Lansky to the Rescue

By YOSEF I. ABRAMOWITZ

Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of A Man Who Rescued A Million Yiddish Books
By Aaron Lanksy
316 pages. Algonquin Books. $24.95.

It's a literary David-and-Goliath story: a young man takes on a quixotic task (rescuing Yiddish books from oblivion), creates an organization out of nothing, gets dissed by the Jewish establishment, and finally succeeds. What’s not to like? Aaron Lansky, the president of the National Yiddish Book Center, has finally penned his autobiography. It’s a great story, but only a good book.

Lansky, a man credited with saving 1.5 million Yiddish books, is at his best regaling the reader with variations on the same theme: he responds first to the call of history and then to thousands of subsequent calls to save books destined for the dustbin of history (and other trash receptacles around North America). Lansky collects the donors' tales around kitchen tables and then is bequeathed, on behalf of us all, the books that grounded their old-world lives.

Buried among the stories are some invaluable narrative nuggets. Consider, for instance, the tale of how Woody Guthrie’s wife hired an Orthodox tutor for their kids, Nora and Arlo. The rabbi who recommended the tutor fired him for being too absolutist in his theology. The tutor, it turns out, was Jewish extremist Meir Kahane.

I wished that Outwitting History focused a bit more on Yiddish literature itself, the burst of intellectual vibrancy of Yiddish in its heyday, which Lansky only begins to capture in a short chapter on Yiddish history. I also wanted to read more on the social-justice dimension of Yiddish, what it represented to both the new immigrants of the Lower East Side and the Jewish idealists in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. I believe that for all the counter-cultural hipness that Yiddish represents today in some circles, it would strum a louder cord with even more people if it sang of Yiddish's associations with social revolution and human aspiration.

One senses, in Lansky's story of providing Yiddish books to new schools in the Former Soviet Union, that even the author sees the limitations of his impressive accomplishment. Yes, Yiddish may outwit history and continue to survive, but it is not likely to define the future of Jewish history. Coincidentally, the government of Birobidzhan, a Jewish autonomous region, has recently offered Yiddish in the public schools. But this is an odd footnote, not a trend. It is an echo of the past, not an omen for the future.

Lansky, as the generational inheritor of various tattered Yiddish idealisms, has been the envy of many a Jewish dreamer and leader. (That MacArthur genius award didn’t hurt, either.) Tenacity and countless textual-rescue trips have created a 32,000-member strong organization and a non-profit business model that may herald a new era in creating specialized centers of gravity in Jewish life rather than overarching mega-organizations.

Lansky fans should read the book, for they will recognize their own stories as part of the larger historic drama that Lansky has claimed as his own. Detractors should read the book and understand that neither the forces of history that limit Yiddish, nor the National Yiddish Book Center’s supremacy can be stopped. The train has left the station. But, as in Lansky’s retelling of the Tevye story, Tevye never got on the train because of a miscommunication with the non-Jewish ticket clerk.

After celebrating Yiddish, the next task will be the celebration of the values of the people for whom Yiddish was the means to transmit the story and dreams of the Jewish people. Because of Lansky, Yiddish again is another gateway, a portal, to the power of enduring Jewish values and intellectual energy. The book is charming, as is Lansky himself. But history can only be outwitted by the rejuvenation of the Jewish people itself. And it will take more than Yiddish to make it happen.