| Len's uncle
A Digression on Nahum
Sokolov and Modern Hebrew
TThe editor of HaTsefira was Nahum Sokolov. Won’t hurt anyone, especially a Jewish person, to look up the name Nahum Sokolov, and find out who he was. He was one, probably, of the many, or few, illuminating stars in the Jewish skies. The man knew a number of languages, but his Hebrew was unusual. I am not going to talk in this series about Jewish heroes. It would be very important if I could have a series of Jewish outstanding people, but Nahum Sokolov was the editor of the HaTsefira.
In Russia, they had censors in every big city, so there was a censor for Hebrew and Yiddish in that city, and that censor was a very strict man, very devoted to the Czar. He always attempted to find something which is unbecoming, maybe something that was referring to the Czar, maybe trying to insult the government. So he started crossing out lines from the HaTsefira. the HaTsefira was published with crossed-out lines, black, black lines. Words were missing all the time. Nahum Sokolov couldn’t stand it anymore. He came to see him [that is, he came to see to the censor] and the most unfortunate thing was that that man was a meshumet. His name was Shapiro. Meshumet means a convert. He was a Jew, a learned Jew, turning to Christian.
Well, anyway, so Shapiro asked him to sit down, Sokolov sat down, and said, “I’ll tell you something. I’ll grant you to write free —I’ll leave it to you and trust you to write whatever you want, on one condition, that you give me—I’ll mention to you several verbs and several nouns, and I want you to give me five synonyms for every word that I mention.” And Nahum Sokolov rattled it off in no time at all. He said, “Now you can go and publish anything you want.”
The Founding of Modern Hebrew
In those days, Hebrew had not been used... Hebrew had not been used for centuries, I mean in a practical way as a language. It’s remained in the books, the Jewish people were practicing it. They were davening, they were praying every day in Hebrew. They were printing books in Hebrew, but the important things in life that you need—various objects, various opticals [?] various icons, names of verbs, names of animals, names of reptiles, that was forgotten completely, because the Jews were divorced from it. There was a big gap between nature and the Jewish people and their language.
So those things had been forgotten, even though they are mentioned all over, they are scattered all over the Jewish literature, you go to a mechilta, to a sefriyot, to a safrar, to a medresh, or to a yalkut, and mishna, [commentaries on the Bible] you find the names of all plants, of all fowl, birds, various animals, but we don’t know which is which.
For instance, in the Torah, we read in the book of Leviticus, he enumerates names of fowls that we are allowed to eat, names of those that we’re forbidden to eat. My rabbi didn’t know what it was, when I was a little boy in cheder, in the Hebrew school. My rabbi used to skip it. He said, “What’s the use? I don’t know which is which.” I never knew it until I grew up, and Hebrew had become a language and I became interested in knowing the words of. What do you call a plaster in Hebrew? What do you call a wind in Hebrew? What do you call a medicine in Hebrew? What do you call a bandage in Hebrew? He didn’t know it, because they departed from it and they didn’t know it.
So I started learning it, and I learned it. I was away from home for quite a number of years.
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