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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