I NEWS I Holiday .. Wrappings. Sentiment. • • • • • • • • Romance. • • BEN GALLOB Special to The Jewish News • • ti The warmth of the hearth • mirrored in feelings • for family and friends. SS Parties and gifts. • Fashionable memories to last a lifetime are yours for the season at Holiday Hours: Mon.-Fri. 10-9 P.M., Sat. 10-5 P.M., Sun. 12-5 P.M. ORCHARD LAKE AT FOURTEEN MILE • FARMINGTON HILLS • 855 - 3444 RELIABLE AND EXPERIENCED SINCE 1930 insurance estimates accepted expert color match, foreign & American TOWING & RENTAL CARS AVAILABLE La Salle Body Shop Inc. 28829 Orchard Lake Road, Farmington Hills, MI 48018 MAX FLEISCHER BETWEEN 12 & 13 Mile Rd. 553 - 7111 GET A PRIVATE CONFIDENTIAL PHONE NUMBER AND MESSAGE SERVICE FOR $20 A MONTH YOKE gp, MAIL VOICE MAIL BOX JUST $20 A MONTH! Tired of having private messages intercepted by your secretary, roommate, associate or spouse? Get a private number Voice Mail Box. Only you can retrieve your messages. Comes with a private 7-digit phone number. Your personal access code restricts access to messages. Call for a FREE features and application sheet. al-m a PHONE 84 Yiddish Book Recovery Sparked By Student (313) 353-3839 ANSWERING SERVICE FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1988 Monday-Friday 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. New York (JTA) — A Jewish student, working with corn- puters, is salvaging hundreds of thousands of Yiddish books long discarded and forgotten in Jewish homes, making them accessible to an eager audience of Yiddish devotees. The genesis of the salvage effort was a hunch by a col- lege student, Aaron Lansky, who thought that homes of American-born children of European-born Jews might still have books in Yiddish — used and loved by the parents, but discarded and forgotten by their children. As a student at McGill University in Montreal, Lan- sky discovered that the Yid- dish texts he needed were in scarce supply. Following up suggestions that there might be forgotten Yiddish books in Montreal Jewish homes, Lansky visited those homes and found a sur- prising number of Yiddish books in basements and attics. He returned home to Am- herst with a master's degree in Yiddish literature and con- tinued his book hunt. As news of his unique search spread, Lansky's home be- came flooded with Yiddish books, and he was forced to seek funds for a home for his growing collection. Thus started the National Yiddish Book Center, using rented space in an Amherst factory. That soon became in- adequate, but the town of Holyoke donated an unused school building, where the books have since been housed. The center's office remains in Amherst. "Thanks to the work of our volunteers and generosity of our members, we have assured that the physical remnant of East European culture — the embodiment of almost a thousand years of Jewish history — will not perish with our generation," Lansky said. There are many steps from the acquisition of a long- forgotten book to its filing and placement in a major university library. The first phase is the ac- quisition of the books, which must be unpacked, sorted, oc- casionally repaired and final- ly shelved. Each title is entered into a computer database. "This is a painstaking process, since the Romanization of Yiddish names must be exact," Lan- sky said. The name of the pro- cess is "accessioning?' Lansky said an experienced computer operator can acces- sion about eight titles an hour. The specific goal is to assession "all 30,000 titles in our collection over the next two years." Computers are essential in attempting to catalogue so many books, so the entire 10-person Yiddish center staff is computer literate. For computer software, Lan- sky said, "we designate 42 separate fields for each title," such as author, title, editor, translator, illustrator, place of publication, publisher, publication date and up to six separate subject codes." Lansky explained that the software makes it possible for the center staff "to search and sort the database by any single field or combination." For example, "we could pro- vide you in a matter of minutes with a printout of all available Yiddish books printed in Vilna during World War I, or all autobiographies by major Yiddish writers, or all Yiddish books dealing with Zionism in the United States between 1897 and 1917." The Yiddish center has a grass-roots membership of 13,000 worldwide with almost 100 active volunteers throughout the United States and Canada, according to Lansky. He called the Yiddish center "the world's only com- prehensive supplier of used and out-of-print Yiddish books," which now total about 850,000 volumes. Scholars, Lansky said, estimate "that the whole of modern Yiddish literature is comprised of 40,000 in- dividual titles. Of these, our collection probably represents 30,000 titles. The remainder of the 820,000 texts are duplicate copies, "which we make available to libraries throughout the world." issues The center catalogues, each listing about 1,000 basic titles, as well as regular updates of 300 to 400 newly-acquired titles. Lansky said two staff members, Neil Zagorin and Peter Runyan, are still mak- ing collecting trips to New York every six to eight weeks. They return with a truckload of 6,000 and 8,000 volumes. He indicated that though the search may be ap- proaching the point of vanishing returns, right now