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Jewish Book Fair
Molly Abraham, Detroit News 1/2/04
Literary Heritage
For 25 years, Aaron Lansky has been rescuing the
word's abandoned Yiddish books.
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86
903150
A
aron Lansky is the Yiddish
Indiana Jones. The founder and
president of the National
Jewish Book Center, Lansky has been
an intrepid archaeologist and adventur-
er in his decades-long effort to find and
save Yiddish books around the world
before they are destroyed or lost forever.
With scarce resources but aided by
enthusiastic volunteers, he has emptied
dumpsters in the rain, salvaged books
from forgotten basements, emptied
libraries on the brink of being closed
and crossed international borders
amidst danger.
This 49-year old gentle soul, the
recipient of a MacArthur "genius" fel-
lowship, has also sipped tea and eaten
cakes and homemade delicacies across
America, listening to stories from aging
Jews about to give up their collections
of Yiddish books, people entrusting
him with their inheritance.
In his first book, Outwitting History:
The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who
Rescued a Million Yiddish Books
(Algonquin Books; $24.95), Lans
earnestly tells his story, from his initial
study of Yiddish as an undergraduate to
his building an institution described by
Esquire magazine as "the most grass-
roots Jewish organization in America,"
with a state-of-the-art facility on the
campus of Hampshire College in
Amherst, Mass. In 25 years, they have
collected more than 1.5 million Yiddish
books and how have 35,000 members.
The book's title is drawn from a
response given by the Yiddish scholar
Max Weinreich. When asked why he
persevered in teaching in Yiddish after
half of the world's Yiddish-speaking
population was killed in the Shoah, he
said, "Because Yiddish has magic; it will
outwit history"
When Lansky was a student, he and
his classmates had trouble finding
copies of the Yiddish books they want-
ed to read. He began searching old
bookstores and synagogues and realized
that indeed there were many Yiddish
books in private collections, whose
readers were dying off and leaving them
to children and grandchildren who
couldn't read the language.
Soon after beginning his graduate
studies, Lansky, then 23, decided to
take a leave of absence "to save the
world's Yiddish books before it was too
late."
Although Lansky had the passions of
an antiquarian book collector, he hardly
looked the role. After the word got out
about his efforts, he would show up in
jeans, driving an old dented truck,
ready to cart away as many books as
people would part with. Often, the
books were given one at a time, with a
tale about each. Everywhere he went,
he was kissed.
In an interview, Lansky says that peo-
ple poured out their hearts in what he
came to see as a "ritual of cultural
transmission." He would prop up his
tape recorder on the table between the
gefilte fish and chrayn, horseradish.
Even when people asked not to be
taped, he sometimes would turn the
tape recorder on in his pocket, ever
aware of the historical responsibility of
remembering their words. From his
first days on the road, he had the sense
that he was witnessing a moment he
would need to write about.
In the name of efficiency, he would
travel with two colleagues;
0 7 one would
be the designated eater, left sitting at
the table while the others hauled books.
Among their early donors were
Marjorie Guthrie (the wife of Woody
and whose mother was a Yiddish
writer), Abbie Hoffman's mother and
Allen Ginsberg's stepmother.
Sometimes, Lansky would get mid-
dle-of-the-night emergency calls regard-
ing institutions about to throw out
their books, and he and his team would
race down in a truck. Once, while
emptying the books out of a Bronx cul-
tural library, they enlisted an assembly
line of local kids to help them. He also
writes of missions to Cuba and Russia.
Once the center collected a signifi-
cant number of books, their aim was
never to keep them but rather to dis-
tribute them to schools and libraries.
And now, their efforts extend beyond
that, to sharing the knowledge inside of
the books to a wide audience.
Their recent projects include creating
a digital library, a summer internship
for college students (they get 100 appli-
cants for every spot, and this year will