Boodishnick

[Neil Bermel]

Dear all,

Here's one of those friend-of-a-friend-asked-me queries. I've checked a 
number of obvious sources to which I have access, including Russian 
print and online dictionaries and Yiddish and Ukrainian online 
dictionaries and googling the word in various spellings (only one 
hit...), but no luck. I'm not even sure if the word referred to is best 
treated as Russian (seems unlikely), Ukrainian, Yiddish....

"A word cropped up in a piece of fiction I’ve got to annotate for a book 
proposal. The word is ‘boodishnick’, which is how it’s spelt in the 
fiction, but I’m not sure whether it’s correctly spelled. The context is 
a pogrom in Odessa during the 1880s, and the word is used by one of the 
mob, who shouts ‘Who murdered the boodishnick?’ Could you help with a 
possible translation?"

Any advice for this person will be greatly appreciated.

Neil

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