ReferencesOutwitting history: The amazing adventures of a man who rescued a million Yiddish books. Aaron Lansky. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004. ISBN: 1–565–12429–4 316 pages. $24.95.
Imagine an entire culture disappearing in Dumpsters. Imagine libraries of stories, novels, histories, poetry, and plays discarded because their text was unreadable, their paper fragile, their time past. Imagine the records of generations vanishing because almost no one cared. Into this desperate scene appears Aaron Lansky. Over a quarter of a century ago, he decided to save a literature from oblivion, from so much filler in dumps, so much detritus sinking forever.
This book records Lansky’s efforts to save Yiddish literature. The story is well told, albeit by the hero. Like many a hero, he started his efforts for personal reasons — basically to find Yiddish books for his own academic interests as a student and budding scholar. But Lansky discovered not only books and journals he but the remaining members of once thriving communities, scattered throughout Europe and indeed the world. Hence this tale is grand, because it is not only about books, but those books’ authors and readers who saved thousands of volumes in their homes, apartments, and offices for a Lansky to come along. Lansky indeed preserves a vibrant Yiddish literature for future generations; this book provides us with a thoughtful memoir of a passing generation.
The characters that fill these pages remind me of many friends of my father and grandfather, those strong personalities that still stir in my imagination. I still see these individuals in the pages of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Lansky’s Outwitting history introduced me to many a person that I wish I had known and yet I also felt that I knew many of these striking and determined souls from my old neighborhoods.
Issac Bashevis Singer remarked in his acceptance speech for the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature that the Yiddish language is “a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both gentiles and emancipated Jews.” It is this noble language that Lansky saved, and this book records a fantastic tale. If we didn’t know of the existence of the National Yiddish Book Center (see http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org) and its 1.5 million books, of the Center’s efforts to put Yiddish books into libraries and readers around the world, we might dismiss this story as too improbable. But Lansky proved the impossible possible. What are the lessons for other cultures and libraries?
We must recognize that on a global scale there are hundreds of languages at risk, and with their possible extinction diverse literatures and cultures. William Sutherland in a recent study published in Nature noted that 357 languages have less than 50 speakers (Sutherland, 2003; Connors, 2003). Ninety percent of the known 6,809 languages have fewer than 100,000 speakers. There are 46 languages with only a single individual fluent in a given tongue.
Lansky’s efforts require massive duplication to preserve and save the extant literatures of these vanishing languages. With the growing popularity of English, Chinese, Spanish and a handful of other languages, the extinction of many tongues is accelerating. The grassroots campaign described by Lansky certainly will not work for every “at risk” language, but efforts of some sort need to be instigated and implemented by literally armies of dedicated individuals before more of human culture is lost forever.
Outwitting history is remarkable. It will be all the more remarkable if it inspires others to rescue other languages before they are irretrievably lost.
Steve Connor, 2003. “Alarm Raised on World’s Disappearing Languages,” Independent Digital (UK), reprinted at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0515-05.htm, accessed 11 October 2005.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978. “Presentation speech: Nobel Prize in Literature,” at http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1978/singer-lecture.html, accessed 11 October 2005.
William J. Sutherland, 2003. “Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of language and species,” Nature, volume 423, number 6937 (15 May), pp. 276–279.
Edward J. Valauskas is Follett Chair, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Dominican University.
Email: ejv [at] email [dot] dom [dot] edu
© 2004 Edward J. Valauskas