| | "Outwitting History" with Aaron Lansky |  | |
February 2012
Amherst center rescues the common language of the Jewish people
By Mike Briotta
PRIME Editor
It wouldn't be farfetched to call Aaron Lansky the Indiana Jones of the Yiddish language. He's crisscrossed America, and scoured the globe, to rescue cultural artifacts from the brink of extinction.
The treasures he seeks are rare books: volumes that were forgotten, tossed into dumpsters, and left out to unceremoniously crumble apart in the rain.
Lansky has been "schlepping" books for more than three decades. He's taken the wheel of rundown rental trucks all over New York's Lower East Side, hunting for and acquiring Yiddish tomes, and traveling to foreign lands (Russia, Mexico, Lithuania and Cuba to name a few) in an epic search. At various times, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Time Magazine and other news outlets have picked up his story.
Lansky is now the 56-year-old, professorial-looking steward of the largest Yiddish book collection in the world. The nonprofit group he founded, the Yiddish Book Center (YBC) is located in Amherst. Fittingly, he also wrote his own book about his book-saving adventures, "Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books."
His quest began back in 1980, when he was a graduate student in his early 20's, Lansky was saddened to learn that thousands of Yiddish books, which had survived cultural persecutions by Nazis and fascists, were being discarded or destroyed. As an older generation died, their children and grandchildren (who were ...
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