ROKHKIND, Sof'ya, & Gertsel' Shklyar.

£975 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Yidish-Rusisher ṿerṭerbukh - Yevreysko-russkiy slovar' (Yiddish-Russian Dictionary). Scarce, sole edition of the first comprehensive Yiddish-Russian dictionary, with 6,000 copies printed and only 14 known institutional holdings. It was compiled and published by the Byelorussian Academy a few years before the catastrophic anti-Semitic campaigns began in the USSR.Work on the dictionary was completed in 1939, but due to ideological obstacles, it was not published until early 1941, despite being dated 1940 on the title page. The dictionary includes tens of thousands of words, but due to growing Soviet hostility towards Jewish culture, it contains virtually no vocabulary related to Judaism, Jewish life, or traditions.The authors, Sof'ya Rokhkind (1903-2000) and G. Z. Shklyar, worked in the Jewish Section of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences, which was founded in 1933 to develop regional understanding of Jewish culture but only existed until 1935. During Stalinist repression, Rokhkind and Shklyar were the only members of the Academy's linguistic department to survive. The Jewish Section was closed, and the "survivors" were transferred to the Institute of Byelorussian Literature and Language.Rokhkind was educated at the Institute for Jewish Knowledge in Petrograd and later at the Yiddish Division in the Literature and Linguistics Department of the Second Moscow University, the highest Jewish senior high school in the country. After graduating in 1928, she worked in Jewish schools

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.