me

 

Had some time to kill and decided to visit Whitechapel Library (haven't been in many many years). For no particular reason I went over to the language section of the library and suddenly remembered that a friend wants me to translate a line into Hebrew (and find someone to translate it into Arabic as well) so I went to see if there was a Hebrew/English dictionary - coz my Hebrew is pretty rubbish nowadays.

There were loads of European languages of course but also some surprising ones like lots of Polish and Czech language books. There was also a plethora of Asian languages and one very old very large tome on Yiddish. No Hebrew. I wondered whether it had always been like this at Whitechapel Library - where the local popluation was predominately Jewish 50 years ago - or whether it was a relatively recent 'political' choice to get rid of any Hebrew reference book.

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