At YIVO, an unfinished Yiddish dictionary gets the last word

In the hallways of New York’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 defin