While Efry was a Zevulun — he began his successful business career during those years by making small deals such as selling cigarettes, to help out his family — Sol was the Yissachar of the pair. Usually holed up in the multilingual library his father had set up next to the shul, Sol read classics in Yiddish, Spanish, German, Hungarian, and Hebrew, as well as leafed through the library’s bi- and trilingual dictionaries. His father, noting his interest, proposed setting him up to learn Russian with a recently arrived Russian refugee. Lipe also tapped Sol’s budding literary talents to write divrei Torah for the Diario del Sabado and a column of Jewish quotations entitled “Joyas” (Gems).

After the war the family was devastated to discover that the “paranoia” that had motivated Lipe to leave Europe had been well founded: most of their relatives had perished. Meanwhile, many of Santo Domingo’s Jewish refugees began to move on to other places. Lipe, with his usual foresight, realized that the only way to prevent his now teenage sons from intermarrying would be to move to a larger Jewish community. He obtained visas for his family and they all flew to Caracas, Venezuela, to begin anew.

In Caracas Lipe opened a succession of businesses, none of which were successful. Eventually, he opened the first Jewish school in Venezuela, which was a success, and today it has 1,500 students. Efry became a partner in an electronics business, and Sol found jobs in an art gallery and with a furrier. But Sol’s father had other plans for him. Lipe made inquiries about Jewish schools in America and learned that a dean of one of them, Samuel L. Sar, was traveling through South America and interviewing Jewish students. Lipe contacted Dean Sar and arranged a sort of farhehr.

“I must have passed the Dean’s quiz successfully,” Sol wrote, “because in mid-March a letter arrived informing me that I had been granted a full scholarship to the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and Yeshiva College in New York City.”

Go North, Young Man

Sol flew to New York. Since he knew no English, he communicated with the people he met in Yiddish, which he says drew some strange looks from his peers! It wasn’t long, though, before his nimble mind caught on to English, and with diligence he finished high school in two and a half years.

“During the shivah for my father, people told us that students used to line up outside my father’s door for help editing their papers,” says his son Steven Steinmetz, a lawyer in Greenwich, Connecticut. “Imagine — they came for help to my father, who didn’t learn English until he was sixteen years old!”

Life in New York was an adjustment, but fortunately there was a small chevrah of “South American” boys at YU who could offer friendship and a feeling of home. It also helped that Sol’s siblings began to arrive not much later. Even Lipe, Leah, and the youngest daughter, Eva, moved to the US a few years later, setting up housekeeping in Chicago.

Sol writes ebulliently about his years at YU. His college roommates were Alter Benzion Metzger, today a professor at Stern College who lives in Crown Heights, and Charles Bahn, who became a social psychologist and expert on terrorism at Columbia’s John Jay College. Rabbi Metzger remembers well the time Sol entered YU’s Jerome Robbins Memorial Short Story contest, a contest named after a YU student who was killed in combat during World War II. “In order not to prejudice the judges, the names were removed from the stories and placed in separate envelopes,” he says. “When the judges opened the envelope for second prize, they called out, ‘Sol Steinmetz!’ Then they opened up the envelope for first prize, and called out again: ‘Sol Steinmetz!’ Sol had submitted two stories, and both of them won!”

Sol continued at YU through the smichah program. Here as well Sol succeeded both academically and with helping others, as is illustrated by a story his son Steve was told during the shivah, by the rabbi of a shul in Queens.

“I owe your father everything!” said the rabbi. “Back in our days as YU, the smichah exams were really, really hard. You had to go before Rav Soloveitchik, Dr. Belkin, and Rabbi Shatzkes They would lambast you with questions. There were guys who literally had nervous breakdowns from the pressure!

“The night before my exam, I went down to the beis medrash and I saw Sol. His eyes were popping, like he’d just found gold! He told me, ‘I just found the most unbelievable thing in the Gemara!’ We sat there riveted for hours, until I looked at the clock and said, ‘Oh, no! I have to go get some sleep before my exam!’

“The next day I walked into my exam and the Rav opened a Gemara and began asking me about that very same portion! Of course, I knew everything! The Rav was so angry he couldn’t find a single gap in my knowledge that he finally slammed down the Gemara and yelled, ‘Good!’ But that was really a compliment, and I got my smichah!”

During the time Sol was studying for smichah, he won a scholarship to do an MA in linguistics at Columbia University, where he wrote a thesis on linguistic splits in Yiddish and bilingualism among Sephardic Jews. He brought in money by working as a chazzan on the side.

In 1955 he married Tzippora Mandel, Dr. Belkin’s secretary; his former roommate and close friend Rabbi Dr. Herbert Dobrinsky was best man. A year later, with his MA and smichah in hand, he obtained a position as rabbi of a shul in Media, Pennsylvania.

But despite his love for people and all things Jewish, Sol decided against a life as a pulpit rabbi. “He had the good sense and grace to leave when he saw it wasn’t for him,” says son Jake, a lawyer for the Land Authority of Judea and Samaria. “There was also the issue of finding good yeshivos for us. We moved around a few times because of the need to find yeshivos.”

Steinmetz’s professor from Columbia, the noted Yiddishist Dr. Uriel Weinreich, helped him find a position with Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts. Sol wrote, “My familiarity with about seven languages and a background in linguistics helped me ease into my new job as an etymologist on the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, better known as Webster’s Third, a monumental work of 2662 pages that is still, after 50 years, the largest dictionary of American English in the world.” His colleague and coauthor Charles Levine told Mishpacha, by e-mail, that Sol’s achievement was extraordinary: “Becoming an acclaimed lexicographer of his fifth adopted language is a feat unparalleled in the history of English lexicography.”

Steinmetz would later move on to spend some thirty years with Barnhardt Books, where he mainly edited school dictionaries. “The Scholastic Dictionary we used in school, the Beginner’s Dictionary that we all had as kids — my dad edited all of them,” Jake says.

In the late 1980s Sol and Tzippora moved to New Rochelle, where he became close to Rabbi Fink, who says they hit it off right away because Sol was such a talmid chacham as well as a mentsch. “He was great at helping with word derivations from Old French in Rashi,” Rabbi Fink says. “He was also adept in dealing with people on every religious level.”

Sol became the executive editor for the Random House Dictionaries in the late 1980s, a position he held until his retirement in 1997. But “retirement” simply meant that he had more time to devote to writing. Already the author or coauthor of several books, during this time he wrote books such as The Life of Language (2006) and Semantic Antics (2008), which both dealt with the rise and fall of words; and There’s a Word for It (2010), in which he catalogued neologisms (new word coinages) and their origins — words such as geek, escalator, beatnik, Big Bang, joyride, guesstimate. In Meshugganery (2002) and Yiddish and English (1986), he indulged his love of Yiddish. He seemed particularly amused by the development of a subdialect of English he called “Jewish English,” in which Hebrew and Yiddish words mix seamlessly with English, e.g., “He walked the chassan to the chuppah, and the shvigger was kvelling.” He also noted that yeshivah students have their own particular brand of Jewish English, laced with Talmudic terms like “avada,” and “kal v’chomer.”

His otherwise happy and fulfilling retirement years were, unfortunately, marred by a family tragedy: his grandson Amichai, one of Jake’s children and a soldier who had served in elite units of the IDF, mysteriously disappeared while hiking in the Himalayas. Although the family searched for months, the young man’s body was never found.

A Big Heart — Though Not His Own

When Sol’s mother passed away in 1987, he traveled to Chicago for the levayah. While there, he had so much trouble breathing he was taken to an emergency room, where he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. The doctors told him to put himself on a list for a heart transplant, which was then still a new and dangerous procedure. In November 1993, a heart became available and the now-famous Dr. Mehmet Oz performed the surgery.

Tzippora kept a diary of those frightening days, as her husband teetered in and out of internal bleeding, organ swelling, and hospital psychosis. “Nobody was sure if he’d pull through,” says his son Avi, “but he miraculously survived for close to twenty years after that.”

Sol had extra heart in more ways than one, thanks to his sterling middos. “He made many friends, and kept all of them,” his wife, Tzippora, says. “He saw the good in everyone. I couldn’t even say lashon hara in front of him — it was just foreign to him.”

Or, as his lexicographic talmid Jesse Sheidlower, the current editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, put it so aptly, “He never had a bad word to say about anyone — and he knew a lot of bad words.”

The Girl Who Was a Male (but not mail): A Few Tidbits from The Life of Language and Semantic Antics

English is one of the world’s richest languages, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, in part as a result of successive invasions of the British Isles. The native Celts were invaded by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, who were in turn conquered by the Norse. The Germanic mixture that resulted was later enriched by heavy importing from Latin and French, as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the influence of the Church. (This is why English often has a plainer, Anglo-Saxon way of saying something as well as a fancier, Latin-derived root, such as “scary” and “terrifying” or “spotless” and “immaculate.”) Beginning in the seventeenth century, the English colonization of countries around the world also brought many foreign words into the lexicon.

Below are a few examples Steinmetz offers in Semantic Antics of the way English words have changed their meanings over the years:

Girl: When the word girl came into the language around 1290, it simply meant a young person, a child of either sex. By Chaucer’s time the word “boy” had come into use with its modern meaning, while female children were referred to as a “wench” or “maiden” (or “lass,” when compared to “lad”). The word “girl” first began to be used in its modern sense around 1530.

Hobby: In 1375, when this word first appeared in print, it denoted a pony, a small or middle-sized horse of an Irish breed. In the 1500s, a hobby horse described a child’s toy, made by fixing a cloth or wood horse’s head to a stick so the child could “ride”; by the 1600s, “hobby horse” began to apply to any favorite pastime. The term was shortened in the 1800s to “hobby.”

Invest: Historically, this word had to do with getting dressed, especially with the garments or insignia of an office (invest princes in royal silks and velvets). By 1590 the word was extended to mean “secure a right or power,” as in “the powers invested in Congress.” In the business correspondence of the East Indian trade circa 1613–1616, “invest” made appearances with the new meaning of putting money into a venture that will yield profits. By the nineteenth century “invest” had taken on a broader, figurative meaning, as in “invest time or energy.”

Mail: Originally spelled male, around 1275 this word was used to designate a “bag” or “pack.” By the mid-1600s, a bag or pack of letters sent by post was called a mail of letters. In the 1800s, the word mail was extended to refer to the entire system of delivering letters. “Electronic mail” appeared in 1970 and was shortened to “e-mail” in 1982, followed a year later by “snail mail.” N.B.: The Brits still prefer the term post.

A Dictionary History

The earliest dictionaries were glossaries that translated Old English into Latin. Monolingual dictionaries — those that defined words within one language — didn’t appear until the eighteenth century. The first dictionaries began as collections of “hard words,” but soon expanded to encompass the entire language, with simple definitions supplemented by information on the words’ pronunciation, etymology, and parts of speech. By the twentieth century, more obscure or nonstandard words like slang, regional variations, and technical terms gained entry as well.

During the B.C. (Before Computers) era, creating a dictionary was a slow and cumbersome process. According to the Oxford Dictionaries website, “lexicographers worked from boxes of handwritten paper slips on which were written suggestions for revising existing definitions, adding new entries or senses, or making new corrections.” Research was cross-checked against volumes of other dictionaries or paper proofs. Today, however, lexicographic information is collected in huge computer databases.

People of my generation remember having to pull down a five-pound tome from the shelf when we needed to look up a word, but such physical exertions have become increasingly unnecessary now that electronic dictionaries and thesauruses are freely available online. Most of them also include audio recordings of correct word pronunciations, so that you’re sure to say the words right. In addition, word processing software programs include internal dictionaries that will autocorrect a mistyped word.

With all these new aids to literacy, you might think the next generation would boast extraordinarily rich vocabularies and perfect spelling. But according to some English teachers, the kids who think they’re doing just gr8 won’t be LOL’ing when they take English Regents or college exams, which expect polished, skillfully worded essays!

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 381)