Arguments, on topics minute or meaningful, are an elemental part of Jewish tradition. Reform and Orthodox Jews may have different ways of dressing, eating and praying, but they share the practice of vigorous debates, which can stretch on (and on), without resolution, for years.
That culture of dispute is at the spiritual and comedic center of “The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” a new chamber opera by the composer Alex Weiser and the librettist Ben Kaplan, about the disagreements between two scholars who are warring over the size and contents of a massive Yiddish dictionary.
The opera, which will be performed at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan, Sept. 18 and Sept. 21, is based on the true story of the relationship between Yudel Mark and Max Weinreich.
Weinreich was a giant of Yiddish scholarship and a founder of Yivo, an organization that began in Vilna, Poland, in 1925, and fosters the study of Yiddish culture. When Weinreich moved to New York to escape the Nazis, so did Yivo.
After World War II, Yivo wanted to publish a comprehensive Yiddish dictionary, and they asked Yudel (it rhymes with strudel) Mark to oversee it. Mark was a Yiddish scholar and linguist with an obsessive streak. He decided that his dictionary should document every Yiddish word — all 250,000 or so, including, to Weinreich’s exasperation, neologisms that might one day exist.
Even worse, Mark decided to ignore the “takones,” a set of rules Weinreich and Yivo created in 1937 to standardize Yiddish, which varied across Europe, where there were 7 to 8 million Yiddish speakers before the war.
Weinreich, who had an imperious streak, was offended that someone would dare to change prefixes and spellings, and he threatened to remove Yivo’s logo from the dictionary.
After Weinreich died, Mark wrote a fond obituary in the Forverts, the Yiddish newspaper, referring to Weinreich as his bar plugta, a Talmudic term that translates roughly to “scholarly opponent” or “philosophical sparring partner,” though frenemy might be the closest 21st-century synonym. The two men had arguments that would have toppled anyone less used to bickering, and their incompatible goals make the opera both meaningful and funny.
“In order to tell the story truthfully, we have to lay bare all the nasty arguments that happened,” Kaplan said in an interview at the offices of Yivo in Chelsea, where he and Weiser work. Mark and Weinrich were “at times petty, grandiose, or messianic,” Kaplan added. “They’d argue about one diacritic for hours. That’s hilarious, but it was life and death for them.”
Mark believed that each Yiddish word was a holy spark, and set out to save them all from what he called “the icy sea of forgetting.” His obsession was entirely unpragmatic. “How long do you expect this dictionary to be?” Weinstein asks in the opera. “Only 10 volumes,” Mark replies, to his colleague’s alarm. “Maybe 12,” he adds.
Mark, the quixotic dreamer lacking in tact (performed with droll exasperation by Jason Weisinger), is a tenor, like most heroic opera figures; Weinrich (Gideon Dabi), the rigid disciplinarian, is a baritone. “But Max isn’t actually the villain,” Weiser says. “Neither one is right.”
Sung in English and Yiddish — with projected supertitles — the opera opens in 1953, when work on the dictionary began. In a mystical touch influenced by Tony Kushner (Kaplan was his assistant for a year), Yudel Mark receives a sacred assignment from three mezzo-sopranos, who are divine manifestations of alef, the first letter in the Yiddish alphabet. The alefs urge him to open the graves of Yiddish words and “blow in them a breath of life.”
Weiser scored the opera for clarinet, string quintet and piano. He mostly eschewed the augmented second, an interval that immediately signals Jewish music, and krekhts, a sobbing musical ornamentation common to klezmer and cantorial singing. Weiser said some of his favorite composers — Steve Reich and the Bang on a Can founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe — write pieces “that explore Jewish topics, but don’t have a stereotypically Jewish sound.”
Weiser and Kaplan have lots of biography in common. Both are 36, were raised in secular Jewish families, and went to liberal arts colleges on the East Coast. Weiser, the director of public programs at Yivo, grew up near Union Square and studied at Yale, where he took classes with Lang, then got a masters at New York University. When he joined Yivo in 2016, he’d never heard of the organization. But when he began studying Yiddish and reading its literature, “my mind exploded,” he said.
On his first album, “and all the days were purple,” released in 2019, Weiser set Yiddish and English poems to post-minimalist soundscapes. The New Yorker called it a “ravishing song cycle.”
A few months into Weiser’s Yivo career, the organization was hiring a director of education, and he encouraged Kaplan to apply for the job. (The two became friends after meeting at a Christmas party, a detail that elicits laughter.)
Kaplan, who grew up in Queens and on Long Island, said “I didn’t think I’d do anything Jewish after my bar mitzvah.” At Williams College, he took a class on the Hebrew Bible as literature, “and I felt a sense of betrayal — why wasn’t I taught this growing up?” he added. “I went whole hog and added a Jewish studies concentration.”
Weiser and Kaplan collaborated on “State of the Jews,” an opera about the Zionist writer Theodor Herzl, which was first performed in 2019. Then Weiser read his friend Alec Burko’s Ph.D. thesis about postwar academic efforts to save Yiddish, and had his own divine spark. “Alex said, ‘Our next opera is about a Yiddish dictionary,’” Kaplan recalled. “I said, ‘Leave me alone.’” Then he read Burko’s dissertation.
About half the world’s Yiddish speakers died in the Holocaust. After that, many Jews eager to assimilate saw it as a reminder of subjugation, a comical language of hard consonants and spittle. The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, called it “a grating, foreign language,” and banned Yiddish theater and newspapers. As Kaplan recognized, the dictionary saga wasn’t only about words.
“It’s about memory and grief,” he said, “about how much of your culture you can save and how much you leave behind.”
It’s no spoiler to say that Mark, who died in 1975, didn’t complete his dictionary. Yivo published four volumes, which don’t progress beyond alef, and two more volumes have been posted online. The full array of Yiddish words has still never been documented.
For Weiser and Kaplan, “The Great Dictionary” isn’t a story about failure — the meaning is in the dialectic between Weinreich and Mark, a style of argument, or “pilpl” in Yiddish, that goes back 2,000 years, to debates between the Jewish sages Shammai and Hillel, if not to Abraham hectoring God about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. In the Mishnah, a third-century document of Jewish wisdom, rabbis coined a term — an “argument for the sake of heaven” (or “machloket l’shem shamayim” in Hebrew) — to show that scholarly debate isn’t merely allowed, it’s encouraged.
Yudel Mark was smart enough to know he’d never finish the dictionary. “So we both will not live to see it,” he wrote to a colleague, in a letter that’s part of Yivo’s enormous archive. “What of it?”
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