The winner of this year’s spelling bee was the legendary “knaidel” (a.k.a. matzah ball). Thirteen-year-old Arvind Mahankali correctly spelled the Yiddish word for the small mass of dough to win the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Arvind was a finalist in the last two national spelling bees. In both 2011 and 2012, however, he was tripped up by German-derived words. This time, he conquered the German-derived-Yiddish knaidel.
When an Indian-American forms the word knaidel to win an English language contest, it’s a coming of age of sorts for the Yiddish language. We are all familiar with the entry of words like chutzpah into the American lexicon, but knaidel must have had a real upstream swim to make it. To be… Read More »