Max Weinreich

This chapter is from the revised and expanded second edition of Solomon Birnbaum's Yiddish. A Survey and Grammar (2015). It addresses the origins and history of Birnbaum's classic work (1979) as well as notes ways in which Birnbaum's "Orthodox", southern-oriented approach to Yiddish differs from that of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO).

In September 1939, Max Weinreich, the renowned Yiddish scholar and the guiding spirit of YIVO (the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Jewish Scientific Institute) was en route to a linguistics conference in Brussels when World War II erupted. The dismantlement of Polish sovereignty by the Germans and Soviets that month rendered his passport effectively useless at a time when travel almost anywhere in Europe was difficult and fraught with danger. While he and his elder son were caught in Copenhagen, his wife and younger son remained in Vilna, the world center of YIVO's activities. The city had been wrested from Poland by the Soviets and, after a six-week occupation, awarded in mid-October 1940 to independent Lithuania as its new capital.

Forthcoming. To be published in "Yeda Am: a journal for Jewish Folklore", Vol. 46, 2019. To see the bibliography for this article, follow the link: https://www.academia.edu/38265893/The_bibliographical_background_for_the_article_Eretz_Israel_and_the_Vision_of_a_Jewish_State_in_Yiddish_Literature_and_Press_until_the_establishment_of_the_state_of_Israel_