OUTWITTING HISTORY: How a
Young Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a
Vanishing Civilisation
By Aaron
Lansky
Souvenir Press, £18.99; 320pp
ISBN 0 285 63724 X
Buy the book
WORDS ON FIRE:
The Unfinished Story of Yiddish
By
Dovid Katz
Basic Books, £16.99; 448pp
ISBN 0 465 03728 3
Buy the book
Books are meant to be read. That’s what I
remind myself whenever I feel stabbed with
regret about the library of my late father, Hugo
Gryn. A salaried rabbi, he often jested that all
he would have to leave us, his children, was his
cherished collection of books, some of them in
Yiddish. After his death in 1996, I packed them
into cardboard boxes and a guardian angel stored
them in his textile warehouse. But, last summer,
when he announced his retirement, no one in the
family had room for several thousand books and
journals.
Thankfully, a far-sighted librarian at the
Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies came
to the rescue. Gambling that my father’s role in
shaping postwar Anglo-Jewry would make his books
and papers of interest to scholars in years to
come, he agreed to catalogue and conserve the
archive in exchange for its indefinite loan.
Alas, other than a basic grasp of Hebrew and
some quirky Yiddish exclamations that add pepper
to my speech, I did not inherit my father’s
mastery of languages. “Ich vill redden
Yiddish mit mein tatteh” — I will speak
Yiddish with my father — was my first and only
formal lesson. My love of Yiddish literature,
with its earthy humour and compassion for
humanity, was formed on English translations of
celebrated Yiddish writers such as Sholem
Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Isaac Bashevis Singer
and his brother, I. J. Singer Their writings are
the legacy of a lost civilisation. In 1991
Unesco declared Yiddish an endangered language,
yet it is enjoying a remarkable revival, not
just among the burgeoning families of
ultra-Orthodox Jews who speak it at home, but
among Jews reclaiming their cultural heritage,
for whom Yiddish is hip.
Born in Massachusetts in 1955, Aaron Lansky
got the Yiddish bug when he was still a
long-haired student in faded jeans. By the
mid-1970s, when he enrolled on a graduate
programme in East European Jewish studies in
Montreal, virtually the whole of Yiddish
literature was out of print. Scouring libraries
and bookshops, Lansky and his fellow students
were hard pressed to find copies of books
assigned by their teachers. They realised that
children of Jewish immigrants who could not
understand their parents’ mama loshen —
mother tongue — were throwing away thousands of
irreplaceable Yiddish books.
In 1980 Lansky founded the National Yiddish
Book Centre and appealed for unwanted Yiddish
books. Jews all over North America responded;
hundreds of books still arrive every week.
Outwitting History is the charming and
compelling epic about how Lansky and a few
volunteers saved Yiddish books from extinction.
Lansky recounts his adventures on the road:
speeding off in the middle of the night to
schlep truckloads of books from
demolition sites and damp basements, recruiting
an international network of zamlers
(people who gather scattered things).
Interspersed throughout are the poignant stories
of the books’ ageing owners, the last of more
than two million native Yiddish speakers who,
dreaming of a better future, migrated from
Eastern Europe to America at the turn of the
last century.
Words on Fire offers an elegant and
more scholarly approach. The book is rich in
detail and beautifully illustrated and Dovid
Katz explains the genesis and development of
Yiddish and its place in Jewish history.
Yiddish, which means “Jewish”, first emerged
about a thousand years ago among the Jews of the
Rhine, a fusion of medieval German with Hebrew
and Aramaic, deriving other words from Latin,
French and Italian. Like other Jewish
vernaculars such as Judaeo-Arabic and Ladino, it
was written in the Hebrew alphabet. As Jews
emigrated eastward, they carried Yiddish with
them, picking up linguistic influences from
their neighbours in Poland, Ukraine, Russia and
Slovakia. The language and its demise under
Hitler and Stalin (who, in 1952, ordered all of
his country’s leading Yiddish writers to be shot
on a single night) contain the bones of the
story of Ashkenazi Jews.
It was used primarily as a spoken language,
but in the 19th century, after the Haskalah, the
Jewish version of European Enlightenment, there
unfolded a huge outpouring of Yiddish
literature. Beginning in 1864 with publication
of Mendele the Book Peddler’s novel Dos
Kleyne Mentshele (The Little Man), by the
time of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939,
nearly 30,000 Yiddish titles had appeared.
Yiddish was important in the growth of the
Jewish Workers’ Bund which became, in the 20th
century, a mass socialist movement. Founded in
secret in a Vilnius attic in 1897, the same year
as the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland,
both movements sought solutions for the
marginalised and persecuted Jews of Eastern
Europe. Zionists supported emigration to a
Jewish homeland with Hebrew as a common
language, while the Bundists, preaching humanism
and democracy, saw Yiddish as the national
language of East European Jewry.
But for many Jews arriving in America,
trapped in the sweatshops and tenement buildings
of New York’s Lower East Side, Yiddish was a
reminder of the miseries left behind, an
obstacle to integration, while for
ultra-Orthodox Jews, modern Yiddish literature
is treyf, forbidden. It could have
vanished into a footnote of history.
Lansky’s organisation, now based in Amherst,
Massachusetts, has recovered 1.5 million Yiddish
books, many recycled to students, scholars and
libraries around the world. His mission to
preserve the books for posterity has been
fulfilled by a programme of digitisation.
Outwitting History inspires longing
for an era that valued books over bookshelf
space, summed up best by Isaac Bashevis Singer
as he accepted his Nobel prize in 1978: “Yiddish
has not yet said its last word. It contains
treasures that have not been revealed to the
eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs
and saints, of dreamers and cabalists, rich in
humour and in memories that mankind may never
forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise
and humble language of us all, the idiom of
frightened and hopeful humanity.”