Old habits

Outwitting History: How a young Man Rescued a million Books and Saved a Vanishing Civilization
By Aaron Lansky,
Souvenir, £ 13.50

This, as the long subtitle suggests, is a book about books. It is a remarkable first-person narrative of a crusade to save books written in Yiddish and thus to retrieve for history a culture on the verge of disappearing. Aaron Lansky, with the help of a band of devoted friends and the cooperation of thousands of Jews living across the United States created in the National Yiddish Book Center a repository of books which, without his efforts, would have been lost to humanity. This is a story of immense optimism, the triumph of the human spirit and ultimately about the love for books. Lansky tells the story without an iota of self-importance but in the full consciousness that he fulfilled a mission.

A word is in order about Yiddish and the culture that it represents. It is a common misconception that Jews, especially in Europe, spoke Hebrew. In fact, for the better part of the last millennium, Jews in central and eastern Europe ? the Ashkenazi Jews, as they are called ? spoke Yiddish. Yiddish means Jewish and it emerged from around the 10-11th centuries as the spoken language of the Jews living along the banks of the Rhine. It was the language the Jews used among themselves to distinguish themselves from their non-Jewish German speaking neighbours. Yiddish is rooted in Hebrew (the language of the Torah) and in Aramaic (the language of the later sections of the Talmud). It was written in the Hebrew script and about 20 per cent of its vocabulary came from Hebrew and Aramaic. But living along the Rhine, Jews added words from German, Latin, French and Italian. In the 14th and 15th centuries, when Jews began to be expelled from western Europe, there was a migration eastwards towards Poland. In the process words and phrases from the Slavic languages were added to Yiddish. It became a language without a country; the language of a people on the move, ?a living chronicle of Jews? historical experience?.

Lansky illustrates the last point with the example of a simple Yiddish sentence: Di bobe est tsholent of Shabes ? The grandmother eats warmed-over bean stew on the Sabbath. Bobe, grandmother, is a Slavic word that came into Yiddish in the 14th century; est came from Middle High German a 1,000 years ago; tsholent, bean stew from Old French from chaud, hot, and lent, slow; Shabes, Sabbath, is a Hebrew word going back thousands of years.

In the 20th century, Yiddish was under threat. First by the Holocaust, which killed Jews by the millions in the cradle of Yiddish culture. Yiddish went across the Atlantic with the fleeing Jews of Europe. Second, there was the problem of the rise of Zionism and Israel. Zionists and orthodox Jews did not consider Yiddish to be kosher. They wanted to revive Hebrew and its attendant culture. Third, there was the tendency of acculturation among Jews. In the second half, Yiddish language and literature faced extinction.

When Lansky, in the early Seventies, decided, in a quest for his roots, to learn Yiddish, he found that no courses were on offer and very few books were to be found. He learnt the language informally from a professor and then began to collect Yiddish books. In the beginning the task seemed hopeless. He had no money and didn?t know where to start. Through the grapevine and through ads in newspapers, the word spread, and people began writing to him about their collection of Yiddish books. He and a handful of friends began crisscrossing the country in ramshackle trucks, hired cheap, to collect the books. In their journeys, they met Jewish families, mostly old people, who had their stories to tell, and some joined his project. Thus a library was born and the record of a culture saved.

Lansky?s work and his recollection of it here is the best tribute to the People of the Book. It can only warm the hearts of readers and book lovers.