NEWS FEATURE: American Jews’ roots preserved at new Yiddish book center

c. 1997 Religion News Service AMHERST, Mass. _ In the middle of a rolling apple orchard here sits an odd-shaped wooden building seemingly better suited for Eastern Europe’s Carpathian Mountains than for a college town of 30,000 in the foothills of the Berkshires. It is the new home of the National Yiddish Book Center, the […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

AMHERST, Mass. _ In the middle of a rolling apple orchard here sits an odd-shaped wooden building seemingly better suited for Eastern Europe’s Carpathian Mountains than for a college town of 30,000 in the foothills of the Berkshires.

It is the new home of the National Yiddish Book Center, the world’s largest repository of Yiddish books. Founder Aaron Lansky, 42, hopes the center will become a focus of American Jewish culture.


Lansky has no illusions about the center sparking a revival of spoken Yiddish _ the mix of mostly German and Hebrew that was the everyday language of millions of European Jews who immigrated to the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Rather, he hopes the $8-million, 10-acre center _ built in the style of a 19th-century”shtetl,”or Eastern European Jewish village _ will help link American Jews to their roots.”We cannot discard a millennium of our history, we cannot forget where we have come from, and still expect to know who we are and where we are going,”Lansky said.”For any serious Jewish creativity, there has to be a sense of history, of continuity.” Whatever the future of Yiddish, the center _ which opened in mid-June _ stands as a testimony to Lansky’s determination to rescue a disappearing language.

It was in 1979 that Lansky, then a 23-year-old graduate student in Yiddish literature at Montreal’s McGill University, learned that Yiddish books were being destroyed by elderly Jews who no longer had use for them, or by their children who could not read them.

Lansky began making house calls, picking up weathered books by the box-full. Often, he was invited in for tea and cake by his hosts, who regaled him for hours with stories of the Old Country.”It was like visiting my grandmother 20 times in a single day,”he recalled.

Lansky, who grew up in New Bedford, Mass., approached the major American Jewish institutions for help in his reclamation project _ and was unanimously rejected. Their attitude, he said, was that Yiddish was beyond saving.

In 1980, experts estimated there were about 70,000 recoverable Yiddish books in the United States. Using his own funds, Lansky collected that many in his first eight months of searching.

At first he made his rounds on a moped with a milk carton on the back. He soon upgraded to a van. The problem then became where to store his treasures, leading to creation of the center.


The center, incorporated in 1980, moved into a succession of unlikely homes, including a former silk mill and an abandoned roller rink. At one point, Lansky shared space with a potter, a weaver and a woman who sold goat’s milk.

Some of his rescue operations are legendary. One night, awakened by a midnight phone call, Lansky boarded a 2 a.m. train to New York. Working in a freezing rain with a hastily assembled group of volunteers, he saved 8,000 books from a Dumpster. Another time, he enlisted the help of black and Puerto Rican teens to save 15,000 Jewish books from the basement of a demolished building in the Bronx.

The numbers attest to his perseverance. Operating with the help of some 200 volunteers around the country, Lansky has managed to salvage to date about 1.4 million Yiddish books, plus 150,000 folios of rare Yiddish and Hebrew sheet music. About half of the 50,000 titles ever printed in Yiddish are in the center’s collection.

The total collection includes many duplicates, which are often donated to scholars and libraries. So far, Lansky has strengthened the Yiddish collections of some 400 institutions around the world. During a 1989 visit to the Baltic republics, he donated 7,000 books to new Jewish schools and libraries there.

His exploits have gained Lansky a modicum of fame. In 1989, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a”genius grant”of $225,000. He also has been honored with a Jewish Book Award.

To understand the importance of Lansky’s project _ which has been funded by foundation and individual gifts as large as $1 million and as small as $2 _ requires an understanding of the cultural odyssey of American Jewry. His Yiddish-speaking grandmother is a case in point.


Like millions of Eastern European Jews, Lansky’s grandmother arrived at New York’s Ellis Island from Poland around the turn of the century. She was greeted by an older brother who grabbed her suitcase filled with books, letters and photographs from the Old Country and tossed it into the waters of New York harbor.

This was the New World, he told her; better to leave the past behind.

His grandmother’s experience was hardly unique. Yiddish culture indeed flourished for a time in America _ at one point, the country had a dozen Yiddish theater companies and five Yiddish daily newspapers. But Jewish immigrants generally sought to shed their cultural and much of their religious baggage, metaphorically if not literally. The idea was to blend as fully and painlessly as possible into the American melting pot.

Combine this with the devastation of the Holocaust, in which nearly half of Europe’s Yiddish speakers died; the repression of Yiddish in the Soviet Union; and efforts in Israel to supplant the language with Hebrew. The result was what Lansky called an unprecedented rift in the fabric of Jewish continuity.

Lansky’s work has been, in effect, an on-going search to recover his grandmother’s suitcase.

With nearly 10,000 people having donated money for the center, it appears that many American Jews feel compelled to undertake the same search.”We are part of America. It’s the first country in the world where we have really become part of it,”Lansky said.”Times have changed (from the days of the immigrants), and we can now start reclaiming our cultural baggage and tradition.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

The center”celebrates the openness of American society, the openness that America offers Jews to be Jews again,”said David Roskies, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.”The price of admission to America is no longer discarding your culture, your background.” Now that the center has a permanent home, the challenge is what to do with it. In its temporary locales, the center offered a few Yiddish classes and occasional seminars on Jewish culture.’

In Amherst, a summer program teaches ten student interns to read Yiddish, which they use to catalogue and shelve books that still arrive in quantities of up to 1,000 a week. An English-language, quarterly magazine on Jewish literature and culture has also been launched.


Classes and seminars will be offered on a year-round basis. A kosher kitchen will allow the center to host conferences and special programs. A full-time Yiddish scholar will be added to the staff. Exhibits will document Jewish and Yiddish art.

Despite all that, the center’s future”really is a little bit of a blank slate right now,”Lansky admitted. However, his ultimate goal is clear: to offer Jews a fixed address for an infusion of”Yiddishkeit,”or Jewish culture.

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But some are skeptical. “I’m happy and relieved that the center is doing what they’re doing, but I wonder about just how much they can realistically achieve,”said Allan Nadler, director of research at YIVO, the Yiddish Scholarly Institute, in New York.”If they can go around with a dump truck and pick up trash cans full of books, it’s because people don’t want them. Clearly, the very fact that such a center has to exist is a sign of the dying of Yiddish, not its revival.” Nadler also cautioned that an increased interest in studying Yiddish may have a worrisome consequence.

Many young Jews come to Yiddish classes after learning about the Holocaust. In an age when support for Israel is politically troublesome for many liberal American Jews, the Holocaust could supplant Israel as the center of their Jewish identity, Nadler said.”It would be a crime if we lost Yiddish culture altogether, it would be a kind of cultural genocide,”Nadler said.”But in the course of championing Yiddish, one has to be very careful not to do it at the expense of post-Holocaust Jewish culture.” To Lansky, the center is a counterweight to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington: a glimpse not of how Europe’s Jews died, but of how they lived.

He doesn’t expect Yiddish to once again become the Jewish lingua franca, nor does he think it should. Its usefulness today, he said, is to help Jews return to their roots _ and then move forward, not back.”This is a place to preserve and explore and celebrate a living culture. We’re here not to mourn the past, but to affirm our faith in the future,”Lansky said.

MJP END ARNOLD

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