Andrew Silow-Carroll | JTA
Steven Spielberg had already donated money to the Yiddish Book Center when he asked if the center’s founder, Aaron Lansky, might fly out to Los Angeles and drop by his office.
The filmmaker doesn’t usually meet with the beneficiaries of his philanthropy, Lansky told me recently, but wanted to explain his support for what is now the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library at the YBC, an online collection of more than 12,000 Yiddish titles.
“’You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that what I do for a living is I tell stories,’” Lansky recalls Spielberg telling him. “’The idea that you have miles of Jewish stories that have yet to be told, that’s just irresistible to someone like me.’”
Spielberg may not even have been the first supporter of the Yiddish Book Center to find something, well, Spielbergian about an institution Lansky founded in 1980 as a then 24-year-old graduate student of Yiddish.
More than one visitor to the YBC’s campus in Amherst, Massachusetts has compared the shelves and shelves of Yiddish books, rescued from dumpsters and the attics and basements of aging readers, to the colossal government warehouse seen in the closing scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
But Spielberg also seemed to understand what has driven Lansky, who is retiring this month as the center’s president. Lansky began by going door to door, asking elderly Jews and their offspring for the books they might otherwise have thrown away.
The rescue project could easily have remained a warehouse of old books, dusty treasures moldering in the dark, occasionally accessed by scholars and hobbyists.
Instead, the collection of some 1.5 million volumes is only the foundation of an institution that now includes Yiddish classes, academic fellowships, a training program for translators, scholarly conferences, a publisher of books in translation, an oral history archive, a podcast and that digitized library of both classic and obscure Yiddish books.
“This is not just a matter of collecting books,” said Lansky, 69, recalling that he always had a vision beyond warehousing unread books. “It’s really a whole culture, it’s a whole civilization, it’s a whole historical epoch that needs representation, that wants to tell its story.
“And so after cataloging the books, very quickly, we started offering courses. We started teaching Yiddish language, and to make this world accessible. And that’s just continued ever since.”
Lansky’s decision to step down is both voluntary (his successor is Susan Bronson, the center’s executive director for the past 14 years) and gradual (he announced his retirement 16 months ago, and will stay on for two more years in the part-time role of senior advisor).
He’s looking forward to writing, reading and thinking about the role of Yiddish in a Jewish world dominated by a Hebrew-speaking Israel and an English-speaking North America.
For much of the past 1,000 years, Yiddish was spoken by three quarters of the world’s Jews — a Germanic vernacular, seasoned with Hebrew, Slavic and Romance vocabulary, that bridged polyglot Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe and followed them to the far corners of the diaspora.
The Holocaust decimated its native speakers, and assimilation and the rebirth of Hebrew as Israel’s language rendered it useless as an every-day tongue.
While many haredi Orthodox Jews speak Yiddish as a first language, the Yiddish Book Center celebrates and commemorates what Lansky calls “one of the most concentrated outpourings of literary creativity in all of Jewish history,” lasting roughly from the 1860s to the immediate aftermath of World War II.
As newly emancipated Jews encountered modernity, they created a vast Yiddish literature both high-brow and low-brow — books, literary journals, newspapers, plays, songs and films.
It was a literature, according to Lansky’s mentor, the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse, “that, if it suffers from anything, suffers from its youthfulness, from the exaggerated emphasis on innovativeness and on modernity and originality.”
Lansky says Yiddish literature asks the essential question, “What does it mean for Jews to live in a modern world?” That question gnawed at him as a student, first at Hampshire College and later at McGill University, and led him to lead teams of collectors with wheelbarrows and pickup trucks.
An early estimate that they might find some 70,000 distinct volumes proved wildly modest. As the collection grew, Lansky earned a MacArthur fellowship, wrote a memoir about his efforts and, in 1997, opened the center on a 10-acre site on the campus of Hampshire College.
Lansky said people come to the center and the study of Yiddish for any number of reasons — nostalgia, scholarly interest, to discover a new aspect of their Jewish identity.
Some younger Yiddishists have been drawn to the radical politics that Yiddish-speaking Marxists, socialists, Bundists and anarchists brought from a turbulent Europe to the streets of American Jewish ghettos.
“Yiddish was like a Rorschach test in that everybody seemed to find in it what they were looking for,” he said. But whatever their impulse, Yiddish is “significant because it represents the evolution of the Jewish people over a rather critical time. It gives voice to Jewish values, Jewish mores, Jewish perceptions of the broader world.”
The Oct. 7 attacks also took place just a week before the center planned to unveil a reimagining of its core exhibit, “Yiddish: A Global Culture,” with displays on the wide reach of Jewish creativity in the arts, politics and culture. Lansky briefly thought about postponing the celebration, but changed his mind.
“I said, ‘Right now, Jews are feeling so alienated, so isolated, so pilloried in so many ways that we really do need to stand together, and people are going to need their own history and culture more than ever before,’” he recalled. “We were expecting 100, maybe 200 people. But on that day, in the aftermath of what had happened in Israel, 500 people showed up.”
Ultimately, those who came were seeking out exactly what had inspired Spielberg: the power of telling one’s stories.
“People were crying, because they were just so happy to have their own history,” said Lansky.
