Nahum Stutchkoff


Nahum Stutchkoff, Yiddish נחם סטוטשקאָװ , originally Polish Nachum Stuczko or Yiddish נחם סטוטשקאָ , was a Yiddish-Polish and later Yiddish-American actor, author, lexicographer, and radio host. The largest Yiddish dictionary ever to be finished was compiled by him: the Oytser fun der yidisher shprakh.

Life and work

Childhood

Nahum Stutchkoff was born Nachum Stuczko into a Chassidic family living in the northeast of Congress Poland in the then Russian Empire. Only in America did he add a vov to his Yiddish name and two -ff to his English name. The family moved to Warsaw in 1900, where Stutchkoff visited the traditional elementary school. He later studied at two Talmud academies, one in Łomża and one in Warsaw.

Theatre

At the age of 16, Stutchkoff had his first experience with Yiddish theatre. He broke off his traditional religious schooling to join the theatre company of the cultural organisation Hazomir, led by the author Isaac Leib Peretz. He gave his acting debut in Sholem Aleichem's Mentshn and went on to act with different troupes in Poland and Russia. In 1912 he was drafted for military service. After his release he was hired by Adolf Segal and from 1917 on he played at the Undzer vinkl theatre in Kharkiv, which maintained a lively theatre scene in spite of the First World War and subsequently, the Russian Civil War. In 1921 the company was incorporated in a state theatre company which led to the group's break up. Stutchkoff joined the Yiddish State Theatre of Vitebsk. In 1923 he emigrated to the United States – with his wife Tsilye and his son Misha, born in 1918.
Stutchkoff performed on Yiddish stages in New York and Philadelphia before he became the secretary of the Yiddish Drama Club in 1926. In Russia he had translated pieces for the Yiddish theatre, in America he concentrated on writing and adapting operettas, comedies, and dramas for the Yiddish stage. He worked with many illustrious names of the Yiddish theatre, such as Molly Picon, Ludwig Satz, Sholom Secunda, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Menasha Skulnik. His work usually earned him more approval from the audiences than from the critics.

Radio

In 1931, Stutchkoff got his first post at a small radio station in Brooklyn, in a studio built by the owner of a women's clothing store. Shortly after that, he started work as an announcer at WLTH, where he soon took over a children's talent show from Sholom Secunda and renamed it Feter Nokhems yidishe sho.
Stutchkoff quickly became popular and was hired by WEVD in 1932, a radio station which had been bought by the Yiddish newspaper Forverts after the American Socialist Party had founded it. In the three following decades, Stutchkoff worked as a writer, director, and host of about one dozen serial programs and produced thousands of advertisements for his sponsors. His melodramatic series Ba tate-mames tish, on family conflicts, aired every Sunday in the 1930s. The program was so popular that Stutchkoff adapted it for the stage. He also wrote many comedies for radio, such as Eni un Beni, In a yidisher groseri, In a freylekhn vinkl, and An eydem af kest. One could call these comedies the sitcoms of their time.
After the United States entered the Second World War in 1941, comedies of the type Stutchkoff wrote lost their popularity. He wrote the series Tsores ba laytn instead, which ended with a plea for donations to nursing homes and which ran for fifteen years. The only time he directly referred to the Holocaust was in a show called Der gehenem in 1943. The purpose of this show — it was funded by the Ministry of Finance – was the propagation of American war bonds.
From 1948, 615 episodes of Mame-loshn aired, a program dedicated to the Yiddish tongue. Stutchkoff reminded his listeners of the rich Yiddish lexicon in countless anecdotes and dramatic scenes. The show was Stutchkoff's answer to the destruction of the European Jewry – Yiddish lost his 'father and mother' in the Holocaust; American Jewry was to take in the orphan. Another purpose of the show was the promotion of his Oytser. Finally, in 1951 Stutchkoff started a program on family drama A velt mit veltelekh. Stutchkoff worked in radio until 1958 or 1959.

Lexicography

Stutchkoff gained importance as a lexicographer: in 1931 he published a Yiddish rhyming dictionary , and, based on it, in 1950 a thesaurus of the Yiddish language followed '. A Hebrew thesaurus ' was published posthumously in 1968. The latter was outdated by the time it was published, since it was based on the educated Hebrew of the European Jews rather than the modern everyday speech of Israel.
However, the Oytser fun der yidisher shprakh, which was arranged onomastically, is undisputedly Stutchkoff's main achievement. It remains even today the most extensive dictionary of the Yiddish language, containing approximately 90,000 single-word entries and 8,000 idioms. The dictionary was meant to 'store' the Yiddish language, which was in danger of extinction after the Holocaust. Peter Mark Roget's English thesaurus served as an example; nonetheless, Stutchkoff reduced Roget's 1000 onomastic categories to 650. The dictionary received critical acclaim and 2000 copies were sold within the first year of its publication alone. It does not project purist language views; instead it includes 1500 Americanisms, 3000 Germanisms, 1000 Slavisms, 500 vulgarisms, 700 funny expressions, and 700 archaisms, dialectal words, slang words and Sovietisms. This inclusion of modern lexicon distinguished Stutchkoff's dictionary from other publications put out by the Institute for Jewish Research YIVO '. Stutchkoff's decision to include those terms went against the advice of his publisher, Max Weinreich. However, some reviewers – among others Isaac Bashevis Singer – criticised the fact that Weinreich had designated certain terms as "not recommended", while others regretted that the Oytser included many artificial terms invented by the YIVO that were not in use in other circles.
The Oytsers broadsheet catalogue became the basis of the Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh, an even more extensive dictionary. Stutchkoff planned on compiling it with the linguists Yudel Mark and Judah A. Joffe and then publishing it at YIVO. In 1955, he left the project for personal and conceptual reasons after only three years: his pragmatic approach to lexicography was not compatible with Yudel Mark's scientific claim. Finally, only the first four parts of the Groyser verterbukh'' were published between 1961 and 1980. They covered all words starting with Aleph and most words starting with a vowel.

Personal life

Stutchkoff's wife Tsilye née Grenzer was also an actress and she later participated in the radio programs, as did their son Misha and their daughter Esther. Misha also appeared in Yiddish movies and wrote English television programs for Hollywood, using the pseudonym Michael Morris. Stutchkoff's father is thought to have died before the Second World War, his mother and sister died in the Warsaw Ghetto. His brother Aaron was a rabbi in London.
Although he grew up in a traditional Jewish-Yiddish environment in Poland, Stutchkoff abandoned this way of life as an adolescent. However, the destruction of the European Jewry by the Nazis made him an energetic supporter of traditional Judaism and an adversary of assimilation in language and religion. He became more purist and conscientious in his use of Yiddish, and recommended a Jewish upbringing for children.
Stutchkoff was very gifted in languages. He grew up speaking Yiddish, Polish and Russian, and learned Hebrew, German and French at school. His grandchildren also claim that he learned English on his passage to America with the help of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Published work

Select publications

The catalogue raisonné by Burko and Seigel includes three dozens stage plays, including stage adaptations of Stutchkoff's own radio programs:
two dozens translations of plays in other languages, such as:
more than ten radio shows produced for the WEVD, including:
uncounted advertisements
around a dozen texts for sheet music, which Abe Ellstein, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Sholom Secunda put to music
three books:
Stutchkoff's abatement is kept in the New York Public Library, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Library of Congress, and the American Folklife Center.
While the scripts for the radio programs still largely exist, only a few audio files have survived time. They were retrieved by the Yiddish Radio Project and are partly available on www.yiddishradioproject.org.

Footnotes

Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at :de:Nahum Stutchkoff by the same author; see its history for attribution.