Rokhkind Sofya (1 results)

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 and moved to Minsk in 1930, where she worked for two years in a Jewish middle school before becoming a research student at the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences in 1932. She defended her dissertation on Yiddish translations of Pushkin in 1936. The archives state that "Except for her dissertation topic, she did not contribute at all. In 1935 she did not fulfil her programme. She is inactive in public life." In the 1950s, Sofia was fired from her position during an anti-Semitic drive. Later in life, she recorded her recollections of shtetl life in her home village of Tolochin. During the early years of the Soviet regime, the Yiddish language experienced a renaissance, with over 1,200 Yiddish schools, several teacher training institutions, and departments of Jewish studies and Yiddish language at universities in Moscow, Kyiv, and Minsk by the 1930s. However, with Stalin's rise to power, Jewish cultural institutions were gradually liquidated. After the Second World War, following the Nazi genocide that killed around 800,000 Jews in Byelorussia (about two-thirds of the Jewish population), Yiddish culture was completely suppressed in the Soviet Union: books in Yiddish were banned, and anti-Semitism became state policy. Project "Voices of the Jewish Settlements" - International Cultural Center "Israel-Belarus" online. Octavo. Corrigenda slip tipped-in at the tile page. Text in Hebrew and Cyrillic. Original moderate olive green cloth, gilt lettering to spine and front cover entirely flaked away, light yellowish green patterned endpapers. Overall rubbed and bumped, thin boards notched at the edges; contents browned throughout, short closed tear to the title page; about very good.