Session Transcript
NB: Yiddish transliterations are phonetic but spelling may not be accurate.
Chair: I’d like to welcome everyone to this session. Shulem aleichem! This is the UK launch of Aaron Lansky’s book, Outwitting History. The book has already been published and launched in the States, as of last October.
Aaron Lansky is the founder and the president of The National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is known as the Büche Centraler in Yiddish. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship. I don’t think Britain has such things.
I am honoured to be chairing this session as for years I have heard of Aaron Lansky’s work as it has grown and evolved. I have ordered books from the Book Center but I don’t go there for fear that there would be too much that I would want to purchase. I have also had the privilege of teaching Yiddish to some of the interns who have worked at the Book Center, many years ago in Oxford.
As well as being happy to at last put a face to a name, I am delighted to honour someone who once had the totally crazy vision of saving the world’s Yiddish books. To have the vision is one thing, but to succeed in actually pulling it off is quite another. The result is that there is a stable home for more one and a half million books in Amherst and that many duplicates make their way back to Eastern Europe from where Yiddish books unnaturally disappeared.
Aaron Lansky’s Outwitting History is a fabulous read. Lansky tells his own story in a very honest and compelling way. It is a modern Jewish adventure story, a quest, filled with an abundance of humorous and moving anecdotes and warm and colourful characters which are encountered along the way. At the same time, the book in an easy way provides the reader with an important historical and cultural context. So, for example, there are passages and sections about the history of the Yiddish language and a brief history of Yiddish literature. The book also uses a lot of Yiddish words in a seamless way so that the reader might even emerge from the reading thinking that he or she can understand some Yiddish.
Outwitting History, to my mind, also raises some very important issues, and this is a very personal response. Some of these are as follows:
· That there has been, in wider Jewish circles, an omission regarding the story of Yiddish. That is, that the study of modern Jewish culture and history has excluded Yiddish culture.
· That Yiddish literature and culture is a great bridge between the Jewish present and the European Jewish past.
· That Yiddish in the late 19th and 20th centuries often represented an alternative Jewish culture and it still has the power in our times to fulfil that role.
Lansky, in Outwitting History, asks several very pertinent questions which he attempts to answer. One is: ‘How did it happen that Jewish people, this book-loving people, parted with a whole literature?’ Another question is: ‘All of those saved books: who is going to read them?’
In the Yiddish world there has been a great tradition of Sammlers, collectors. Lansky has continued in that tradition on an unimaginable scale. It is my very great pleasure to hand over to Aaron Lansky and have him tell you as much about the Sammlung as time will permit.
Aaron Lansky: Well, Shulem aleichem! [Slight audience response.] You didn’t get that. The proper response is Aleichem shulem! You want to try it again? Right, hold on! Shulem aleichem! [Louder audience response: Aleichem shulem!] That’s it! And they told me that people didn’t speak Yiddish in England! I can already see that was wrong.
Well, I have to tell you that after having rescued about one and a half million Yiddish books, it was only fitting that I would finally sit down to write a book of my own. I almost knew from the first day I set out that I would have to do this one day. When I first began, this was back in 1980, I was a young graduate student, 23 years old, studying Yiddish literature up in Montreal, Canada. We had this very simple problem. There were simply no books to read. Pretty much everything that our teacher assigned was out of print and we used to race around to the old Jewish neighbourhoods of Montreal. We would knock on doors and we would say, ‘Zeit mir a moichel’, ‘Excuse me, I need to borrow such-and-such a book for my class’. People would bring us into their house and they’d give you tea in a glass and we’d sit down and talk about the books that they were handing over to us.
But somewhere along the way it had become apparent to me that Yiddish books were being destroyed in alarming numbers. As an older generation passed on, their children couldn’t read the literature. The grandkids didn’t even know what these books were and, more often than not, these books were literally ending up in the trash or, in the best of circumstances, stashed away in a basement or an attic.
So, at the age of 23, I took what I thought was a two year leave of absence from graduate school to rescue these books. It is now 25 years later. We have collected one and a half million books and I’m still on leave from graduate school!
When I began I sent out press releases saying that here are young people looking for old Yiddish books and if you have them, please let me know. Before I knew it, this deluge had begun. Books started pouring in. But along with the books came letters and postcards from older Jews who would write to me and say that they had many books to give me but that they themselves were too old or too infirm and there were simply too many books, and that I was going to have to come and get them myself.
So it was that I set off on my very first trip in the summer of 1980. I had received a postcard from an elderly man telling me that he had a lot of books to give me. I had some indication of how old this man because the postcard was what we call in America ‘a penny postcard’. By that point postage was about 25 cents for a postcard and this still had a penny imprint on it. So I knew that he was quite elderly. He lived in Atlantic City, New Jersey, right on the boardwalk in a high-rise building for the Jewish elderly. He didn’t even have a telephone. He was very poor.
So I sent him a telegram telling him when I would arrive. I got there right on schedule at noontime on this hot day in July, only to find this man waiting for me in the lobby of his building wearing a heavy dark wool suit. I said, ‘Mr Templeman, have you been waiting long?’ He said, ‘Actually, I’ve been waiting since seven o’clock this morning. I didn’t want I should miss you.’
Then I realised why he had that suit on. Because for him this was one of the major days of his life, like a bris or a wedding or a bar mitzvah. This was the moment in his life when he said, ‘I am about to turn over to you my yerusha (my inheritance). This is what I am turning over to you.’
He brought me up to his apartment, which couldn’t have been very much bigger than the stage on which I am now standing. His wife had died a few years before and so he had been forced to move to this building for the Jewish elderly. The apartment had one little bed and there was a metal table with a lot of bottles of medicine and a hotplate. Other than that it was crammed full of books, in both Yiddish and in Hebrew.
Well, I’d thought that all I need to do was to load the books on a trolley and bring them out to the truck and move on to the next stop. He said, ‘Oh no, no. First I have to tell you about these books.’ And he sat me down and he hands me 500 books, one volume at a time. He says, ‘This book, my wife and I we bought it in 1927. We went without lunch for a week we should be able to afford it. And this book, have you read this book?’ I said that no, I hadn’t read that book. He said, ‘Sit down right now and read this book!’ On and on and on. Finally I get all the books off onto the truck. I’m about to drive off. I’m four or five hours behind schedule and he says to me, ‘Ein minute, jungermann.’ What does ‘jungermann’ mean? ‘Young man.’ It became sort of my generic name in the Yiddish world, and he said, ‘One minute, jungermann, you don’t understand.’
When he had received my telegram, he had told all the other people in the building and he said, ‘They also have books for you!’ I look up at this high-rise building, 12 stories all with Jews living there. I said, ‘They all have books?’ He said, ‘That’s right! They all have books. Let’s get to work!’ He takes me to every single apartment. Everyone was waiting for me. They have boxes full of books; shopping bags full of books; suitcases full of books. And what do you think I had to do at every single apartment? You already know, I see. All right. You have to go in and you drink the glass of tea and you take the lokshen kügelach that come out of the oven, and the cakes come out of the boxes. And I went through an entire day of this.
By this point I’m like five hours, six hours behind schedule. I’m about to drive off. I’m very late and I really didn’t know how I was going to make it. That truck at that point was so heavily laden that it literally was scraping on the axle as I drove away. And I for my part was so full of tea and cookies that I had to stop at every gas station between there and Philadelphia.
But I quickly learned the occupational hazards of collecting these books. After that very first solo voyage I made two important innovations. The first was that thereafter I always travelled in a group of three. That is to say myself and two other young people. Two would do the shlepping and one was the designated eater! That’s how we managed to make our way through all of this.
The second thing I did was to buy a little portable tape-recorder. Because I realised that what was taking place here was really a ritual of cultural transmission when Jews were handing over books, not only from one generation to the next but literally from one epoch of Jewish history to the next. So every time I’d go to someone’s house, I’d prop up my little tape-recorder between the sour cream and the chrein, the horseradish, that was piled up on the table there. As they talked and talked and talked over the kitchen table, I would record their stories.
It was from all of that that 23 years later I was finally able to sit down and write the book that you now see as Outwitting History. Now the book is full of a lot of very dramatic adventures and I know that my time is limited here today. But I’ll give you at least one example.
Shortly after I began the organisation I was at home asleep one night, quite late, after midnight. Now back in those days the telephone rates used to go down after eleven o’clock at night. So naturally all the older Jews used to wait until after eleven to call me as it was. But this is after midnight. I’d been on the road for a week. I was completely exhausted and the phone is ringing and ringing quite insistently. Finally, a friend of mine, my housemate, came bounding down from upstairs and he said, ‘Aaron, this call you’ve got to take.’ So I stumbled to the phone. It’s snowing outside. It’s bitterly cold. I’m wrapped up in a blanket. I answer the phone somewhat sheepishly, ‘Hello?’
It’s a friend of mine in New York City who said he’d been walking on the street and had come across a garbage dumpster. (That’s not the word you use. What do you call it? A great big bin of trash.) ‘Well I came across a great big skip, full of books,’ she said to me. ‘All of them seem to be in Yiddish.’ They were literally piled so high that they were overflowing the top of the skip. ‘You have to get down here right away.’
At that time I was too poor to own an automobile and we were three and a half hours from New York City. We don’t have very good train services in the United States and, as it turned out, we had exactly one train a day from where I lived down to New York City. But it was beshert: it just so happened that it went at two o’clock in the morning. So I made my way down to the train station, hopped on the train and got to New York. The conductor woke me up. I ran out onto the street just to see that it’s sleeting and freezing and raining and things you should never know about here! I made my way down to 16th Street where this dumpster supposedly lay. Sure enough, there is this huge skip on the street, but I mean really gigantic, longer than this stage here, literally full of books. So much so that they were overflowing over the top of the dumpster and many of them already lay splayed out on the road and pavement and cars were running over them. And of course it’s freezing rain at this point.
I quickly called a few friends. Within a half-hour six young people were there. We pooled our money. We got a large rental lorry and we backed it up to this dumpster. The whole rest of that day we spent hauling books in the pouring, freezing rain. Within very short order we were not only soaked to the skin but the covers of the books started to run. So pretty soon we were mottled red and pink and blue and orange as we were working in the rain and saving these books.
I bet you want to know where they all came from, right? So it turned out that there was an old Labour Zionist organisation which had gone bankrupt some years before. When they went out of business they had taken their entire library, about 8,000 volumes, and stored them away in a basement storeroom for safe keeping. What happened was that the building was now being renovated. Workmen had come upon this cache of books and for three days had been hauling them out to the street until they finally overflowed the top of this skip.
That day we managed to save about 6,000 volumes. About 2,000 of the volumes were so thoroughly sodden that they were really beyond reclamation and we left them behind floating in this fetid pool at the bottom of the dumpster.
But there is a happy ending to the story because we got the books back up to our headquarters in Massachusetts and managed to dry out the rest of them. Many of those books ended up in major libraries, including the library at Oxford University. So this was a long way from New York City indeed.
I tell you this story, and it is really one of so many of these, but only because it is such a powerful metaphor for what it means literally to reclaim a culture from that dustbin of history. There are so many more stories like this that I could tell you. For example, the time when we literally stole the entire Yiddish collection of the Newark, New Jersey Public Library because we’d heard it was about to be destroyed. I don’t have time to tell you all that because I do want to tell you about what was in some ways more typical of what happened. That was that every time we ran into a dumpster or a demolished building in the Bronx, we spent many, many more times going to the homes of older Jews who handed us books with their own hands.
For example, there was a couple who lived out in Seagate which is a walled-off community at the very edge of Coney Island. Once it was home to a great many Yiddish writers and intellectuals. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Asch, Moshe Nadir and Itsik Manger all lived out in this colony. By the time I came along all those writers were gone. But there was a couple who lived there named Sam and Leah Ostroff. They had come from Lithuania before the Second World War.
We went to meet them. I don’t [think] either of them was much over five feet tall, but boy did they have energy! They became our most energetic Sammlers ever, collecting more books than anyone would ever imagine possible. They put up notices all over Brooklyn and Seagate and Coney Island and Brighton Beach that said: Az mehot yiddisher Büche (If you have Yiddish books), call the Ostroffs and they’ll get them.
Every two weeks we would come down to New York. The Ostroffs would hop in our truck. Well, actually, I got that wrong. They used to feed us a 15-course breakfast. Then they would hop in our truck and we would drive all around picking up these books from house to house. One time, for example, Mr Ostroff called me and said that it was an emergency and that I had to come right away with the biggest lorry I could find. I rented the biggest truck available, came down to the city and, sure enough, again there was an old Zionist organisation. This time it had fallen on hard times financially and had been forced to sublet its space to an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva.
Now here we come to one of the great ironies of contemporary Jewish life because ultra-Orthodox Jews continue to use Yiddish as their spoken language, yet are quite hostile to Yiddish literature because Yiddish literature merges in the late 19th century as the way in which Jews tried to figure out what it means to live as Jews in a modern world. Now this wasn’t very high on the Chassidic agenda. So, as a result, they moved in and they took an 18,000 volume library and literally threw the books down the cellar stairs so the kids shouldn’t be exposed to what they saw as apikorsis, or heresy.
Fortunately there was a young Soviet immigrant working as the janitor in the building. He found the books. He called Ostroff. Ostroff called me. We went down there with a few young people. We spent an entire day hauling the books out. Finally we loaded them onto the lorry and when you have a truck that is designed for four or five tons, and you put ten tons of books on it, what do you think happens? A mechanic I’m not, but the thing starts shuddering and one mile away from there smoke starts trailing out of the clutch. Before I knew it, the truck had broken down whereupon we did the only conscionable thing we could do.
We went to the same rent-a-truck company, rented a second lorry, backed it up to the first, offloaded half the books and drove that lorry away. Then we called up the rent-a-truck company and said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. We’re minding our own business with a perfectly normal load when your lousy truck broke down on us!’ They came. They fixed it. Now, again, we’re hours and hours and hours behind schedule.
At which point Sam said, ‘Good. Now you’ll come to our house for dinner!’ I said, ‘Sam, hob rachmones,’ I said. ‘Have pity on us. We cannot come back to you. We’ve had two big meals already. We’re hours behind schedule. We can not come for dinner.’
‘You must come for dinner!’
Finally, it was his wife Leah who broke the impasse. She said, ‘Sam, don’t make a big deal.’ To us kids she said, ‘It’s all right. If you can’t come for dinner, I’ll pek you a snek.’ If you don’t know Yiddish, that means she’ll pack us a snack. This was the snack she packed for us. First I have to tell you that this was to get us from Seagate to the Lower East side of Manhattan, which is a drive of about a half-hour. The snack consisted of – I’ll see if I can find my note because I don’t think I’ll ever get this quite right otherwise. It had to be one of the notable snacks of human history. She said she was going to pack us a snack. It’s a 40-minute drive from Seagate to the Lower East side. I said that with her snack we could have made it all the way to California!
Among the highlights that I remember were: challah and cream cheese; gefillte fish and chrein (horseradish); egg salad sandwiches; three cans of sardines; marble cake and halvah. There were also two tea bags and a plastic spoon What we were supposed to do with those in a moving truck I’m not quite sure.
As it turned out, we had to offload that entire truckload of books in a warehouse that we had in the City. It was finally midnight when we got to my friend’s house on the Lower East side where we were staying. We went upstairs and opened up a few bottles of beer. Utterly exhausted we crashed at the kitchen table. Suddenly, after midnight the telephone rings. My friend comes in from the other room and says, ‘Aaron, I think this call must be for you, ‘cos the guy is not speaking English.’
I pick up the phone and I hear this booming voice. It says, ‘Lansky? Ostroff!’ I said, ‘Chaver Ostroff, how are you? What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Lansky, ever since you left the house we’ve been worrying.’
‘What are you worried about?’
He said that after we had left they had realised, ‘as mir hobben vergessen ayn zu packen dos lokshen kugel’. They realised that they had forgotten to pack the lokshen kugel and they were afraid we were going to be hungry!
You want to hear one more story about Mr Ostroff? All right. I don’t know how I’m doing on the time here, but you’ll tell me if I’m really falling behind horribly. I’ll just tell you one other story.
The New York Times once decided to run a story. There was going to be ‘A Life in the Day of the Yiddish Book Collectors’. So whom do they send to write such a story? A young reporter named Doug McGill. Now, as you may gather, Doug McGill is not a Jewish name and nor was Doug Jewish. He was 29 years old and had just come from Minnesota to New York City. I said to him, ‘Doug, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we meet at the Ostroffs’ house at seven for a quick breakfast? We’ll go on from there.’
What I was thinking, this moment of utter delusion that I thought that this was going to be a quick breakfast! Not only did we have the usual 15-course breakfast but, in honour of the reporter from The New York Times we now have a 30-course breakfast. There was everything. They thought that this was like an ethnographic opportunity to teach The New York Times about Jewish food. So they said, ‘Now, Doug, this is a good Jewish food. It’s called ‘lox’, l-o-x. Lox. This is our baigel.’ This went on and on and on and on.
I have to tell you one other thing. What does the name ‘Doug’ mean in Hebrew? Fish, right? Dag = fish. So, when we first got there, I said, ‘Mr and Mrs Ostroff, this is Doug McGill.’ And Mrs Ostroff says to me in Yiddish, ‘Tell me, why do they call him a fish?’ And I said, ‘No, no, no. You don’t understand. That’s an English name. Doug. It’s an English name.’
‘Oh, no, no, no. You can’t fool me. It means fish!’
So at the end of this whole 30-course meal, Doug was a very good sport. He managed to eat just about everything. He leaves maybe this much matza brei left behind on his plate, at which point Mrs Ostroff comes in and she looks at this tiny bit of leftover food. She looks at Doug and then she says to me in Yiddish, ‘It’s not wonder they call him Doug. He eats like a fish!’
We were supposed to go to ten different people that day. Unbeknownst to us, the Ostroffs had called up everyone to tell them that a New York Times reporter was coming. So what do you think happens? Every single house we go to, of course, everybody had cooked another meal for us. Poor Doug doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. Everybody has got this huge spread laid out for us.
I’ll give you one example. At the next apartment, Doug took out his notebook. ‘Do you mind if I ask a few questions?’ he politely enquired. ‘You vant to ask me questions?’ the hostess replied. ‘First I have to ask you a question. Do you want your cake mit ice cream or mit whipped cream from the can?’ ‘Neither, please,’ said Doug. ‘you see we just ate.’ ‘Nonsense,’ the woman interrupted, ‘a big boy like you? You need to eat. Now sitzach. Sit!’ Doug remained standing. The woman, who barely came up to his waist, grabbed his belt and pulled him down hard onto a dining-room chair. ‘Such a big boy, kein ayin hora! For you I’ll give both the ice cream and the whipped cream!’
I’ll just read one more section.
At the end of the day Doug said to me ‘You know, I’m a young reporter. I usually get the worst assignments. They send me to New Jersey because someone is dumping toxic waste and when I get there no-one wants to talk to me. Today,’ he said, ‘today every person I interviewed fed me first and kissed me after. I’ll never [have] an experience like that again!’
Now the amazing thing about all that of course is not just that everybody fed us, you know, after all these visits. I mean, other people feed people too. Italians do it. There are other ethnic groups who (I don’t know how to say this politely), who enjoy food. But what was really amazing about that day was that, counting the Ostroffs, we went to 11different homes and not one single person stopped for one second to question why it was that there was a reporter from the New York Times, the national newspaper of the United States, present to record the day when they gave away their Yiddish books.
Every one of those people thought that this was the most important thing in the world: that this truly was national news and of course the New York Times should have a reporter there on the day when they passed over their yerusha [inheritance].
At the time I thought that that was kind of funny. But when I went to write the book 20 years later, I realised how truly poignant it was. Because the truth is that they were right. It was an amazing literature and it is an extraordinary culture. And it really was national news when they turned it over to us. The books we found over the years are things that you can’t even imagine. You have to understand what 1.5 million books look like. We have two warehouses with two floors the length of football fields piled almost to the rafters with these books. And we have a beautiful new building in Amherst, Massachusetts also full of Yiddish books. And the treasures we find are extraordinary.
Pretty much every genre of modern literature that you can imagine can be found in Yiddish: treasures of all descriptions. We even find world literature translated into Yiddish, because of course Yiddish was the language in which Jews of Eastern Europe discovered the world. We find works of Knut Hamsun and Jack London and Charles Dickens, all translated into Yiddish.
Anybody want to guess who the most popular of all world writers is in Yiddish translation? [Inaudible shout from audience.] That’s great. An American audience would never have guessed that: Shakespeare. So now that you got that I’ll give you a harder question. So of all Shakespeare’s works, which do you think was the most popular in Yiddish? [Audience shouts: The Merchant of Venice.] No, I don’t think Jews would have enjoyed that much. King Lear, that’s the answer! And why King Lear? Think about it for a second. It’s the ultimate Jewish theme: tzores mit Kinder! Trouble with the kids! Right?
We even have one volume of Shakespeare that we found and on the title page it says, Űbergesetzt und verbessert which means ‘Translated and improved’ by so-and-so!
Now we don’t find only books. One time I got a call from a rabbi in New Jersey who said that there was a Chassidic Jew in Borough Park, the Chassidic section of New York, who, he said, had a garage behind his house, a two-car garage, which was piled to the rafters with what he described as Yiddish and Hebrew ‘sheet music’. Well, I have to say, I didn’t quite believe it at that time. Because at that time we had collected maybe a half-million books and had found fewer than (oh, I don’t know) maybe 50 or 60 folios of sheet music. Not because they weren’t used. Jews used to go to the Yiddish theatre on Second Avenue. There weren’t CDs in those days and you would come home instead with the sheet music so that you could play it at home. But very little of it survived because it was so well used.
But, sure enough, we went down to Borough Park. What happened was that a music publishing house called Metro Music had gone out of business years before and had left behind 80,000 folios of music, some of it dating back to the 1890s, all of it in mint condition. It was publishers’ remainders, all new music. Sure enough, this Chassidic Jew, because there was cantorial music mixed in, he had stashed it all in this garage behind his house and there it had lain, all those years, until we finally showed up.
Now there was only one problem. The day we arrived, this hot summer day, myself and two student interns, it turned out that it was the 17th day of the Jewish month of Tammuz, which is a fast day. But we didn’t know that. We got there and there wasn’t anything to drink or eat in all of Borough Park that day and it was really hot. By one, two o’clock in the afternoon we were getting so woozy with nothing to drink, we were so utterly dehydrated that they finally had to bring over a rabbi who had to pasken and he had to declare that this pikuach nefesh, that to save a human life they could give us a glass of water.
We got all the music back to Massachusetts and sorted it all out. Of 80,000 sheets of music we found that we had about 800 discrete titles. And of 800 discrete titles we found that 40 of them began with exactly the same Yiddish word. Anyone want to guess that very ubiquitous Yiddish word? Nu is good. Oi is really good, so I’ll give you a hint. It’s the member of the family who would have most reason to say Oi. Mama, of course! A whole immigrant motif of Mamas. Schreyen ein Mama, Weint der – A Mother Cries, a mother worries about her kids. This whole immigrant motif. Forty Mama titles: and many Tatte titles? How many father titles do you think we found? Exactly one, in fact. It was a sheet of music entitled A Tatte is nicht kein Mama.
There’s so much more I could tell you but time does tick on here. But I will tell you that there is a whole section of my book in which I chronicle my experiences with older, highly-politicised Yiddish organisations, which was a famously contentious world. So much so that that section of the book is entitled ‘Him I don’t talk to!’ Because that was sort of a mantra of this world altogether. The Socialist didn’t talk to the Anarchist and the Anarchist didn’t talk to the Communist and the Communist didn’t talk to the Zionist and sometimes they used to wonder that anybody spoke Yiddish at all because nobody would talk to anybody else.
The truth is that when all was said and done, the real rifts were not ultimately ideological. They were demographic. Because a generation really was passing on before our very eyes. I remember that I once went to a woman’s home and she told me that for years she had run a Yiddish reading circle. She said, ‘You know, every time one of our members died we used to plant a tree in Israel. Now,’ and suddenly the tears started streaming down her cheeks, ‘now we have a whole forest in Israel and no members left here.’
And I heard the same sentiment expressed a little more forcefully once by a gentleman who came to one of our organising meetings in New York. It was a cold day in February and this man came in wearing a linen suit and he had a pearl-handled walking-stick although he had just come straight off Miami Beach. He came into that room and he had all sorts of suggestions. After the meeting he came up to me and sort of whomped me on the chest with his walking-stick and he said, ‘Jungermann, do you want to know what the trouble is?’ I said, ‘I have no idea. What’s the trouble?’ And he said, ‘The trouble is that people are dying today who never died before!’
He had a point there. A generation really was passing on. I’ll give you like one really quick example to show you how much so. There was once an old building that housed a lot of Yiddish organisations in New York. The building was being closed down and the organisations forced to relocate to much less glorious space. We were called in at the very last minute to save thousands and thousands of books. People had already moved out of the building. The movers were there, carrying the last of the heavy furniture out. We went in from the basement all the way to the top floor, carrying out these thousands and thousands of books that had been left strewn about and carrying them out to our lorry on the street.
As we did so, I was the first one to get up to the top floor, to the garret floor of the building. It was just starting to get dark. I walk up there, this supposedly empty building, and I see an old man, a very old man in fact, sitting at a roll-topped desk. I thought, My God! It’s like a scene right out of Bashevis Singer. I look at him and he looks at me. Finally he said to me in Yiddish, ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ I explained who I was and I said to him, ‘And who are you?’
He says, ‘Ich, ich heiss Yud Shin Hertz.’ J. S. Hertz was the author of the definitive 4-volume history The Jewish Labour Bund in Russia and Poland. It was obligatory reading in graduate school. I thought this man had died 40 years before. Here he is sitting, he is 93 years old, sitting at this desk. Finally I said, ‘Excuse me but, you know, they are moving everyone out of the building. What are you doing here?’ And he says, ‘I’m not moving!’ And he is sitting there reading his newspaper and he is refusing to move. I said, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘They’ve pushed Yiddish around long enough. Somebody has to take a stand. I’m taking a stand. I’m not moving. They are going to have to carry me out.’
Well, I left him there in that darkening room, not having the heart to try to persuade him myself to leave. I figured out it would be a job for the movers, perhaps. But as I left him there, I realised as I started heading down the stairs that his cause was already lost. As noble as he was, he was really like Don Quixote sitting up there in that attic, but as noble as he was I realised that his cause was left. How did I know that? Because as he sat there digging in his heels and taking that last stand, the newspaper he was reading was not the Yiddish Forverts [Forwards]. It was the English language New York Times.
The truth is that a generation really had passed on before my eyes and was passing on. That change really was inexorable, no matter what else one wanted to do about [it].
I’ll just read to you one very last quick passage.
I said that these encounters for me with an older generation were incredibly poignant. But even after hundreds of hours together, as I think we both knew, that on some level we would remain strangers to one another. Born in the shtetl, versed in Talmud, steeped in Marxism, tested on the streets and sometimes in prison, well-read in Hebrew, Yiddish and the major languages of Europe, they possessed a depth of Jewish learning experience and erudition that I could barely apprehend, let alone aspire to. And I, for them, was also a cipher.
No matter how respectful I was, no matter how intensely I listened, it was never enough. They always wanted me to stay longer, return sooner, understand better or appreciate them more. And why shouldn’t they? They’d been famous long ago. They’d lived front and center on the stage of history. They wrote books. They read. They learned. They talked. They organised. And now, in their old age, all they lacked was a yarshan, somebody to whom they could bequeath not only their libraries but the sum total of their lives. God only knows they deserved it and God only knows that I tried. But, in the end, what history had stolen from them, no-one, not I, not anyone, could restore.
But I promise that I’m not going to end on that note. So, hold on because there is a little tiny bit more to come and what is to come is really very critically important. Because really the story doesn’t end there.
That transfer of generations has now taken place. When we started collecting books 25 years ago, 95 per cent of the books that we collected were given to us by older Jews. Today, I don’t think that happens twice a year, even though we still collect 500 books every single week.
The truth is that that generation really has passed on but it doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the line. Not long ago I met with a group of college students. Every year we have a hundred college students apply for every position that we have as an intern, to study Yiddish, learn Yiddish from scratch and open up boxes of books, like an archaeological dig. I was sitting with this group of students outside of our very beautiful building in Massachusetts, underneath an apple tree.
I said, ‘So how come you’re here? Why do you want to spend your whole summer learning Yiddish and dealing with these dusty books?’ And there was one young woman sitting there, and I’ll never forget the scene because she had a diamond stud in her belly button that was glinting in the sunlight as she spoke, and she looked at me and she said, ‘Aaron, don’t you understand? Nowadays, Yiddish is hip!’ Right. Yiddish is with it, it’s current! And I thought about it for a second and I realised that well of course it is hip! After all, it does represent the last thousand years of our history. If you want to know who you are, you have to understand your own past. You know, the people with no past has no future. It’s the key to self-understanding.
More than that, it’s sort of the other side of Jewish life. Jewish life was always a dialectical tradition. As we say in havdolah, right? It was part Shabbes and it was part chol, it was partly the everyday side of life. We’ve sort of kept the religious side but we forgot about the everyday side. We forgot the totality of Jewish experience. Yiddish is a key to that and it’s funny and it’s political and it’s passionate and it’s literary and it’s intellectual and there are loads and loads and loads of reasons to think it hip indeed.
We have seen amazing changes as a result of all of this. I began the organisation 25 years ago when not one major Jewish organisation in America would support this effort. I went out on my own and the organisation I founded, The National Yiddish Book Center now has more members than almost every single one of the organisations that turned us away 25 years ago. We’ve now digitised Yiddish literature, with help from Steven Spielberg. We are systematically translating Yiddish literature. One half of one per cent is available in English right now. But we are working with scholars around the world, including Joseph Sherman at Oxford, to systematically translate the best of this literature and bring it back into print.
But I’ll [end] with just one last story, not a story from me but from Isaac Bashevis Singer. He has a novel called Enemies: A Love Story. I don’t know if anyone here has ever read this, but in the book there is a wonderful scene. There is a man who owns a Yiddish bookstore. At night-time, he starts closing up his store and a friend of his is with him. He puts on one lock and he locks a second lock. Then he takes a chain and a heavy padlock and the locks the doors shut. The friend is looking at him like he’s nuts and the friend says, ‘What are you doing? Do you really believe somebody is going to break in in the middle of the night to steal Yiddish books?’ And the bookseller said, ‘Oh, no! Ganz verkerd! Quite the contrary! I’m afraid that somebody might break in in the middle of the night and leave me more Yiddish books!’
I tell you this only because the simple truth is that collecting 1.5 million Yiddish books, as dramatic an adventure as it was, and as good a story as it made for a book, the truth of the matter is that that was the easy part. Collecting the books, you know, that was a job for the young and we did it and it’s done, more or less, and the job has been a very exciting adventure.
But the real adventure now lies ahead because now the question is: How do we open up these books and share, not just the literary content, but share this extraordinary civilisation that lies within with a wider public? With Jews around the world, most of whom don’t know Yiddish any longer, and with the rest of the world as well? How do we bring our stake into that cultural admixture? Because there is a huge amount of work yet to be done. So I tell you today that I hope that I can come back to England five years from now with a new book in hand.
I should just tell you that my wife and children are here today. I am just going to introduce them. My wife, Gail, and our children, Sasha and Chava. Could you just stand up for one second? I don’t mean to embarrass you but just stand up for one second! … I made the introduction now instead of later only because when I told Gail, after I’d finished writing this book which was a bit of a challenge for my entire family for two years, when I finally finished writing I said to Gail, ‘You know, I think now I’ll write a second book.’ Gail gave me a look and she said, ‘Yeah, maybe with a second wife!’ because it was a bit of a challenge.
But the simple truth is that there is a second book to be written. If this book is the chronicle of an older generation, as spunky as they were, the next book has to be the chronicle of a younger generation and how young people have come to discover this literature, to discover this culture, to discover this language. And what they are going to do with it is to transform and re-energise Jewish life for us all.
I have absolutely no illusions in all of this. There is still a very long way to go. But I promise you that, with the help of you and Jews around the world, we really can outwit history. Thank you all very, very much.
Chair: Well I think that’s going to give you a real flavour of what Aaron’s book is like. It is very much like what you heard, with masses of anecdotes and a lot of very serious reflection as well. I can only highly recommend it.
Just to make a few concluding remarks: I want to in a way carry on with the theme that Aaron ended with just to say that I, personally, also would like to see Yiddish culture included and not excluded in the pursuit of the understanding of Jewish culture and tradition. For it not to be simply dismissed nostalgically with cutesy words like shlep and meshugge and chutzpah and pupik and toches and so on, and for there to be a collective will and impetus to really study this language and culture before it becomes too late to have excellent new translators for the future. My wish is that there should be new generations of Yiddish readers pouring over the books that Aaron Lansky and his many helpers have saved.
Now we are ready to take questions. Instead of me fielding the questions, Aaron has done this a million times before. So I am going to leave it completely up to him to take questions from all of you. I have been asked to request of you all that should you wish to pose a question, please make sure that it is a question and not a speech! OK?
Lansky: She knows whereof she speaks!
Questioner 1: [Inaudible]
Lansky: The question is that I should explain to you how it was that we got books back into the old country. Before I tell you that story, I’ll tell you another story!
I have done a certain amount of lecturing over the years because that is how we were able to sign up members. I once gave a lecture and there was a woman in the front row who was extremely enthusiastic, kind of hanging on every word. I’m speaking and I’m seeing her the whole time. Sure enough, two weeks later I went to give a lecture in a city about 50 miles away. It was more or less the same lecture. I get there and the same woman is sitting in the front row. I thought, Gewald! What am I going to do? I quickly sat down and completely rearranged the lecture so as to tell a completely different set of anecdotes and different stories.
I got up. I delivered the brand new lecture. I finally finished. I open it up for questions and this woman is the first one to raise her hand. I said, ‘Yes?’ She says, ‘So tell me, how come you didn’t tell the story about such-and-such?’
But I’m happy to tell this story. But I’ve got to do this on regel echad, on one foot, because it’s a really long story.
About, I guess, about fifteen years ago, just when Glasnost had taken hold and things were opening up in the Soviet Union. It wasn’t at all clear how long this was going to last but, for the first time it had become legal to read Yiddish books again. You know, people were literally imprisoned even for owning Yiddish and Hebrew books. I am sure you know that most of the major Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union were murdered on a single night, August 12th 1952, when Stalin ordered their execution.
This wasn’t a cheery history by any means. But people were writing and they wanted books. We tried to ship them to them. Nothing got through. We checked it with the US State Department. They said that either there were over-zealous censors at the border who hadn’t quite gotten the word that these books were legal or, more likely, it was geneivah, thievery. Every time a box came from the United States, they thought there was a Macintosh computer inside and so they opened it up and threw away whatever else was there.
We finally decided to go ourselves. Kenneth Turan, a well-known film reviewer in the United States, and I headed off for the Soviet Union. We went the first time in the middle of the winter in 1989 to establish need. We found that Yiddish was now spoken really only in the Baltics, Moldavia, areas that had come under Soviet rule during the war but not before. So Yiddish had still lain dormant, at least in those areas.
So the next summer we came back with a truckload of books with the help of Jews in Sweden. We got a kind of Campervan, outfitted with heavy springs, and we brought that across. Then we had Yiddish books which we labelled as Estonian books which were legal to ship in. We shipped them in as far as Tallinn. We took a ferry from Stockholm to Tallinn and met up with the books. We got to the border. You know, although we were picking up the books there, we got to the border and in the back of the truck we had two boxes of books with us. It was Dubnov’s History of the Jewish People, published in Riga in 1938 that we had just reprinted.
So we have these two boxes of books and we get to the border and it’s really scary there. There were guards with machine guns and they started swarming all over our little van and they find these two boxes of books. The officer says to us in English, ‘What is in box?’ I figures I might as well be forthright so I said, ‘Those are Jewish books.’ And he says, ‘Are they religious books?’ And I wasn’t sure what the right answer was but I thought that maybe they are trying to show their newfound religious appreciation. Even though they were completely secular books, I said, ‘Yes, yes. They are religious books.’ He said, ‘OK’ and he said something in Russian to the soldiers and all the soldiers go on to the next vehicle.
Suddenly the office turns back round to us and he looks at me and he says, with a big smile, he says, ‘So tell me, are they in Yiddish or Ivrit?’ And I suddenly knew: they say Azoi koch Mann Lokshen. Suddenly I understood; we must have had the only Jewish border guard in the entire Soviet Union!
The whole trip was exactly like that. There were a million misadventures and somehow everything went right. Every step along the way we managed to work things out. We brought books into the Soviet Union, delivering them to brand new Jewish schools in Tallinn, in Riga and finally in Vilna. This was the most difficult of all because at that point Lithuania had just declared its independence. The borders had been sealed; we couldn’t get a visa into Lithuania. We finally managed to find a sympathetic Latvian woman, not Russian but Latvian, who gave us a transit visa through Lithuania. We got in there with the help of some bodyguards, the shtarkes they sent out. They came with us. We got there. We offloaded all the books and I managed to get gasoline from the head of the Lithuanian mafia (who it turned out also spoke Yiddish, forgive me!) and he gave us free petrol and we were able to go on our way back out of there as well and here we are today to tell the tale! So that was pretty good for ‘one foot’. OK?
The next question, please.
Questioner 2: [Inaudible]
Lansky: Oh, that’s a great question! Two separate questions. First, Oxford. That’s easier. Oxford has been teaching Yiddish for some time now in various ways and has really one of the world’s greatest collections of Yiddish literature including the oldest extant Yiddish manuscript fragment. We have shipped a great many books to the Oxford library over the years.
As far as my friend Doug McGill: yes, he went back to the Ostroffs. In fact, when he got there Mr Ostroff said to him, ‘I want you should come back with your wife and I will feed both of you!’ They went back and until the day Sam died, Doug and his wife used to make periodic trips back to the Ostroffs’ home.
Questioner 3: [Inaudible]
Lansky: We have a tremendous number of duplicate volumes: many, many copies of the same title. We have used those to augment collections at major university and research libraries around the world. So we place books into collections (they pay for them a nominal fee) in order to spread them around the world. At this point we have now sent Yiddish books to libraries in, I think, 26 different countries around the world. So there is a resonance indeed. How many to Oxford? I don’t know the exact answer to that question.
Another question, please?
Questioner 4: I would like to ask you the following question. Since I live in Israel I speak Hebrew and am aware of how much Hebrew is in Yiddish. In fact, of all the para-Hebraic languages, according to an exhibition at the Diaspora Museum, there were 71 from Aramaic onwards including a language of Arabic-Hebrew spoken in the island of Bahrain so that the Arabs wouldn’t understand what they were saying. I would like you to consider whether a scholastic study could be made, a random survey of Yiddish literature articles to see how much Hebrew is hidden in it since it is my belief that all the para-Hebraic languages, from Aramaic onwards, all 72 of them, helped preserve Hebrew as a spoken language amongst a small minority. I think, and I wonder if you agree with me, that it’s worth a study, maybe a PhD?
Lansky: That’s a profound question. First of all, everything is worth a PhD! But the answer is that yes, there is no question. Actually we do know the percentage of Hebraic and Aramaic or Semitic words in the Yiddish language. Between 15 – 20 per cent of the lexicon comes from Hebrew and Aramaic. So that much we do know. The only trouble is (and I’m not a linguist of course) that when linguists start adding up the percentages of different languages that make up Yiddish: so many of the words are of Germanic origin; so many are Romance and so many are Slavic – it always comes up to more than 100 per cent! That’s the only slight problem in all of this. But there is a large percentage of words [from Hebrew].
In fact, during the war Jews developed a way of speaking Yiddish. Since, of course, the Germans could understand part of Yiddish, they found a way to speak Yiddish where they would emphasise what they used to call the loshen kodesh schticker, the Hebrew/holy tongue words within Yiddish. They would say: Zyhroya: de orols neben kol dibbur which is a perfectly good Yiddish sentence and yet there is not a single word of Germanic origin. It means: ‘Be careful: the uncircumcised one is a master of all languages.’
So Jews developed their own way of speaking in that way and one can emphasise or de-emphasise these Hebrew elements as one chooses. But certainly most of the key concepts within the language are of Hebrew origin and that is a very important point to make. So there is no question that it kept Hebrew alive in a very real way of course.
[Inaudible interjection.] Two PhDs? And I’ll give you three because Ber Borochov, one of the leading theorists of modern Zionism, was also a professional Yiddish linguist. So that gives you three PhDs now.
Questioner 5: I wondered how you got finance for the warehouses that house the books?
Lansky: Oh goodness! The question is: So where did the money come from?! The answer is that that has been a challenge from the very, very beginning. It says in the Talmud: Im ayn kemach, ayn Torah. ‘Where there is no bread there is no learning.’ We have struggled with that really right from the beginning. Because the Jewish establishment was so, at the very least, dismissive of, or at the worst hostile towards Yiddish, we really had to go direct. So I spent years and years out on the road lecturing to groups, signing up members here and there and we now have a worldwide membership of about 32,000 people that supplies a large part of our funding.
We have managed to build a $7 million US building and we are now in the process of building a $25 million endowment so that Yiddish will be secure for all time to come. So it is still a huge struggle ahead of us and we work very, very hard. It takes up a lot of our time. If anybody here is in a position to help us, talk to me, contact us on our website. I am not making a joke on this. It is very real and it really is an international thing. It is literally the history that belongs to all of us. We therefore all have a stake in its preservation.
Lansky: The last question then. Here we go.
Questioner 6: What is the attitude in Israel towards Yiddish?
Lansky: That’s a wonderful question. The question is: What is the attitude in Israel towards Yiddish? Well, first I have to say that although Ber Borochov and others were certainly Yiddish-speaking Jews, those who founded Yiddish, Zionist ideology was nonetheless predicated upon what they called ‘negation of the Galut’. That the Diaspora culture that had prevailed for the last 1000 or 1500 years was seen as an aberration of sorts. It was a time in which Jews were powerless. Therefore, as Tchernichovski said, we are going to unfetter ourselves and release the desert God and we are going to redefine ourselves as a people. And Israel is very much successful in that and in many positive ways.
But, culturally, there was a terrible price to pay and that was not that Yiddish should have been adopted as the spoken language of the new state. That would have been a horrible mistake because, of course, as we learned afterwards, nobody could have predicted that half the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Europe would be murdered. Nor could anyone have predicted the expulsion of Jews from the Arab countries and the ingathering of 650,000 Jews from Arab countries. And it would have been chauvinism of the worst sort to impose Yiddish.
So Hebrew really did become a lingua franca in that sense and it was brilliant to turn to Hebrew. The problem was that in the process Yiddish was really suppressed, really at the point of violence at various points in Israeli history. Of course times change and Israelis too are now beginning to reconsider all of this. They also want to know who they are. There is no such thing as building a national identity without knowledge of our own antecedents, without knowing where we have come from. Those of Israel are as aware of this as we are. For that reason, Yiddish is now part of every major Israeli university and is now part of a great many Israeli high schools. So I don’t want to overstate the case. But the fact is that with all these things, it is also a dialectic. The pendulum swings one way and then it swings back the other. But it is a natural human endeavour to want to reclaim one’s own history; to want to know who we are, and that is happening in Israel today just as it is happening in the rest of the world, just as it is happening for all of us.
With your continued help I am sure we can make it happen for many, many years to come. Thank you all.
End
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