92 | MARCH 31 • 2022 

Nazaruk, Newman and Lansky 
worked on this project for four years, 
and now White Goat Press of the 
Yiddish Book Center combines with 
Grodzka Gate to jointly publish The 
Glass Plates of Lublin: Found Photographs 
of a Lost Jewish World, displaying about 
160 of the 2,700 photographs taken by 
Abram Zylberberg between 1913 and 
1930. 
Many of the photographs show 
Jewish life in the bustling city, includ-
ing sports clubs, political meetings, 
yeshiva teachers with their students and 
people at work or on holiday. Others 
show non-Jewish farm workers at work 
or relaxing. Street scenes show Polish 
urbanites, who could be Jews or non-
Jews. Poland was becoming modern, 
and the scenes include bicycles, auto-
mobiles, industrial engines, sewing 
machines, railroads and radios. 
Lansky says, “You can see the com-
plexity of this world, and also the inte-
gration of Jews into this society. I don’t 
want to overstate that. They spoke 
a Jewish language, Yiddish. They 
spoke Polish too, but mostly Yiddish 
at home. Many of them were going 
to a Jewish school. They weren’t 
immediately identifiable, as earlier 
generations had been. They went 
into modern professions as well. 
These photographs show young 
women sunbathing, wearing 
bathing suits, and sports clubs, 
as well as rabbinical students.
” 
The photographs, as restored, look 
technically beautiful, models of com-
position, and perfectly in focus, the 
work of a professional photographer. 
In another way, these are ordinary 
photographs. They show people, 
Lansky says, “full of life and promise. 
These people are like us, living their 
lives, full of life and full of hope.” 
That captured vitality makes these 
photographs fascinating. Another part 
of their fascination comes, not from 
the photographs, but because we know 
what was in store for these vibrant lively 
subjects; people who, of course, had no 
clue of what was going to come. 
It remains difficult to find out who 

appears in most of the photographs. 
After all these years, hardly anyone 
remains who can identify the subjects; 
the Jews of Lublin before the war num-
bered about 40,000; only about 200 
lived there after the war. Many of the 
photographs appear with only general 
descriptions, with no caption or with 
painfully incomplete captions. 
A poignant example: One photo-
graph shows six young women relaxing 
on a forest floor. Two hold musical 
instruments. The caption partly iden-
tifies only one of the women as either 
Maria, Leja or Chaya Milsztajn. 
Lansky explains that a woman called 

Yiddish Book Center

In 1989, Aaron Lansky took a two-year sab-
batical from graduate school (at McGill in 
Montreal) to try to try to save the world’s 
Yiddish books. He went to New York to meet 
with scholars to set up a plan of 
action, to rescue what they estimat-
ed were about 7,000 Yiddish books. 
Lansky says, “They were so far off that 
it is preposterous.” To date, the Center 
has recovered more than 1.5 million 
books. 
Lansky returned to Amherst, 
Massachusetts (where he had done 
his undergraduate work at Hampshire 
College) and began the Yiddish Book 
Center. In the spring of 1990, he sent out 
word that the Yiddish Book Center was 
ready to receive Yiddish books. 
Now, 43 years later, Lansky still heads the 
Yiddish Book Center in Amherst. It has col-
lected more than a million volumes, donating 
duplicate volumes to students and libraries 
around the world. In 1997, the Yiddish Book 
Center started the Steven Spielberg Digital 
Yiddish Library, making works available for 
free dowload. Digitizing continues, with more 
than 12,000 volumes now available, which 
have generated more than 1.6 million down-
loads. The Book Center also started White 
Goat Press to publish works translated from 
the 39,000 different Yiddish books collect-
ed at the center. The Glass Plates of Lublin 
is not translated from the Yiddish, but it too 
represents a sliver of Jewish history salvaged 
from the destruction of Yiddish culture. 

ARTS&LIFE
BOOK REVIEW

continued from page 91

