One of our local shiksas, apparently deciding that I lacked sufficient Jewish zeal and/or that I should read about an obsessed guy doing something that everyone else thought was stupid, gave me a book by the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center. Aaron Lansky writes about how he spent the past 25 years collecting books in Yiddish from all over the world and bringing them back to Amherst, Massachusetts. Everyone said that he was crazy because nearly all the people who could read Yiddish were dead, killed by their European neighbors in the 1930s and 40s or expired from old age in the U.S. Children of dead Yiddish readers were throwing the books out when Lansky’s organization alerted them to the possibility of donating them to his new library.
With money from Steven Spielberg, his center has scanned all of these donated books. So now all of these books that nobody wanted in hardcopy exist in digital form. I visited this great digital library and typed in “Singer”, the one Yiddish author whom I’ve read. It turns out that there aren’t any entries for Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Laureate, but there are some obscure titles from obscure Singers. I picked #4 at random, a 111-page book by Israel Joshua Singer, who died in 1944. The book could be mine for $48 plus $5 in shipping. Is there a way to view the text online? No. Could it be that the center didn’t have enough money to buy a few HTTP servers and deliver the bits to interested scholars worldwide? They raised $7 million to build themselves a fancy headquarters building. They got organized to set up an ecommerce and print-on-demand system for hardcopies. So here we have a MacArthur “genius” award winner trying to make Yiddish books more widely available who goes to all of this trouble to collect and scan them, who says that his mission is to make this treasure trove accessible to a new generation of folks worldwide (many of whom live in poor countries with unreliable postal services and/or are starving graduate students), and then prices the collection out of the reach of any of the people who might conceivably be interested. (The Yiddish book center earns a dismal two-star rating from Charity Navigator, spending 33 percent of their budget on fundraising and only 56 percent on program expenses.)
I haven’t followed Aaron Lansky’s career but the cause is worthwhile. Better to have some access to these works than none at all. I do remember that he was our social studies teacher at Bialik in Montreal and certainly raised our consciousness about the world. He didn’t teach Yiddish as he was learning it at the time. (Bialik is one of the few high schools that teaches Yiddish in addition to French and Hebrew through graduation). There are some notorious pictures of him in our yearbooks, sharing different ways of raising consciousness in class.
BTW shiske is a derogatory term. Better to use goy (m.) or goyesche madel (f.).
Perhaps they could republish them in standard, contemporary German orthography. A fair amount of that work could be automated, too, especially since they’re scanning them already.
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