Communications

Dear Editor:

I am especially pleased to note the inclusion of eleven American Yiddish-language journals as listed in part two of Benjamin Knysak's excellent article in the June 2018 Notes, "Music Information in a New Land: Immigrant Music Periodicals in the United States …"

As editor of the 1923 Yiddish operetta Di goldene kale (AMS's MUSA series no. 27A/B [excuse the plug]), I have had much experience with the vagaries of Yiddish and Hebrew typesetting and printing in these computer days. The problem, as illustrated in the printed article, is that some word processing programs—Microsoft Word for Mac, at the very least—have a difficult time comprehending and correctly remembering these languages, which read from right to left. And to make matters worse, the resulting problems can take several different forms.

I offer a few examples from the article, while hastening to add that this little survey is intended only to call attention to the problems and not to criticize either Notes or the author. Indeed, I myself have typed some Yiddish sentences and saved the page, only to call it up and see the words come back as a hegdish (holy mess). The following examples, transcribed left-to-right in Latin characters, illustrate some of many ways computers can sport with right-to-left writing. Note that kh, sh, and ts are single sounds and that the numbers are Mr. Knysak's.

48 "idisher muzikalisher arbeter farband" appears as "irished muzikalisher arbtere frabdna";

49 "idishe muzik" appears as "kizum eshidi"; 50 "arbeter muzik zshurnal" (original spelling) appears as "zshurnal muzik arbeter";

52 "der shliekh-tsiber" appears as "der khilsh-rub[i]ts";

53 "yerlikher buletin fun di shlikhey tsibur d'amerikah vekanadah [Pinkhes Yaminovsky yoshhev rosh d'agudas hakhazanim]" appears as "yerlikher buletin fun di shlikhey tsibzr d'amedik[a]kh vekanad[a]khpinkhes yaminozzmky yoshev rosh d'anudakh khakhazanim";

61 "yidisher farmer folkskhor" appears as "yidisher famerr foskrlokh."

Finally, this seems like a good opportunity to compliment Mr. Knysak, managing associate director of RIPM, and to thank H. Robert Cohen, founder and director of RIPM and the entire RIPM staff for their important contributions to music scholarship.

Michael Ochs

Editor's note: Michael Ochs served as editor of Notes from 1987 to 1992. We regret the errors incurred during our publication process.

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Dear Michael,

Thank you for bringing the Yiddish errors to my attention and for your understanding of the difficulties in typesetting right-to-left languages within a left-to-right document. Let me simply say: mea culpa. While I worked hard to avoid errors in the Yiddish, some typesetting errors apparently were introduced when I saved the document, rearranging characters which I carefully entered (or so I thought). Other errors were generated during the editorial process. While we all attempted to faithfully reproduce the Yiddish text, unfortunately, it seems some errors persisted. I hope these errors can be corrected in the online version.

Benjamin Knysak