Guest Post: Spotlight on Yudel Mark

Alex Weiser is the director of public programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the composer of and all the days were purple, an album of songs in Yiddish and English that was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Music. With librettist Ben Kaplan, Weiser created an opera about Yudel Mark’s dictionary called The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language. Here, Alex puts the spotlight on a featured character in the opera, Yudel Mark:

Not long after I started working at YIVO — the premiere Yiddish academic institution — I heard a story told in jest about how the great unfinished Yiddish dictionary was doomed from the start because of acrimonious disagreements about spelling. “Two Jews, three opinions” as the saying goes. While it would be easy to mistake this as a kind of self-deprecating accusation, the story actually contained a kernel of truth.

On Sunday November 9th, 1958, Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark entered into what Mordkhe Schaechter described in his page-turning account of the history of Yiddish orthography, Der eynhaytlekher yidisher oysleyg, as “a min veltlekhn din-toyre” — “a kind of secular rabbinic court hearing.” Mark and a delegation working on the Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh, the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language — Judah Joffe, Lippa Lehrer, and Israel Steinbaum — were facing off in a debate about Yiddish spelling with adherents of YIVO’s standard, the Takones fun yidishn oysleyg — Max Weinreich, Uriel Weinreich, Mordkhe Schaechhter, and Chaim Gininger— to be judged by YIVO’s Committee on Research — Leibush Lehrer, Philip Friedman, Shlomo Bickel, and Shlomo Noble. The issue at hand was that though the Groyser verterbukh was meant to be released as a YIVO publication, it wasn’t prepared according to the standards laid out in the Takones.

Mark’s deviations from the Takones were modest. He preferred a more generous use of the shtumer alef to separate adjacent vowels (e.g. וואו instead of וווּ); he wanted to spell adverbial compounds as conjoined words (e.g. אינאיינעם instead of אין איינעם); he insisted on using the dogesh in beyz (בּ) to distinguish it from veys (בֿ).

After some debate, the din-toyre ruled that the Groyser verterbukh must follow the Takones if it were to be a YIVO publication. Mark refused to follow the committee's ruling and instead prepared the publication using his choice orthography. The result was an untenable dilemma for YIVO: forsake its own editorial rules or waste the enormous work spent preparing the dictionary.

The pragmatic solution was to publish the dictionary but without YIVO’s logo and with a preface explaining the choice. “Mir badoyern vos mir hobn in dem prat nit gekent kumen tsu a heskem” — “we regret that we could not come to an agreement on this matter,” lamented the “Oyfklerung fun YIVO” or “Clarification from YIVO” printed on page ז (vii) of the prefatory materials. And yet, 1961 saw the first volume of the Great Dictionary published in its over 500 pages of glory, covering about a quarter of the words that start with alef. In a solution fit for the Talmudic sages, the publication preserved not just the work of the Groyser verterbukh but some of the internal debates about it as well. As the Talmud says, “eylu veeylu divrey eloykim khaim,” “these and those are the words of the living God.”

As scandalous as disagreements over the Takones were, though, it was the ambitious — and in some senses bloated — scope of the dictionary that made it impossible to finish the Groyser verterbukh in Mark’s lifetime. Mark would boast that in the process of working on the dictionary they had discovered over 200,000 words in the Yiddish language. “Mir aleyn zaynen farvundert fun der ashires vos hot zikh ongeklibn” — “we ourselves are astonished by the riches that have accumulated,” Mark explained on a radio broadcast on WEVD on October 25, 1964.

Critics of Mark’s methodology, however, pointed out that the Groyser verterbukh’s approach of including rare Hebraisms, obscure internationalisms, and “possible words” (words which combine existing roots and affixes in ways that make grammatical sense, but have not necessarily been used in practice) resulted in a wealth of words that wouldn’t be defined even in the most thorough dictionaries of other languages. Does a dictionary need to define a word like “ahinbetenish” (the process of beckoning to a remote destination) — as distinct of ahinbetn (beckoning to a remote destination) (Volume 1, Page 54)?

As a result, the dictionary was never completed. Today we have four published volumes covering the first letter of the alphabet, alef. Nearly complete unpublished manuscripts for the letters beys, giml, daled, and hey exist as do archives of the project’s invaluable word lists and related materials.

In any case, Mark left us with a lot more than this unfinished magnum opus. One of the most prolific Yiddish linguists and pedagogues, over the course of his professional career he wrote textbooks, children’s books, created translations into Yiddish from German and other languages, and edited YIVO’s journal Yidishe shprakh. Mark’s Gramatik fun der yidisher klal-shprakh (A Grammar of Standard Yiddish), based on his decades of articles on grammatical topics in Yidishe shprakh, published posthumously by the Congress for Jewish Culture in 1978, is one of his crowning achievements and a signal accomplishment in its own right.

I first learned the true story behind the Groyser verterbukh when I read Alec “Leyzer” Burko’s wonderful dissertation, Saving Yiddish: Yiddish Studies and the Language Sciences in America, 1940-1970 (The Jewish Theological Seminary, 2019). It was reading Leyzer’s telling of the story of the Groyser verterbukh that inspired me and librettist and YIVO co-worker Ben Kaplan to write an operatic re-telling of this episode of Yudel Mark’s larger-than-life story.

The tragic drama and high stakes of the Groyser verterbukh saga make for good storytelling, but the broader context makes it all the more poignant and important. In the wake of the Holocaust, projects like the Groyser verterbukh became not just ways to open new scholarly vistas for Yiddish, but forms of memorialization for a destroyed Eastern European Jewry. For Mark, the Groyser verterbukh was even more than that. While secular, he was a devoted member of the Folkspartey and had a deep interest in Jewish tradition. Mark saw a quasi-religious sanctity in Yiddish words and spoke about his academic work in spiritual terms.

Mark’s first aria in Ben’s libretto — in which we first hear Mark articulate his vision for the Groyser verterbukh — captures some of the magic that continues to inspire us about this story:

Gather every spark,

Every flash of wisdom:

The words of rabbis,

Peddlers, thieves,

The words of mothers,

Teachers, friends—

The words of children.

Every word deserves

To be remembered.

Gather every spark,

Every lost expression:

The words of Kiev,

Riga, Łódź,

The words of markets,

Kitchens, stores—

The words of shtetls.

Every word preserves

A piece of history.

As long as I have breath,

I will collect every word,

Define their meanings,

Give voice to the dead,

And save Yiddish.

With these words as sparks,

We can reignite a flame.