"It was like writing in Latin. No one understood them," Lansky said. "They turned to Yiddish as a necessary evil."
The first modern Yiddish novel was written in 1864. Then a sort of cultural combustion occurred: The great masters of Yiddish literature, Sholem Aleichem and I.B. Singer and Moyshe Kulbak and H. Leivick, began turning out novels and poems and plays that played with memory and surrealism and sex and modernity.
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)
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"The power, the velocity, of this literature was astonishing," Lansky said.
As quickly, it nearly disappeared. Israel promoted Hebrew over Yiddish, which was the language of exile. In the United States, assimilation took its toll on the language. Only the Hasidim, the ultra-orthodox, speak Yiddish any longer. And they will not touch Yiddish literature, which they consider worldly, and sexualized, and therefore treyf (impure).
The Yiddish modernists wound up marooned. Lansky recalls how the elderly editor of the avant-garde magazine Zayn handed him the old copies and turned away. "I could not possibly understand what he felt," he said. "It's the ultimate tragedy of their lives that they had helped create modern culture and now their children literally could not understand their language."
Lansky was no different. He grew up in New Bedford, Mass., hearing Yiddish without quite understanding it. "My parents spoke Yiddish as a language of secrets," he said.
He came to Hampshire College in the 1970s, another kid with long hair and a long beard. He took a course in the Holocaust and another in Yiddish and somewhere the hook slipped in. "I remember our Yiddish professor yelling at us: 'Just because your grandmother spoke it doesn't mean you'll learn it by osmosis,' " he said.
Only in time did Lansky realize that his collecting was as much about saving a generation's memory as about their buhks (books). In July 1980, he received a letter from an 87-year-old.
"I have books . . . [but] I am a very old man and I'm afraid that after I will be gone they may throw them in the trash. Please do help me out. Respectfully, Norman Temmelman."
Lansky drove to Atlantic City and found Temmelman in a fifth-floor apartment, a place piled high with boxes of Yiddish books. Temmelman showed him the poetry books that he had shared with his wife, and yellowed accounts of the history of interwar Europe. "It became clear to me that he was handing me an inheritance, his yerushe," Lansky said. "I was his hope."
For a decade, Lansky worked 15-hour days, traveling constantly, making calls from graffiti-covered phone booths, climbing tenement stairs, reaching under beds and into closets for those books. In 1997, he scraped together the $7 million needed to build the center. Arranged as sort of post-modern shtetl, it has a museum and the digitalization program and visiting scholars. And he used money from a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 1989 to pay himself a steady salary for the first time in his life.
Now he has the aches: His knees, like those of any good shlepper, are going on him. And there's the modest salary and pension. Talk of this and Lansky shakes his head.
"Eh! Not for a second did I ever think I was living in poverty," Lansky said. "My work has meaning; I've been blessed."
