While Jews are rarely at a loss for words, not many of us can rattle off an obscure word’s definition, etymology, and pronunciation. But Sol Steinmetz, who passed away last fall, was such a person — a true “lexical supermaven” who also never forgot what it meant to be a mentsch

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain

Words are of interest to everyone, especially to Jews, the descendents of Shem (“name”) and the “People of the Book.” Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century compiler of an authoritative dictionary of the English language, called them “the dress of thought”; another wit described them as the best nonsurgical way to transfer thoughts from one head to another. Just as a person’s use of vocabulary and elocution demarcate lines of social class and origin, language situates people in terms of an era, since new expressions and technical terms enter and leave the sea of language with the regularity of tides.

There are people who devote their professional lives to defining and tracking words, officially known as lexicographers. Their work is largely invisible to us, but they make up the small but essential core of people who devote themselves to expanding and updating such indispensable institutions as the Random House Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary.

All very well and good, you may say, but is this a job for a Jewish boy? For Rabbi Sol Steinmetz, who left us this past October 13 and who became a lexicographer as a natural result of his fascination with language and a polyglot status earned through a childhood scattered among a handful of countries, it most certainly was. Considered one of the top-tier word experts in the United States — he edited dictionaries at Merriam-Webster and Barnhardt and was the executive editor of Random House’s Dictionary Department — he was also good friends with New York Times columnist William Safire, author of the popular “On Language” column. Safire would later dub him a “lexical supermaven” and consult him frequently on etymological questions, especially where Yiddish was concerned.

Steinmetz’s readers and colleagues were largely unaware of the fact that, in addition to his many ways with words, he received a coveted smichah from Rav Soleveitchik as a young man and that he was born in Hungary. “He had no interest in dwelling in the past,” says daughter-in-law Ettie Steinmetz. “Only the genealogy of words held his interest.”

In his final year, however, as his health began to fail from the onslaught of many years of anti-rejection drugs, Steinmetz organized his memories into an autobiography of about ninety pages. “I read most of it sitting next to his hospital bed,” says Rabbi Reuven Fink, the rav of Steinmetz’s shul in New Rochelle, who says Steinmetz never missed a hashkamah minyan or a shiur. “As I went through it, it helped me realize how much his life fit together into one seamless whole.”

Man Without a Country

Psychologists tell us that immigration ranks among the most stressful experiences a person can go through, right up there with divorce or losing a loved one. Sol Steinmetz went through not one but four different migrations, beginning around age eight. These experiences left him feeling like an outsider all his life, despite his proficiency for picking up new languages and a gregarious personality. He titled his autobiography “The Little Refugees” to reflect this persistent sense of not quite belonging:

Only a refugee knows what it feels to be one. It’s the feeling of being estranged from society, alienated, an outsider, like a hungry child peering through a window at a gathering of rich people feasting at a banquet. Having once experienced the shock of being wrested from one’s country and forced to seek asylum in another, the refugee never gets over the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land.

Steinmetz begins by describing his Anyuka, his mother Leah, as a “placid mother hen” and Apuka, his father Lipe, as a charismatic, strong-willed man from a prestigious chassidic family that descended from the Noda BeYehudah and the Tosafos Yom Tov. Rabbi Lipe Steinmetz had learned exclusively in yeshivos but read voraciously in Hungarian, particularly about European history and European anti-Semitism.

“Most people in Hungary weren’t at all worried about anti-Semitism until 1944,” says Judith Steinmetz Silber, Sol’s sister, who today lives in Chicago. “But in 1936, my father was already making plans to leave.”

Lipe went to England, hoping to obtain papers for Palestine, but the British, on the verge of issuing the White Paper, had slammed the doors shut. Many people were turning to illegal immigration on ships leaving from Italy or Greece. This wasn’t an option for the Steinmetz family, because it was standard procedure to drug all the children to keep them quiet during the stealthy night passage and their baby was too young to tolerate the drugs.

When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hungary ceded to Nazi pressure and began issuing restrictions on Jewish workers. Lipe, seeing his worst fears beginning to take shape, decided not to return to Hungary at any cost. Instead, he asked his wife to join him in Paris, where he was then living.

Leah had no desire to leave her family and country for some unspecified future in Palestine or elsewhere. Her family urged her to divorce her husband with his crazy, paranoid ideas. Her father-in-law, however, counseled her to follow her husband and he helped her obtain the visas and passports to get out of Hungary.

The Steinmetz family stayed in Paris for a year — the children picked up rudimentary French in local schools — while Lipe knocked on the doors of various embassies looking for any place outside Europe that would take them. He finally got word that a tiny country in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, which was run by a dictator named Rafael Trujillo, was willing to accept Jews. Unfortunately, Trujillo’s corrupt brother was demanding $3,000 per visa. With no other means of raising money, Leah found herself coerced into becoming a smuggler: disguised as a deaf-mute peasant woman with her baby in her arms, she would shuttle back and forth between Paris and Prague to retrieve the valuables of wealthy Jews who had fled Czechoslovakia. (She later told her daughter Judith, “I wasn’t a hero; I was just stupid.”)

Leah’s bravery paid for their visas and passage. The family left France via Bordeaux in 1939 on the Grande-Bretagne a bare six months before war broke out. After a torturous three-week passage, the Steinmetz family arrived in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital city, where they were taken with several other refugee families to primitive, insect-ridden housing.

All beginnings may be hard, but those beginnings in Santo Domingo were particularly trying. The family had to add Spanish to their growing roster of languages, and adapt to living in a tropical country amidst a simple, superstitious, and occasionally violent populace. “We had no red meat for six years,” Judith Silber recalls. “We had to boil all the water, even the milk. My parents contracted malaria, and it’s a miracle they survived.”

Lipe — who was the only learned Jew on the island — set up a congregation for the small Jewish population of the island and became the chief rabbi, shochet, and mohel for the region. He also published a Spanish-language Jewish newspaper entitled Diario del Sabado, being careful to not offend Trujillo, as well as opened a successful mattress business.

The children were sent to Catholic schools, where their religion was respected by the nuns. Lipe undertook to give Efry and Sol a Jewish education. Efry became bar mitzvah shortly after their arrival, and Judith wrote that at Sol’s bar mitzvah — for which his mother spent weeks preparing — “People couldn’t believe that a boy raised in the Dominican Republic could ‘daven’ and ‘leyn’ and make a learned speech. Everyone said it was like ‘back home.’”