מענדעלע

I was very happy to read Prof. Wolitz's entry devoted to Zachary Baker. I would like to add that scholars from Poland owe him a great deal as well. A number of my colleagues and I visited YIVO in the past and we all appreciated Zachary's enormous competence, knowledge, culture and patience. During his last visit to Lublin in October 1993 he met a group of Polish students from the English Department and talked to them about YIVO and Jewish studies, as well as answered a number of questions. My students recall this meeting as one of their most interesting classes and some of them say that Zachary made them genuinely interested in Yiddish and Jewish culture. Thanks a lot, Zachary, for everything you have done for us.

Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Lublin

> The Index to Yiddish Periodicals is available to ALEPH searchers > who can display Hebrew characters.

Can anyone tell me something about this code page? Or point me to the right place? Where is it defined. Are there other fairly common code pages that are useful for Yiddish?

A dank, Pierre

To Sean Martin:

Sorry I haven't been in touch before but I would recommend the memoirs of Hersh Abramowicz, the father of YIVO's beloved Dina for insight into Poles and Jews. There are others but I am not where I can cite them easily. Dovid Roskies' "Against Apocalypse" has extensive bibliography. If you find material on interbellum attitudes toward Germans let me know. Yechiel Szentuch's book on the subject is supposed to be coming out in English,to be published by HUC press.

Good luck, Dvosye Bilik

Standard Russian word for Yiddish is _evreiskii_ [jewish]. Word _idish_ exists, but is used mostly in scholarly context, and almost always in collocation _iazyk idish_ [Yiddish language], which means that this word requires an additional definition in order to become a lexeme. Interestingly, _evreiskii iazyk_ [Jewish language] in a broad sense may be used for both Yiddish and Hebrew. At the same time, there is a distinct difference between _drevneevreiskii_ [ancient Jewish] for pre-20th century Hebrew and _ivrit_ for modern Hebrew.

A git yontev

Iosif Vaisman

This is in regard to the question of Weinreich vs Harkavy dictionary choice. I also work in a university library and do most of the complex copy and original cataloging of our recently acquired Yiddish collection. I use both Harkavy and Weinreich...Perhaps this quote from the introduction to the reprint edition of Harkavy's Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary would be of some help. "This republication of Harkavy's Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary in no way displaces Uriel Weinreich's Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (1968). In fact, the two complement each other. Weinreich's is a masterpiece of modern scientific lexicography that has become an international structural model for makers of other bilingual dictionaries. Its semantic structureing reflects the author's brilliant research in general linguistics. Its comprehensive analytical apparatus is tantamount to a Yiddish grammar compressed into a lexicographic format. Moreover, Weinreich's dictionary is bidirectional; it will therefore remain the first dictionary for elementary students of Yiddish, for those seeking equivalents for the English vocabulary of modern science and technology, and for those desiring guidance on the attitudes of American Yiddish normativists toward a given item. For the last decade or so, however, the disappearance of Harkavy's trilingual dictionary from the market has been painful for more advanced students of the language requiring a more exhaustive coverage of the language of the nineteenth and twentieth century masters of modern Yiddish literature and a dictionary that is more descriptively oriented. The student of Yiddish can supplement both Harkavy and Weinreich with the first four volumes of Yudel Marks unabridged Yiddish-Yiddish defining dictionary, the Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh..." Hope this helps!

Melinda Saveleva Krushen