"In the hallways of #NewYork’s #YIVO Institute for #Jewish Research, the story was told as a punchline: the great #Yiddish #dictionary project that took 25 years and never got beyond the first letter of the alphabet, aleph.
#Composer Alex Weiser and #librettist Ben Kaplan, both longtime YIVO staffers, heard the tale so often that it seemed like lore. Then they dug deeper — and found an epic.
The result is “The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” an original chamber #opera premiering this week as part of YIVO’s centennial celebration. Featuring #music by Weiser, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for an album of Yiddish and English #song, and a libretto by Kaplan, YIVO’s director of education, the work dramatizes the extraordinary, and unfinished, post-Holocaust effort to create the definitive Yiddish dictionary."
