Diskussioner er møder mellem læsere med temaer, som er fastsat af arrangørerne. Diskussionerne handler om bøger, forfattere og nye medier.

[ 01.10.2009 ]

In 1980, a 23-year-old curly-haired Jewish American student named Aaron Lansky decided to take upon himself a mission nobody had undertaken before: to rescue deserted Yiddish books. The language spoken by three-quarters of world Jewry in the late 19th century was almost lost a century later. Valuable books, passed on by Jews throughout the generations, books that had survived the Holocaust and the Stalinist persecutions, had become unwanted, even a burden to the children and grandchildren of Yiddish speakers.

Whether in the USA, Canada, Israel, Australia, Argentine or West Europe, the books were usually thrown (in the good case) in attics, basements and storerooms, or just discarded as rubbish. Lansky realized that most of these books might literally disappear forever, so he published notices in various newspapers, declaring he was ready to come and collect from any place, at no charge, books in Yiddish.

The National Yiddish Book Center was founded in 1980; when Lansky and a handful of friends began their project, experts had estimated that there were about seventy-thousand Yiddish books in the world. Almost 30 years and a million and a half books later, the scope of Lansky's vision and his great achievement can be grasped.

In his fascinating, humourous book, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, Lansky describes his adventures on the road and how he would arrive in a battered car to Care Homes, synagogues, and cultural centers, only to be overwhelmed by the quantity of books (as well as cakes, latkes and gefilte fish) showered upon him by elderly Jews. One time he and his friends were called out to rescue thousands of Yiddish books discarded into a huge open garbage container in New York, about to become sticky pulp in the freezing rain.

Due to the need to find a home for hundreds of thousands of books, and thanks to Lansky's indefatigable fundraising energies, the National Yiddish Book Center opened in 1997 in green and pastoral Amherst, Massachusetts. You do not have to be one of its 30,000 members in order to visit the place, which boasts a library, gallery, changing exhibitions, beautiful gardens and a bookshop. In addition, the Center offers a rich programme of lectures, films, concerts and seminars, and publishes a magazine, Pakn Treger ("Parcel Carrier"). Over the years the Center has become the largest Jewish culture organization in the USA.

The Center has not only collected and preserved Yiddish books, but also – with the help of a donation from film director Steven Spielberg – scanned them digitally, so that disintegrating, faded books can be exchanged for new copies of excellent quality. In February 2009, the Center initiated the most promising enterprise: in collaboration with the San Francisco Internet Archive, the Book Center uploaded some 11,000 Yiddish texts – almost half of the sum of publications ever made in this language. The website is user-friendly and searchable by author, title and subject. Its scope is amazing: it includes not only the writings of classic Yiddish authors such as Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, Sholem Asch, I.J. Singer and others, but also the works of authors and poets mostly forgotten (who is familiar, today, with the writings of David Hermalin or Shimshon Erdberg?). In addition, the collection holds many books on science, literature, philology and art, as well as encyclopedias and Yiddish translations of European literature. While in the past many of these books could only be found (if that) in a handful of libraries throughout the world, nowadays users can not only view them online but also download them to their own personal computers. The Internet Book Archive is a genuine revolution, and as an avowed fan of Yiddish culture I hope it brings more people closer to this rich, amazing and forgotten language, within which Jews lived almost a thousand years.

Gil Ribak, Haifa