Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath's New Yiddish-English Dictionary Is One for the Ages
This summer, Yiddish-language poet Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath was watching a play at Yiddish Vokh, a week-long vacation spot near the Taconic Mountains for families where the only language spoken is Yiddish, the language of a majority of world Jewry before the Holocaust that is now spoken by around 150,000 people in the U.S. Her father, Mordkhe Schaechter a leading Yiddish linguist who died in 2007 at the age of 79, created the event 35 years ago as an immersive language program for students. It’s since evolved into the world’s only opportunity for Jews from all walks of life to spend a week together interacting in Yiddish only. (Non-Yiddish speaking family members are not welcome as the goal is complete immersion.) People come from as far as Australia for the chance to be in this environment where they can experience lectures, classes, workshops, swimming, sports, campfires, talent and game shows, and klezmer dancing, entirely in Yiddish.
During one performance, a mother wanted to tell her child the Yiddish word for rock candy but she didn’t know how to say it. So, right then and there, onstage, she consulted the dictionary—Schaechter-Viswanath and Paul Glasser’s new Yiddish/English dictionary, a historic, comprehensive reference work with nearly 50,000 entries and 33,000 subentries that was released shortly before Yiddish Vokh—and found the correct word: kandl-tzuker. The audience laughed its approval along with the work’s pleased authors.