Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky Read Free Book Online Page A

tried to place the books at several university libraries but could find no takers. “Aaron,” he sighed, “if you know someone who wants Yiddish books, then by all means, they’re yours.”
    I thanked him profusely, repacked the fruit basket, propped it on my shoulder, and headed for the door before he could change his mind.
    “We get Yiddish books here all the time,” Rabbi Glassman called after me. “I’ll tell you what. From now on I’ll save them for you and give them to your parents. Just let me know when you’ve got enough.”
    I arranged things with my parents and returned to Montreal with my rucksack and two heavy shopping bags full of books. I was beginning to suspect that unwanted Yiddish books were a problem not only in Ohio and New Bedford, but in communities throughout North America. After all, immigrant Jews had been voracious readers. When they died, their treasured Yiddish libraries were left to children or grandchildren who couldn’t read the language. In the best of cases books were preserved in synagogue libraries or stored in cellars or attics for safekeeping; more often, it seemed, they ended up shredded, buried, or thrown out with the trash.
    Admittedly, at the time, I was looking for Yiddish books strictly for my own use, and I figured that if I could just walk into a synagogue and find them in a small city such as New Bedford, imagine what lay in store in a city as big as Montreal, with a Jewish population forty times as large! And so, as nonchalantly as I could manage, I let it be known in my own Montreal neighborhood that I personally, a young graduate student, was interested in Yiddish books.
    Almost immediately people started calling: widows and widowers, children and grandchildren. Within days I was racing around the city on my bicycle, then on a moped with a milk crate bolted to the back, and finally in a borrowed station wagon. When the local Jewish high school decided to clear its shelves of “surplus” books, they offered me a two-thousand-volume Yiddish library. I rented a van, hired two neighborhood kids, and carried all the books up to my apartment. That night my fellow grad student Borukh Hill, Ruth Wisse, and I crouched on my living room floor and opened boxes, sorting through hundreds of dusty volumes and dividing the books among us. My share included two crucial reference works: a complete, ornately bound, four-volume set of Zalman Rejzen’s
Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (Lexicon of Yiddish Literature, Press and Philology),
a pioneering biographical dictionary of Yiddish literature, published in Vilna between 1926 and 1929; and, a bit less practical but no less enjoyable, Nahum Stutchkoff’s 35,000-word
Yidisher gramen-leksikon,
the first and only
Yiddish Rhyming Dictionary,
published in New York in 1931. Both Ruth and Borukh went away with treasures of their own.
    Meanwhile the calls continued. Before I knew it Yiddish books covered every square inch of my living room floor, then the hallway and the kitchen. When the piles spilled over into the bedroom, my new girlfriend decided enough was enough. I responded by buying a big, colorful Guatemalan hammock, which I suspended high over the growing mountain of books on the bedroom floor. That provided enough novelty to smooth things over for a while. But a week later my parentswere on the phone from Massachusetts, and now
they
were issuing ultimata: The rabbi had given them so many Yiddish books that they were afraid the second story of their house was about to collapse.
    Even I had to admit the situation was getting out of control. The next day—I remember the exact moment—I was sitting in class at McGill. Sleet pounded against the window pane, the lecture droned, the radiator hissed, and suddenly, like that, the idea came to me: I would take a leave of absence to save the world’s Yiddish books before it was too late. When I shared the idea with Ruth she could not have been more supportive. At