A. A. KRYUKOV Head of the Representative Office of Rossotrudnichestvo in Israel In the spring of this year, the Moscow publishing house "Kuchkovo Pole" published a neat, hardcover book - 416 pages - " Hebrew in your pocket. Russian-Hebrew, Hebrew-Russian Dictionary". An ordinary event - about 10 thousand words. Similar dictionaries are now published in various Russian and Israeli publishers almost annually. But until relatively recently, less than half a century ago, the publication of the first "Hebrew-Russian dictionary" in our country was an event of truly "universal scale", it immediately became a bibliographic rarity. Today we publish a brief history of the dictionary's publication and tell you about its creator, the outstanding linguist Felix L. Shapiro. The "Khrushchev thaw" of the early 1960s was marked by a very intense but unfortunately brief period of rapprochement between the USSR and Israel (until Moscow severed diplomatic relations with Israel in June 1967). An exchange of delegations of representatives of public organizations, scientists, cultural figures and artists began. A major event was the publication of the Hebrew-Russian Dictionary, compiled by F. L. Shapiro, in Moscow in 1963. The editor of the publication was a brilliant semitologist, Professor Benzion Meirovich Grande, who for a number of years headed the Department of Arabic Philology at the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University (IVYA, since 1972-the Institute of Asian and African Countries, ISAA). The first publication of this kind in the Soviet Union almost immediately became a bibliographic rarity. Dictionary with a circulation of 25 thousand copies. The list included about 28,000 words of literary Hebrew, socio-political vocabulary, terminology from the fields of science and technology, agriculture, art and sports. The preparation and publication of the dictionary became a kind of professional feat of Felix Lvovich (Feitel Leibovich) Shapiro (1879-1961) was a true ... Читать далее