Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Lansky's thoroughly entertaining book carries a dramatic subtitle, but the words are well deserved. An ordinary college student in 1973, Lansky enrolled in a course on the Holocaust. "As the semester progressed," he writes, "I found myself less interested in￯﾿ﾽhow the Germans went about murdering the Jews of Europe, and more in the people whom they sought to destroy." The Ashkenazi culture that appealed to Lansky was largely recorded in Yiddish. But by the mid-20th century, Yiddish had lost much of its relevance among Jews, and unwanted Yiddish books were slowly succumbing to the Dumpsters.

Seven years later, invigorated by youth and idealism, Lansky embarked on a quest to save Yiddish books and prevent the obliteration of Yiddish culture. On a shoestring, he and his friends rented trucks and traveled from Massachusetts to New York, where they served as the beneficiaries of Yiddish collections from the personal libraries of elderly Jewish couples, and from the warehouses of failing Yiddish publishing houses. In time, Lansky's goal of the preservation of Yiddish literature took him as far away as Canada, Cuba, Argentina, and Lithuania.

Today, Lansky runs the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, a thriving organization that collects, digitizes, translates, and disseminates Yiddish literature. His moving, impressive book is a testament to vision, zeal, and determination, and an inspiration to anyone who has ever faced a seemingly insurmountable task. (Holiday 2004 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

And so it has -- though in ways few could have imagined. In 1980, a twenty-three-year-old student named Aaron Lansky set out to rescue the world's abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Precious volumes that had survived Hitler and Stalin were being passed down from older generations of Jewish immigrants to their non-Yiddish-speaking children -- only to be thrown away or destroyed. With little more than his own chutzpah, Lansky issued a worldwide appeal for unwanted Yiddish books, and the response was overwhelming. Outwitting History is an adventure tale filled with unforgettable characters and told with the exuberance of a man whose passion led him from house to house, country to country, collecting treasured books and heartfelt, often hilarious stories of the vibrant intellectual world these older Jews inhabited.

Lansky and a team of young volunteers crisscrossed America, shlepping books from attics and basements, demolition sites and Dumpsters, while shmoozing with their owners, who insisted on feeding them a little nosh -- gefilte fish, kasha, blintzes, latkes, kugel -- before handing over, one book at a time, their beloved literary heritage. When Lansky started out, experts believed that fewer than 70,000 Yiddish-language books still existed. Twenty-five years and 1.5 million books later, the organization Lansky founded, the National Yiddish Book Center, is one of the largest and fastest-growing Jewish cultural groups in the world. As he takes us along on his groundbreaking journey, Lansky explores the roots of the Yiddish language and introduces us to the brilliant Yiddish writers -- from Mendele to Sholem Aleichem to I. B. Singer -- whose lasting cultural relevance is evident on every page. He shares the humor, tenacity, and love for the written word that unites Jewish immigrants with everyone who cares about the future of great literature. And he enables us to see how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Lansky was a 23-year-old graduate student in 1980 when he came up with an idea that would take over his life and change the face of Jewish literary culture: He wanted to save Yiddish books. With few resources save his passion and ironlike determination, Lansky and his fellow dreamers traveled from house to house, Dumpster to Dumpster saving Yiddish books wherever they could find them-eventually gathering an improbable 1.5 million volumes, from famous writers like Sholem Aleichem and I.B. Singer to one-of-a-kind Soviet prints. In his first book, Lansky charmingly describes his adventures as president and founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, which now has new headquarters at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. To Lansky, Yiddish literature represented an important piece of Jewish cultural history, a link to the past and a memory of a generation lost to the Holocaust. Lansky's account of salvaging books is both hilarious and moving, filled with Jewish humor, conversations with elderly Jewish immigrants for whom the books evoke memories of a faraway past, stories of desperate midnight rescues from rain-soaked Dumpsters, and touching accounts of Lansky's trips to what were once thriving Jewish communities in Europe. The book is a testimony to his love of Judaism and literature and his desire to make a difference in the world. Agent, Carol Mann. (Oct. 1) Forecast: A Jewish Book Council-sponsored national tour should help put this at the forefront of books of Jewish interest this fall and lead to handsome sales. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Join this former MacArthur fellow on his incredible journey to revive interest in the Yiddish language and culture. Part memoir and part history, this is the compelling tale of how Lansky retrieved thousands of books from dumpsters and abandoned buildings across America. He also rescued books from the aftermath of the 1994 terrorist bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires and went to Havana to save the few remaining Yiddish books of a vestigial Jewish community there. Throughout, Lansky shares inspiring anecdotes and references to a dazzling array of Yiddish writers. In the words of scholar Max Weinreich, Lansky shows us that Yiddish was the product of "two dialectical forces one rooted in Hebrew and Aramaic texts" and the other rooted in everyday life. In the end, a provocative question lingers: How could the very "people of the book" have discarded Yiddish books and culture? One can only be comforted with the fact that, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Lansky and the National Yiddish Book Center, which he founded, Yiddish literature survives. This important book is highly recommended for the general reading public and all libraries.-Herbert E. Shapiro, Empire State Coll., SUNY at Rochester Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews