Outwitting History: How a Young Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Vanishing Civilization

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2006), "Outwitting History: How a Young Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Vanishing Civilization", Library Review, Vol. 55 No. 2, pp. 160-164. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530610649675

Culture and identity are bound up with books. Because of this, many projects to save books have taken on the spirit of a crusade. Aaron Lansky is the founder and president of the National Yiddish Book Center, based on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. It started in 1980 with Lansky simply asking around for books in Yiddish and has grown from that into the far‐reaching non‐profit organization it is today. Through its website (at yiddishbookcenter.org), readers can read more. In 1998, the center received a large grant from the Steven Spielberg Righteous Persons Foundation to digitize the whole Yiddish library. Now, the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library can be accessed and searched through the same website. This extends the reach of this remarkable cultural and bibliographical resource, and provides the basis for teaching and research and for reprint programmes.

Scanning each book was difficult because many of them were brittle and old. Indeed, Elias Shulman (editor of the Yiddish magazine The Future) gave a talk in the 1980s and the book he read from Chaim Grade's Mussar Students (published in 1939) fell apart as he read it, fragments falling like rain to the floor. This catches the tone of Aaron Lansky's book Outwitting History. There are important themes in the book – that of saving “an endangered language” (UNESCO called Yiddish that in 1991), that of cultural transmission (as memories and networks and personal libraries are handed on), that of the ambivalence with which Jewish and Israeli speakers view and viewed Yiddish (often regarded as a hybrid vernacular unlike Hebrew, the language of sacred texts and the official language of Israel) and that of historical amnesia.

Yiddish has an extensive history and the language and literature are variously regarded as a bridge across the abyss, a language of exile, a lost but living world and a portable homeland. Its history reflects the evolving Jewish sense of identity. The heyday of Yiddish publishing was between the 1860s and the 1930s, much of it in Russia and Poland as well as for emigrants into the USA. It ranged from secular texts and cookbooks to translations of the classics and grammars. Yiddish literature itself is a rich tradition known up to now mainly by specialists, especially if it is available only in Yiddish. There is a very useful introductory list on the center's website called “From Mendele to Maus”. This not only showcases the triumvirate of classic Yiddish writers – Sholem Aleichem (or Rabinovitz), I. L. Peretz and S. Y. Abramovitch (known by his pen name Mendele Soykher Seforim because Mendele the bookseller was one of his best known characters). Maus is the famous graphic novel by Art Spielgelman about the Holocaust[2]. As well as these, the well chosen list includes numerous Yiddish writers, some of whose works are available in English, like Glatstein and Sutzkever, Grade and Leivick, Isaac Bashevis Singer and his brother I. J. Singer. Other “Jewish” writers, like Bellow and Levi, Agnon and Oz, are also there.

Yiddish itself is a hybrid language, in part Hebrew, in part German, and because of the diaspora, a mélange of many other languages. The popularity of cooking has left us with many Yiddish words for food (like bagel and blintz, halvah and matzo). The vernacular character of Yiddish meant that many of its words were direct and earthy, often very useful, often personal and insulting – kibosh and shmuck, mish‐mash and chutzpa, klutz and shlemiel, schmooz and schlep. Lansky and his friends did more than their fair share of shlepping or carrying and lifting when they went round collecting Yiddish books, some left in cellars, others reluctantly handed over by very old Yiddish speakers unable to care for them any more or hopeful that something valuable would not be lost. The vernacular and (from a Hasidic viewpoint) secular nature of Yiddish gives it an unique cultural identity that comes through in words like shlemiel as well as in stories like Peretz’ story about modest Bontsha who, when he went to paradise, asked only for a hot roll with fresh butter every morning, leaving God to ponder how he had made the people on earth so modest. Lansky learnt Yiddish (his account of this is most amusing) and came to know and love such writers.

His own account of the years gathering the books and establishing the Center read like such a story, captured by one reviewer who said he was a bibliophilic Indiana Jones. Many Yiddish books were rescued by chance and at the last possible moment – the Yiddish books in the Newark Public Library that were going to be thrown away, the libraries left when organizations like the Labor Zionist Center and the Congress for Jewish Culture were forced to close down. Some wanted to sell him the books. His lectures on what he called “the Borscht belt” led to more offers – as much of food and memories as books (along with music and photographs). Yet, it would be easy to come away from this with a “cutesy” sentimental and nostalgic view of what went on: far from it. Many of Lansky's contacts were old and suffering. Many remembered the Holocaust, the genocides in Poland and in the Russia of Stalin, and many were preoccupied with feuds about Zionism, Communism, poverty, assimilation, Judaic orthodoxy and secularism. In this way, we are not just told how a collection of books came together: we are given an insight into cultural history.

For many English speakers, mention of the word “Yiddish” evokes Leo Rosten's famous book The Joys of Yiddish. This first appeared in 1968 (in the USA) and 1970 (in the UK). It was a lexicon of what he called Yiddish, Hebrew and Yinglish words often encountered in English. It is still widely used (there is now a “new joys” as well) by people checking Yiddish words, as well as people in search of Jewish stories and folk sayings. His stories about Hyman Kaplan are still read today. Lansky describes how in 1991 he was on a television show with Rosten and how he disliked the folksy way in which Rosten described Yiddish and Jewish culture. Yiddish has been controversial from its beginnings and while Lansky is far from a snob (in fact, he comes across as a really nice guy), The Joys of Yiddish – to a Yiddish scholar – are “a travesty”.

So, if it does anything, Outwitting History will debunk the stereotypes about Yiddish among people who know a little, or less than a little, about it. In fact, it will get them started on an exciting search of their own. Lansky's quest to gather Yiddish books was not the only one; years before historian Simon Dubnow (remembered now in the Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University) gathered materials for his own work, in the style of the Brothers Grimm. Of importance today is the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, now based at the Center for Jewish History in New York, with a library of over 350,000 volumes and papers as well as an extensive Yiddish music and theatre collection), originally started in Vilna in Lithuania and closed down by the Nazis (who used it in anti‐Semitic research). The strap line of the Center is “preserving our heritage”. Lansky alerts readers, too, to important collections in libraries like that at Florida Atlantic University. Interesting journals and websites may also be located to widen the reader's knowledge of Yiddish sources: examples include Mendele: Forum for Yiddish Literature and Yiddish Language (at http://shakti.trincoll.edu/ ˜mendele/) and the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture. There is also a Yiddish radio project while Lansky's Center itself produces a range of reprints and audio tapes (with readers like Leonard Nimoy and Rhea Perlman). Specialist booksellers like Schwartz Judaica can be located on the Internet.

It is said, by Lansky, that one out of every two Yiddish speaking Jews was murdered in the Holocaust. One of his contacts told him: “Hitler killed our readers”. Yiddish speaking exiles in Argentina embarked on a major publishing enterprise of 175 volumes under the series title “Polish Jewry” (between 1946 and 1966) to commemorate this. Works like Elie Wiesel's And the World Kept Silent and Chaim Grade's Refugees were included in the series. From the extensive and increasing reference literature on the Holocaust, we can extract much of direct relevance to Yiddish literature: writers like Grade and Glatstein, Ringelblum and Sutzkever, Molodowsky and Zychlinsky have all contributed works of value to this genre. Some became legends in their own right, like Abraham Sutzkever with his The Golden Chain journal, Emmanuel Ringelblum for his Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (published in Yiddish in 1952) and H. Leivick (pen name of Leivick Halpern) who not only depicted the horror of the Holocaust but kept Yiddish alive in poetry that celebrates the sacredness of human nature. Later, Yiddish writers, like Rachel Korn, return to these themes. The Shoah and anti‐Semitism figure large, along with the diaspora and assimilation, in Yiddishkeit.

Culture is political. Lansky acknowledges this when he suggests that Yiddish, historically, has been dialectically caught between the core culture of the Jews and the ways in which the abstract Hebrew aspects of this culture contrasted with the earthy and secular Yiddish vernacular. Realistically, he does not anticipate millions of Yiddish readers today, as there once were. Tzvi Howard Adelman argues that Yiddish writers like Mendele and Peretz provide an important critique of Jewish life and leadership; Peretz's story about a golem, for example, is a haunting tale about vengefulness, combating an attack on Jewish values by others. Tensions between tradition and secular postmodernism come through the work of Sholom Aleichem (whose story Hodel was the basis for the music Fiddler on the Roof, where one of Tevya's daughters insists on making her own choice of husband). A sense of parody and pathos comes through the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel prize winner, who originally wrote much of his work in Yiddish, as did his lesser known brother Israel Joshua Singer. I. B. Singer's tale about Gimpel the fool, for example, provides a distinctive and oblique view of traditional Jewish life. There is, equally, a rich cultural heritage reflected in “factual” and “biographical” ethnographic work, like Jack Kugelmass' The Miracle of Intervale Avenue (a story of a Jewish congregation in the South Bronx).

Lansky's book also reminds us of how digitizing culture has taken off. The electronic journal DigiCULT tests the water in this converging field: thematic issue 5 for January 2004, for example, discusses virtual communities and collaboration in the heritage sector, describes the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003, the “Heritage for All” CIPHER Project, and the interest in digitizing records of people who have migrated (including Yiddish speakers). If culture is associated with identity and records with culture, projects like the Digital Shikshapatri Online (of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies), the Hoagy Carmichael Collection at Indiana University, the Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum project of Forum Romanum and the British Library's plans to digitize the Codex Sinaiticus spring to mind. The e‐thesis project of JISC[1], CURL and the BL is another important initiative.

Since 1998, the Yiddish materials at the National Yiddish Book Center have been scanned and made available online. One and a half million books, many falling apart, were carefully scanned or captured by Pitney Bowes Management Services (www.pb.com), ∼3.2 million separate pages.

This is, then, a book which represents the tip of an iceberg – in cultural history terms for Yiddish and Jewish culture – as well as in bibliographical and digitization terms. It is fascinating read, of interest to the general reader as much as to the (Yiddish) specialist. It spends virtually all its space on the period up to the digitization, that is to say, between its beginnings in the late 1970s to 1998, and peeps beyond to plans for reprints and further research. Student internships are harder to obtain there than places at Harvard, Lansky says. Many international scholars, like Jeremy Dauber of Harvard, came through the Center.

Lansky got wet and dirty and tired regularly, and was by turns exhilarated, too full of food, worried about money, suspicious about sponsors, grateful to zamlers (zamler is the Yiddish word for a collector or compiler) who helped shlep the books, and amazed at the people he met (including the family of Woody Guthrie, people who accused him of celebrating defeat, and many now long dead who gladly handed over priceless possessions believing that they would find a good home). It is not a scholarly book, mercifully, but the work of an enthusiast, a Yiddish scholar to his fingertips, an infectious activist, a bibliophile and an American. The focus is mainly American although it gets international towards the end. Now the collection has been digitized, it is truly international. One caveat – no index (but what a challenge to compile one's own!). Because of all this, Outwitting History is a book as much for personal and public libraries as for specialist collections. Lansky speaks about “historical amnesia”: his concept of “outwitting history” is now a reality, so no small achievement. Like many of his authors, he is also a born storyteller.