In fall 2024, two Wellesley students encountered a 17th-century Hebrew dictionary in ARTH 299: The History of the Book from Manuscript to Print. One student was learning Arabic and the other knew Hebrew. Studying the book together, they excitedly noted similar roots in Hebrew and Arabic words.
Ruth R. Rogers, Laura Daignault Gates ’72 Curator of Special Collections, who was teaching the class, says that a key aspect of her role is “finding the books that people need to read.” She describes what happened next: “Their conversation and curiosity made me remember that I had once seen an artist book by Lynne Avadenka, [Root Words: An Alphabetic Exploration,] that handled the same topic. So I looked it up on her website, contacted her about it, and managed to buy the last copy.” Soon, Special Collections was in possession of No. 1 of a limited edition of 30, published in 2001.
Avadenka, an acclaimed Jewish American artist/printer, created Root Words as part of an exploration of commonalities between Judaism and Islam. She was intrigued to learn that Arabic and Hebrew share a three-letter root system. Further discovering that the word for compassion is the same, Avadenka initiated a collaboration with preeminent Muslim American calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya. As seven is an auspicious number in both cultures, they decided to focus on seven Arabic and Hebrew words that share meanings and similar pronunciations.
The result is an accordion book that expands to over six feet long. “Seven related words are calligraphed by the two artists as the centerpiece of the work, mounted against a background of explanatory text on one side, and interpretative works of free-form calligraphy on the other,” according to an exhibition publication for Language Comes after Artist: A Selection of Books by Lynne Avadenka, which was on view at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in 2013. The concertina-style binding, elegant calligraphy, and sumptuous paper invite touching.
The magic of Root Words is both its physical beauty and Avadenka’s supposition that, as the 2013 exhibition publication suggests, commonalities between Hebrew and Arabic “might make language the root of the problem between the two cultures as well as a possible solution.”
To experience Root Words and other works by Avadenka, look them up in the Wellesley College Library catalog or make a research appointment with Special Collections staff at specialcollections@wellesley.edu.
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