Preface

Summary

Romanising non-English printed materials always presents a challenge to those of us who write books in English. Those challenges can become more complex when the task includes transliterating both Hebrew and Yiddish into English. Hebrew and Yiddish share a common script but not a single standard transliteration system for rendering that script into a Roman alphabet. There are multiple transliteration alphabets to choose from for romanising Hebrew. In Yiddish, the standard romanisation scheme is known as the YIVO transliteration alphabet; however, in actuality, the YIVO scheme is often not used, a fact evident when we consider Yiddish words like chutzpah, which the YIVO alphabet would transliterate as khutspe, an unlikely spelling almost never seen in print or used in library catalogues. The widespread use of non-YIVO transliterations of Yiddish words, titles and names, along with the lack of accord between the transliteration systems used to romanise Hebrew and Yiddish, presents a set of puzzles to English-language researchers and writers who, like me, do not aim to reproduce Hebrew type in their book because their intended audience is primarily English speaking.

In the present book, I follow the YIVO transliteration alphabet for romanising Yiddish words, titles and names, except in cases of widely used alternative spellings. For example, I use the more common ‘Sholem Aleichem’ as opposed to the unlikely YIVO rendering of ‘Sholem Aleykhem’. For transliterating Hebrew into English, I adhere to the same rule, maintaining commonly used spellings even where they differ from the Library of Congress system whose transliteration guidelines I follow throughout this book. Details of that system can be found in Hebraica Cataloging (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Cataloging Distribution Service, 1987). I also adhere to the conventions of capitalisation common to specific time periods, geographical locations and languages when I cite the titles of written and performed works. For Yiddish titles, that means reproducing the capitalisation of proper names and places along with the first word of a work's title, but not capitalising other title words commonly capitalised in modern English. When citing early modern English titles, I have made every effort to retain the idiosyncratic capitalisations and spellings of the early printed text, including title words.