Maurice Wolfthal

My biography of the world’s greatest Yiddish encyclopedia

My parents spoke Yiddish, read Yiddish, and sang songs in Yiddish. But they were not ideological Yiddishists. I absorbed Yiddish aurally, but it held no interest for me. It wasn’t until I was married and moved to the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx — founded in the 1920s by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union, whose…