London
Times
26 February 2005
A Mitzva or Two
How Yiddish was rescued, already
OUTWITTING HISTORY: How a Young Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved
a Vanishing Civilisation
by Aaron Lansky
Souvenir Press, £18.99; 320pp
ISBN 0 285 63724 X
WORDS ON FIRE: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish
by Dovid Katz
Basic Books, £16.99; 448pp
ISBN 0 465 03728 3
Books are meant to be read. That's what I remind myself whenever I feel stabbed
with regret about the library of my late father, Hugo Gryn. A salaried rabbi,
he often jested that all he would have to leave us, his children, was his cherished
collection of books, some of them in Yiddish. After his death in 1996, I packed
them into cardboard boxes and a guardian angel stored them in his textile warehouse.
But, last summer, when he announced his retirement, no one in the family had
room for several thousand books and journals.
Thankfully, a far-sighted librarian at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish
Studies came to the rescue. Gambling that my father's role in shaping postwar
Anglo-Jewry would make his books and papers of interest to scholars in years
to come, he agreed to catalogue and conserve the archive in exchange for its
indefinite loan.
Alas, other than a basic grasp of Hebrew and some quirky Yiddish exclamations
that add pepper to my speech, I did not inherit my father's mastery of languages.
"Ich vill redden Yiddish mit mein tatteh" - I will speak Yiddish
with my father - was my first and only formal lesson. My love of Yiddish literature,
with its earthy humour and compassion for humanity, was formed on English translations
of celebrated Yiddish writers such as Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Isaac Bashevis
Singer and his brother, I. J. Singer Their writings are the legacy of a lost
civilisation. In 1991 Unesco declared Yiddish an endangered language, yet it
is enjoying a remarkable revival, not just among the burgeoning families of
ultra-Orthodox Jews who speak it at home, but among Jews reclaiming their cultural
heritage, for whom Yiddish is hip.
Born in Massachusetts in 1955, Aaron Lansky got the Yiddish bug when he was
still a long-haired student in faded jeans. By the mid-1970s, when he enrolled
on a graduate programme in East European Jewish studies in Montreal, virtually
the whole of Yiddish literature was out of print. Scouring libraries and bookshops,
Lansky and his fellow students were hard pressed to find copies of books assigned
by their teachers. They realised that children of Jewish immigrants who could
not understand their parents' mama loshen - mother tongue - were throwing
away thousands of irreplaceable Yiddish books.
In 1980 Lansky founded the National Yiddish Book Centre and appealed for unwanted
Yiddish books. Jews all over North America responded; hundreds of books still
arrive every week. Outwitting History is the charming and compelling epic about
how Lansky and a few volunteers saved Yiddish books from extinction.
Lansky recounts his adventures on the road: speeding off in the middle of the
night to schlep truckloads of books from demolition sites and damp basements,
recruiting an international network of zamlers (people who gather scattered
things). Interspersed throughout are the poignant stories of the books' ageing
owners, the last of more than two million native Yiddish speakers who, dreaming
of a better future, migrated from Eastern Europe to America at the turn of the
last century.
***
Words on Fire offers an elegant and more scholarly approach. The book
is rich in detail and beautifully illustrated and Dovid Katz explains the genesis
and development of Yiddish and its place in Jewish history. Yiddish, which means
"Jewish", first emerged about a thousand years ago among the Jews
of the Rhine, a fusion of medieval German with Hebrew and Aramaic, deriving
other words from Latin, French and Italian. Like other Jewish vernaculars such
as Judaeo-Arabic and Ladino, it was written in the Hebrew alphabet. As Jews
emigrated eastward, they carried Yiddish with them, picking up linguistic influences
from their neighbours in Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Slovakia. The language
and its demise under Hitler and Stalin (who, in 1952, ordered all of his country's
leading Yiddish writers to be shot on a single night) contain the bones of the
story of Ashkenazi Jews.
It was used primarily as a spoken language, but in the 19th century, after the
Haskalah, the Jewish version of European Enlightenment, there unfolded a huge
outpouring of Yiddish literature. Beginning in 1864 with publication of Mendele
the Book Peddler's novel Dos Kleyne Mentshele (The Little Man), by the
time of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, nearly 30,000 Yiddish titles had
appeared.
Yiddish was important in the growth of the Jewish Workers' Bund which became,
in the 20th century, a mass socialist movement. Founded in secret in a Vilnius
attic in 1897, the same year as the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland, both
movements sought solutions for the marginalised and persecuted Jews of Eastern
Europe. Zionists supported emigration to a Jewish homeland with Hebrew as a
common language, while the Bundists, preaching humanism and democracy, saw Yiddish
as the national language of East European Jewry.
But for many Jews arriving in America, trapped in the sweatshops and tenement
buildings of New York's Lower East Side, Yiddish was a reminder of the miseries
left behind, an obstacle to integration, while for ultra-Orthodox Jews, modern
Yiddish literature is treyf, forbidden. It could have vanished into a
footnote of history.
Lansky's organisation, now based in Amherst, Massachusetts, has recovered 1.5
million Yiddish books, many recycled to students, scholars and libraries around
the world. His mission to preserve the books for posterity has been fulfilled
by a programme of digitisation.
Outwitting History inspires longing for an era that valued books over
bookshelf space, summed up best by Isaac Bashevis Singer as he accepted his
Nobel prize in 1978: "Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains
treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue
of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and cabalists, rich in humour and in memories
that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and
humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity."