Alexander Harkavy

Born to a religious family in Novogrodek in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus) but drawn early to modern ideals, Alexander Harkavy worked briefly for the Romm Jewish publishing house in Vilna before leaving for America at age eighteen as part of the utopian Jewish agricultural colonization group Am Oylom. When that project failed, Harkavy worked in menial jobs while studying English and wandered between Europe and North America for a decade, founding Yiddish newspapers in Baltimore and Montreal. In 1891 Harkavy published a guide for learning English, Der englisher lerer (The English Teacher), which became extremely popular, selling almost one hundred thousand copies. Over the coming decades he published a vast range of works to help immigrants learn English, including textbooks, collections of sample letters in English, and literary anthologies. He contributed articles in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English to various papers, translated literary classics into Yiddish (for example, Don Quixote, 1910), published books on American history, and lectured widely on Jewish civic and cultural concerns. From 1904 to 1909 he served as a representative of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) at Ellis Island. Harkavy is best known for his work as a Yiddish lexicographer: more than twenty editions of his English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English dictionary have been printed since it was first published in 1925.