The adult education committee of Cong. Rinat Yisrael presents Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, co-editor of the new “Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary” (Indiana University Press/League for Yiddish, 2016). She will be speaking on Shabbat, June 10, at 6:55 p.m., and her topic will be “How a revolutionary English-Yiddish dictionary came into being in the 21st century.”
Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath is Yiddish language editor for Afn Shvel magazine and a published poet. She worked with her father, Mordkhe Schaechter, on his numerous Yiddish publications, including collaborating with him in compiling this dictionary.
Winner of the 2016 Judaica Reference and Bibliography Award, and containing nearly 50,000 entries and 33,000 subentries, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary emphasizes Yiddish as a living language that is spoken in many places around the world. The late Mordkhe Schaechter (Gitl’s father) collected and researched spoken and literary Yiddish in all its varieties, and this landmark dictionary reflects his vision for present-day and future Yiddish usage. The richness of dialect differences and historical developments are noted in entries ranging from “agriculture” to “zoology” and include words and expressions that can be found in classic and contemporary literature, newspapers and other sources of the written word, and have long been used by professionals and tradesmen in synagogues, at home, in intimate life and wherever Yiddish-speaking Jews have lived and worked.
