When people come to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, they gaze at the volumes and say, “Who ever knew such a literature existed?” Don’t you know Yiddish is dead?” When Aaron Lansky, then a graduate student of Yiddish literature, first proposed saving the world’s Yiddish books in 1980, many scholars were pessimistic, […]
Dos kluge shnayderl (The Clever Tailor), by Solomon Simon, 1933.
Photo Credit : Justin Shatwell
When people come to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, they gaze at the volumes and say, “Who ever knew such a literature existed?”
Don’t you know Yiddish is dead?” When Aaron Lansky, then a graduate student of Yiddish literature, first proposed saving the world’s Yiddish books in 1980, many scholars were pessimistic, and with reason. Just 40 years earlier, Yiddish—a 1,000-year-old language that blends Germanic, Hebrew, Romance, and Slavic tongues—was spoken by more than 11 million Jews, but within a single generation it had almost vanished. With it, the key to the community’s books was slipping away as well—an entire canon of Jewish literature perilously close to being forgotten.
In 1939, Yiddish was spoken by three-quarters of the world’s Jews, but the horrors of the Holocaust combined with the pressure of assimilation forced the language out of the mainstream. (There are only around 155,000 speakers in the U.S. today.) Except within some Orthodox communities, Yiddish simply wasn’t being passed down, and Lansky feared what would happen to the older generation’s books when left to the children who couldn’t read them. He founded a grassroots organization of volunteers to scour basements and attics across the globe in search of forgotten tomes. When he began, academics were estimating that there were only some 70,000 Yiddish books left outside of libraries. So far, Lansky and his team have found 1.5 million.
A sliver of that collection is on display at the Center’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, on the campus of Hampshire College, Lansky’s alma mater. Row after row of books stand sentinel, their titles, written in gold-leaf Hebrew letters, glinting in the sprawling, sunlit hall. “When people come here,” Lansky says, “they stand on the balcony, look over the books, and say, ‘Who ever knew such a literature existed?’”
And what a literature it is. On the Center’s shelves you can find everything from memoirs and modernist poetry to potboilers and detective novels. Yiddish presses from Warsaw to New York to Buenos Aires pounded out titles in every conceivable genre, a cacophonous symphony of creativity that’s now gone almost silent.
The Center is filled with displays and programs to make the story of this literature accessible to the estimated 99 percent of visitors who don’t read Yiddish, but perhaps its most important and exciting work is its effort to give these books new voice. Like excavating a pyramid one grain of sand at a time, the Center’s translators are revealing these stories to the English-speaking world, page by page.
It is incredibly slow work (to date, only 2 percent of the estimated 40,000 individual titles have been translated), but the mystery of it is infectious. What sleeping masterpiece is just waiting to be awakened?
“Is there a Moby-Dick on our shelves? It’s too early to know,” Aaron Lansky says. “We’re waiting to see what will emerge.”
Yiddish Book Center, 1021 West St., Amherst, MA. Sunday–Friday 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. 413-256-4900; yiddishbookcenter.org
Justin Shatwell
Justin Shatwell is a longtime contributor to Yankee Magazine whose work explores the unique history, culture, and art that sets New England apart from the rest of the world. His article, The Memory Keeper (March/April 2011 issue), was named a finalist for profile of the year by the City and Regional Magazine Association.