Outwitting History

OUTWITTING HISTORY: THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF A MAN WHO RESCUED A MILLION YIDDISH BOOKS: Aaron Lansky: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: Nonfiction: 316 pages

The recent commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has reminded us of the deaths of millions of people in the Holocaust. Few realize that the Holocaust also sounded the death knell for a culture and a language. Millions of Yiddish speaking people were executed or dislocated from their homelands. As a result, the following generation learned to speak the native languages of a multitude of adopted countries and Yiddish ceased to be spoken. In the 1970’s, just as Aaron Lansky began to be interested in Yiddish, he discovered that personal collections and entire libraries of Yiddish books were being taken to landfills. He began an urgent personal quest to save Yiddish books from destruction, and along with that, to rescue a lost culture.

Mr. Lansky is president and founder of the National Yiddish Book Center. His adventures in salvaging more than 1.5 million books are interesting and moving. This wonderful book is not just for bibliophiles, it’s a book for lovers of history and literature as well. While reading about midnight dumpster dives, we also learn about Yiddish history, Yiddish writers and intellectuals, meet elderly Jewish immigrants who saved priceless volumes in their own personal collections, and travel to communities of Eastern Europe to restore Yiddish volumes destroyed under Communist domination. The National Yiddish Book Center has translated many Yiddish works into English, reprinted important Yiddish books, and with the help of Steven Spielberg, has digitized their entire collection and made it available online. Mr. Lansky’s chutzpah (Yiddish for daring or nerve) can be experienced and celebrated through this book and by visiting www.yiddishbookcenter.org.

SH