"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 unable to read the language) often threw the volumes away. The young Lansky issued a public appeal for unwanted and discarded Yiddish books, and people from all over the world heeded the call. He hit the road, along with a motley crew of helpers, rescuing Yiddish books from the garbage heap. For that work, which continues today, many have hailed his achievement as the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history. Lansky is also a genius — having received the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" fellowship after his first decade of work. Of course, Lansky could not have accomplished all this alone; he credits Yiddish book collecting peers in Israel, Canada and Argentina; an army of volunteers here in the United States; and the generosity of numerous benefactors along the way. When he began, he was told Yiddish books known to be out there for rescue numbered in the thousands. Today, his center has saved more than a million tomes. Migratory Words Unlike traditional Hebrew, the primary language of Jewish religious texts, Yiddish was a popular language, spoken in households and markets rather than reserved for religious ceremonies. However, Yiddish and Hebrew share the same alphabet. Making things more confusing to the average outsider, there are some 18 different Jewish languages, also including Aramaic and Talmud. Lansky said Yiddish is also sometimes referred to as "mame loshn" or mother's tongue, and that some scholars also call it "zhargon" which directly translates as "jargon." It was the language of everyday life. And as such, Yiddish hasn't always been treated with the same respect of other flexible languages like modern English. The etymology of Yiddish reflect a cultural diaspora: elements of the Rhineland of Germany, France, and some Slavic words are commingled with ancient Hebrew. This cultural history embedded in Yiddish is one reason why Jewish people seeking to assimilate into American or Western European culture often chose to speak other languages. Yiddish is a road map of Jewish history. Lansky loves the m lange that is Yiddish, and so too he often enjoys the interpolation of Yiddish words in the American English lexicon. Anyone who's ever derided someone as a "schlub" or lauded a good person as a "mensch" has borrowed from the Yiddish language. If you have "kvetched" with friends, had a "nosh" at a deli, or enjoyed a comedian's "shtick," you also have Yiddish to thank. "It's an organic process. These things happen," Lansky said of the blending of Yiddish phrases into ordinary English dialogue. "I get a kick out of it. "Yiddish is a fusion language," Lansky continued. "It's an amalgam of linguistic stock. If that's good enough for English, it's good enough for Yiddish." The language itself is a mosaic. Yiddish words borrowed from French are right alongside Turkish phrases. It shares roots in Germanic and Romance languages alike. Lansky called Yiddish "an inside language of people on the outs; of marginalized people." Lansky added, "Hebrew is important, but not the language Jews were speaking. You can't really understand the culture unless you understand the language." He said that knowing Yiddish is integral to understanding contemporary Jewish identity. "Thirty years ago there was a lot of pushback," he said of reactions to his efforts. "What we saved was a literature; an awful lot of books. It also repatriated a people with its culture." Lansky's efforts to preserve the Yiddish language also protect the history of a people. He readily admitted in his book that the language faces an uphill battle to survive in modern American culture. "I'm the head of a major Yiddish organization," he wrote, "yet my Yiddish is still not half as fluent as that of my grandfather, and he was a junkman. Which makes it hard not to worry about cultural continuity." Yiddish Disneyland If Lansky comes across as a working man's superhero, then the Yiddish Book Center may at first seem like a Bizarro world for English-speaking visitors: Yiddish words and sentences are read from right to left. This also makes what we might think of as the back of a book is actually its front, when written in Yiddish. To an outsider, then, these texts seem to begin at our accustomed ending point, challenging our most basically held assumptions. The center's appearance is also distinct: it's that of a classic, European thatched-roof building. Lansky explained that it was built to resemble small Jewish towns in Eastern Europe called "shtetls." "I also wanted it to have the feel of old wooden synagogues," Lansky said. He added, paraphrasing the building's architect Allen Moore, "It walks a very thin line. We wanted it to evoke a historical recall, and have echoes of the past, without being a Yiddish Disneyland." Lansky's group purchased a roughly 10-acre plot of land from Hampshire College (his alma mater) in the mid-1990s to construct the current home of the YBC. The mutual interests of the book center and the adjacent college continue to be vaguely related, as shown in their cooperative efforts, Lansky said. "The idea was to ring the campus with interesting nonprofit organizations," Lansky said in his book. He calls the space, carved into an apple orchard, with its own woodland pond and an open view of the Holyoke range, "The most magnificent piece of land that Yiddish has ever known." The 37,000-square-foot headquarters integrates an open Yiddish book repository, English-language bookstore, theatres, art galleries, museum exhibitions about Yiddish language and culture, and much more. Its total price tag amounted to roughly $7 million. The current building, however, is only the latest book warehouse occupied by Lansky's group since about 1980. He originally started his collection in apartments, and moved his efforts to an old mill building in Florence upon incorporating as a nonprofit. Everything in that original location was either built from scrap or salvaged — bookshelves, office furniture, and a single telephone. "We were trying to save the world's Yiddish books before it was too late," he recalled of the early days. His indomitable spirit ultimately helped save an endangered language, and preserve an at-risk culture. Lansky referenced a Jewish story about a "treger," a Jewish person who makes a living hauling heavy burdens on his back. "Even the most humble Jew has the right and the responsibility to change the world," Lansky summarized about this tale of one man's conviction. It's a metaphor for himself; Lansky's burdens are multitude. He carries books and a cultural legacy on his shoulders. Surviving Extinction Although certain Yiddish words do seem to lend themselves to a punchline in the Catskills (one of the many places Lansky has spoken in support of the YBC), he also cautions in his book against the notion of pouring on the "schmaltz," or considering Yiddish to be a "darling" little language. Rather, he considers Yiddish "the language in which millions of Jews lived and died and affirmed their dignity in the face of cataclysmic violence and oppression, the language in which they cried out to God and man for justice." Yiddish was the primary spoken language of Eastern European Jews for 1,000 years. However, the near-eradication of the Yiddish language from the face of the Earth paralleled the global politics starting around World War II. "It didn't die a natural death," he said. "It was brutally uprooted by Hitler and Stalin." Lansky added, "Most of these books technically survived World War II, but only because two-thirds of the publishing in Yiddish at that time was in the United States. The culture of these writers, however, was destroyed in the war." He's said that not only were half of all Yiddish-speaking Jews murdered in the Holocaust, but also Stalin ordered all of the Soviet Union's leading Yiddish writers shot on a single night in 1952. When Lansky began his quest in earnest around 1980, a much quieter threat endangered these same volumes. "Later [Yiddish books] would face neglect," he said. "In an astounding number of cases, the books were being thrown out. This was emblematic of a much larger problem: Jews kept the religion but lost the culture." A byproduct of American assimilation, as Phillip Roth famously wrote about in his books, the discarding of Yiddish writings was part of fitting in. Lansky called Yiddish "an unwelcome reminder of the immigrant culture they had worked so hard to forget." Pursuit of the Future Asked if he knocks on every door to gather funds for the Yiddish book collection, he quipped, "Maybe every other door. [Fundraising] is kind of the bane of your existence in nonprofits. All of us pitch in. We also rely on our 17,000 members who each pay $36 a year. That brings in about one-third of our annual operating budget." The center has a $16 million endowment, which Lansky said he would like to see expanded to $50 million. However, the YBC remains, as Esquire magazine once dubbed it, "The most grassroots Jewish organization in America." The center encompasses aspects of a traditional library, a museum, and a performance space, all in one. "It's not really a regular library," Lansky explained. "We're sort of a library's library. All these terms are blurring a little bit, not just here but everywhere." The center's efforts don't strictly revolve around preserving books in their printed form. Most original Yiddish volumes were printed on highly acidic paper that turns brittle and crumbles to dust. So, about 15 years ago, Lansky and his group had the idea to digitize Yiddish books. The technology at that time was limited, but the project took off with help from Steven Spielberg's charitable foundation, which donated $500,000. The project was also named after Spielberg. Lansky originally talked with Google to host the digitized volumes, but soon realized that Google wanted complete control over the scanned texts. "The idea of one company, however benign, controlling all the information may not be the best idea," he recalled. So the center opted instead to work with The Internet Archive, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. The California group's aim is to someday host all the world's literature, to which Lansky said, "That is a lot of chutzpah." He added in praise of the West Coast group, "They are utterly visionary and idiosyncratic." The Amherst book center has 11,000 of its titles available online, which have been downloaded more than a quarter-million times in less than three years. These full texts are easily downloaded, free of charge. Yiddish, once the most endangered of literatures, is now perhaps the most accessible. As a result of these efforts, the makers of the game Trivial Pursuit decided it was also worthy of a mention in their game. One of their trivia questions became: "What was the first literature to be digitized?" The answer, of course: "Yiddish." In his more optimistic moods, Lansky thinks that modern Jewish readers simply forsake these books, its language along with a culture. However, he also concedes in his book that "Maybe the reason Jews, the People of the Book, uncharacteristically discarded a literature was. because they understood it too well. After all, look how Yiddish literature ended up: its world in ruins, its writers murdered, its readers dying, its children estranged." But as one older woman who gave her books to Lansky told him, "It's not enough to cry for the past. It's more important that we build for the future." No matter what that future may hold, Lansky's center in Amherst continues to carry on a cultural legacy that narrowly escaped extinction. "Yiddish," remarked the Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, "has not yet said its last word." PRIME For more information about the Yiddish Book Center, please visit the group's Web site online at: www.yiddishbookcenter.org.