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Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of A Man Who Rescued A Million Yiddish Books
Books: Travel: Auckland: Item 4
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Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of A Man Who Rescued A Million Yiddish Booksby Aaron Lansky
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful: What's Not To Like?, May 31, 2005 Reviewer:H. Cota "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - Outwitting History works well on several different levels. Judging from some of the other reviews here, if you've ever studied or spoken Yiddish, or know people who do, you'll find this story interesting. But if, like me, you don't know any Yiddish other than schmaltz and oy ve, and you aren't even Jewish, you can still enjoy Lansky's tale of saving hundreds of thousands of books and helping to preserve the history of what may be a dying language. As a college student, Lansky started salvaging Yiddish books that were being discarded. As word got around that someone was willing to shlep old books away, he became inundated with people cleaning out their libraries and libraries who couldn't use the books any longer. Lansky nudged a couple of friends to help him and it turned into a full time job, taking his unreliable pickup truck all over the East Coast and beyond to pick up cartons of books at all hours. Often when Lansky and his helpers arrived, there was a smorgasbord of food waiting for them and the person giving away the books usually had some tales to tell about how they acquired the books, or about what it was like to be Jewish immigrants in New York sixty or seventy years ago. In exchange for the books, Lansky and his friends got an education in a fascinating slice of American twentieth century history. After some twenty-five years of book salvaging, Lansky has a million and a half volumes stored in his National Yiddish Book Center. Although Yiddish is no longer the first language of many, thanks in part to Lansky, many people are rediscovering its literature and culture.
From Publishers Weekly
Lansky was a 23-year-old graduate student in 1980 when he came up with an idea that would take over his life and change the face of Jewish literary culture: He wanted to save Yiddish books. With few resources save his passion and ironlike determination, Lansky and his fellow dreamers traveled from house to house, Dumpster to Dumpster saving Yiddish books wherever they could find them—eventually gathering an improbable 1.5 million volumes, from famous writers like Sholem Aleichem and I.B. Singer to one-of-a-kind Soviet prints. In his first book, Lansky charmingly describes his adventures as president and founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, which now has new headquarters at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. To Lansky, Yiddish literature represented an important piece of Jewish cultural history, a link to the past and a memory of a generation lost to the Holocaust. Lansky's account of salvaging books is both hilarious and moving, filled with Jewish humor, conversations with elderly Jewish immigrants for whom the books evoke memories of a faraway past, stories of desperate midnight rescues from rain-soaked Dumpsters, and touching accounts of Lansky's trips to what were once thriving Jewish communities in Europe. The book is a testimony to his love of Judaism and literature and his desire to make a difference in the world.
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Lansky’s quarter-century quest not only helped keep Yiddish literature from slipping into history, but also provided him with plenty of terrific material for his first book. Granted, a story about collecting old volumes in an obscure language initially sounds less than thrilling. But thanks to Lansky’s storytelling skills, this memoir lives up to the "amazing adventures" advertised in its title; it’s quickly clear why he’s been dubbed "the Yiddish Indiana Jones" and "the Otto Schindler of Yiddish literature." Lansky’s recounting of his personal mission may come off as self-aggrandizing to a few readers. But most will likely view the book as a great tale filled with memorable anecdotes and a rich cast of characters who reflect the endangered culture they’re trying to save.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
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