Outwitting History

Aaron Lansky. Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. New York: Algonquin. 2005. Print.

First Sentences:

The phone rang at midnight.

That wasn't unusual. Older Jews often waited until the rates went down to phone me about their Yiddish books. But tonight I had just returned from a long collection trip, it was snowing outside, and I had no intention of crawling out from under the covers to answer it.












Description:

In 1980, at age twenty-three, Aaron Lansky found something unusual on the brink of extinction: books written in Yiddish. 

In his mesmerizing tale, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, Lansky tells of his plan to learn Yiddish while at Hampshire College to better understand the thoughts of Holocaust writers and other Jews. But he soon discovers that Yiddish books are extremely difficult to find. He scours bookstores for anything written in Yiddish, but rarely is successful. Finally his professor suggests Lansky go to the Lower East Side in New York City "where the Yiddish readers used to live."  

And there he finds Yiddish books in small collections of elderly Holocaust survivors, immigrants from Russia, and book collectors. He locates Yiddish books being discarded in dumpsters or left on the curb to be thrown away: shames (worn-out religious books set to be ritualistically buried); Karl Marx in Yiddish; Zalman Rejzen's Lexicon of Yiddish Literature; Nahum Stutchkoff's Yiddish Rhyming Dictionary; Jacob Glatstein's When Yash Set Forth about his travels in interwar Europe; and Zishe Landau's Poems.

Lansky examines every collection and hauls them away for storage in a rented warehouse. At first riding his bicycle with an empty milk crate on the back and later in a rented truck, he and some fellow students begin to gather titles and thus preserve a cultural history and its written language book by book. 

At that time scholars believed 70,000 volumes remained; today [2004], my colleagues and I have collected more than one and one-half million -- many of them at the last minute from attics and basements, demolition sites, and Dumptsters.

Lansky finds he must bring helpers with him not just to help carry books away but to permit him to interact with the owners of these titles. Owners often ask Lansky to sit down and eat with them as they hold up each Yiddish title and tell the story about how they acquired the book and brought it from their homeland. He listens to their stories politely while his fellow students surreptitiously load books into the truck. These stories from the book owners, too, are saved from extinction.

We were enacting a ritual of cultural transmission. He was handing me no merely his books but his world, his yerushe, the inheritance his own children had rejected. I was a stranger, but he had no other choice: Book by book, he was placing all his hopes in me.

This is a very powerful story. Lansky goes from being a student simply trying to find a couple of titles to a tireless preservationist of a culture's icons. He is a personable writer, passionate about the people and books he discovers that makes this a real-life adventure story and human interest documentary. 

I absolutely loved this book. Very highly recommended for lovers of books, Yiddish, and the people who write and collect books in this language.

Yiddish has magic, it will outwit history.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Belfoure, Charles. The Paris Architect

During World War II in occupied Paris, architect Lucien Barnard is commissioned by wealthy Jews to design hiding places in their homes for themselves that the Nazis cannot find. But is the fabulous amount of money and constant work worth the risk of discovery by the Nazis?