AMHERST, Mass. -- History arrived not so long ago in a thousand-pound crate postmarked "Bulawayo, Zimbabwe."
Workers here wrestled the crate inside the National Yiddish Book Center and opened it. What treasures they found: Yiddish travelogues from Belgian Congo, accounts of Yiddish ostrich farmers, a famous history of the Russian Socialist Party.
Aaron Lansky, director of the National Yiddish Book Center, sorts through a crate that contained a collection of books from Zimbabwe.
(Nancy Palmieri For The Washington Post)
|
|
The last synagogue in Bulawayo, a tree-lined city on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, was closing its doors, and a rabbi packed this crate and mailed it to the center with no notice.
"You have no clue, none, what you'll find when you open these boxes up," said Aaron Lansky, the Yiddish Book Center's founder and chief zamler (a person who gathers scattered things). He pulled out a history book and turned the pages. Yellowed parchment flecked off like sand.
"It's our lost history," Lansky said, "literally crumbling in our hands."
Lansky has created the world's greatest repository of books in a language spoken and written by 11 million of the world's Jews until the 1940s, when the Holocaust nearly consumed that culture. The center -- modeled on an Eastern European shtetl and set in an apple orchard at Hampshire College -- houses 120,000 Yiddish titles. Another million or so volumes sit in an old silk mill in Holyoke, where the weight of so much literature causes the support beams to bend. And still the books arrive, 100 on Monday, another 500 on Thursday.
"Early on, I found myself interested less in the details of the Holocaust than by this question: So who were these Jews they wanted to murder? What was this culture they wanted to destroy?" Lansky said. "I discovered in Yiddish the language by which Jews made sense of the modern world."
Enlisting hundreds of volunteer zamlers -- many of them Holocaust survivors -- Lansky has passed a quarter-century ferreting out Yiddish novels in attics and cellars in the Bronx and Cleveland, discovering musical score sheets in a garage in Borough Park and stacks of histories in abandoned bookstores on New York's Lower East Side. In 1981, he discovered a dumpster filled with Yiddish books -- history's dustbin come to life.
He and friends conducted a Perils of Pauline nighttime rescue, with a U-Haul van and a dozen friends forming a de facto bucket brigade to load the books of Zionist theory, memoirs and Yiddish translations of the Torah before the rain ruined them.
"Half of our books have come from New York City, but we have our surprises," he said by way of no little understatement.
Lansky has hopped secret flights to Cuba to rescue books from a synagogue and sifted through volumes left in a San Francisco carriage by a socialist, Yiddish chicken-farming commune in Petaluma. He's taken receipt of Yiddish books from Nome, Alaska. And with the help of movie producer and director Steven Spielberg, his center is turning the collection digital.
Not for nothing did he title his memoir "Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books." There is a boyish quality to the 49-year-old man with the blue eyes, wire-rimmed glasses and disheveled hair. "When I began, I consulted with academic experts and they said, 'Oh, there's about 70,000 Yiddish books in the nation,' " Lansky said. "I said, 'Okay, I can do that in two years.' Now I have 1.5 million books." He shrugs. "What can I say? The experts were wrong."
Yiddish, as such things go, is a relatively young language, formed around the 10th century from a linguistic bouillabaisse of Aramaic, German, French, Italian, Hebrew, Belarusan and Ukrainian. "It was spoken by more Jews than any language in history," said Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard University, who taught Lansky at Toronto's McGill University in the 1970s.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, Yiddish had become the conduit by which Jewish peddlers and merchants introduced the Enlightenment to the East -- from Poland to Hungary and Bulgaria and Russia. Jewish intellectuals responded to this ferment by writing in Hebrew, the language of scholars. But there was a problem.
