Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  The problem didn’t stop there. Even when we did have sufficient duplicate copies, their condition was often so bad as to render them unusable. That’s because modern Yiddish literature holds the dubious distinction of being 100 percent acidic: printed on inexpensive, wood-pulp paper, which, because of its high acidity, gradually breaks down, turning yellow and brittle and, eventually, crumbling into fragments and dust. Although this is not a uniquely Jewish problem—every library in the world struggles with the Herculean task of conserving books printed after 1850, when pulp paper (as opposed to rag paper) came into widespread use—the problem for Yiddish is particularly severe. Even the best of Yiddish publishers were usually shoestring operations, and more often than not they cut costs by using the cheapest paper they could find.

  Like all readers of Yiddish literature, I had grown accustomed to the problem. When I turned the pages of a Yiddish book, I pretty much expected them to crumble. My wife, on the other hand, did not. Night after night she’d watch in disbelief as I lay with her in bed, engrossed in one or another Yiddish novel, oblivious to the monsoon of paper crumbs raining down on our new cotton sheets. Some libraries had begun to deacidify their most brittle volumes by treating them with alkaline gases or solutions, but the process was expensive (as much as $100 a volume) and it could only arrest further disintegration, not reverse the damage that had already been done. A brittle book would remain brittle, no matter what they did. As a result, many libraries balked at acquiring Yiddish books from us: Already swamped with millions of brittle volumes of their own, why compound their tsores by bringing more coal to Newcastle?

  So there we were in our brand-new building, Abra and I and a handful of students, surrounded by crumbling books and angry customers, without a clue about what to do to make them happy.

  “How about reprinting books?” one of our work-study students suggested.

  “We tried,” Abra explained. “A few years ago we reprinted a missing volume of the Lexicon of Yiddish Literature. It cost us three thousand dollars. Altogether we’ve got about fifteen thousand titles in our collection. Let’s see . . . that would be $45 million to reprint them all.”

  “Okay,” the student persisted, “but there’s got to be another way. Have you ever thought of digitization?”

  We hadn’t; the technology was still in its infancy back then. But the idea was intriguing. Using computer scanners (essentially, high-tech Xerox machines), it was theoretically possible to take an electronic “picture” of every page of every book, store the images in a computer, and use them to print brand-new copies on demand. As far as we knew, no one had ever tried to digitize an entire literature before, but we could think of no compelling reason why it couldn’t be done. So we consulted experts at Harvard and Yale and turned to our longtime friend Peter Lerner, an investment analyst with the Kaufmann Fund, in search of a company to whom we could outsource the labor-intensive work of scanning and production. Peter went straight to the CEO of Danka, a spin-off of Kodak, who agreed to take on the project at a price 95 percent less than that of a larger competitor. Three weeks later, at a factory in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, the systematic digitization of Yiddish literature began.

  The process wasn’t simple. First each book had to be “disbound”: the spine cut off so that pages could be fed through the scanner one at a time. Danka had to order special machines from Japan that could scan both sides of the page at once, since many were too brittle to go through twice. Most books were so dusty the technicians had to clean the scanners’ lenses after every pass. At our end, we had to keep up with selection, cataloging, and proofing. And fund-raising. Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation provided a lead gift, in recognition of which we named the project “The Shmuel Shpilberg Digital Yiddish Library,” and our friend Max Palevsky, Spielberg’s first boss, sponsored the Palevsky Literature Collection. For $360, we gave our members a chance to “adopt” a title, adding their name and commemoration to the title page every time the book was reprinted. Even my wife and I contributed—we couldn’t resist the chance to immortalize our parents.

  After four years of round-the-clock scanning, our online catalog went live in June 2001 (at www.yiddishbooks.org). Our project director, Gabe Hamilton, worked with colleagues at VTLS, a library automation company, to design an interface similar to that of Amazon.com: You log on, search for books by author, title, subject, or keyword, and click on the titles you want. The order goes straight to the bindery, where it takes only minutes to produce a brand-new acid-free, clothbound copy that looks as good as or better than the original and will last for five hundred years.

  Although many individuals still prefer our original “artifactual” books, the reprints are a godsend for libraries, since they require no conservation and can better withstand the rigors of circulation. We’re now reaching beyond our own collection. Our Noah Cotsen Library of Yiddish Children’s Literature includes almost a thousand Yiddish children’s books, many borrowed from the YIVO. And our David and Sylvia Steiner Yizkor Book Collection, a joint project with the New York Public Library, offers on-demand reprints of almost seven hundred memorial volumes chronicling Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust—a crucial resource for historical and genealogical research.

  In many ways digitization is the fulfillment of our original mission: to preserve Yiddish books and make them accessible forever. Our electronic masters—3.5 million pages and counting—take up less room than a shoe box, and we have secreted duplicate copies in secure locations across the country, including a former Strategic Air Command bunker buried deep inside a mountain not a half mile from our Amherst headquarters. Our next step is the Virtual Yiddish Library, an ambitious plan to place the content of most Yiddish books online, fully searchable and instantly available, free of charge, to any computer user anywhere in the world. The day our catalog went online, the New York Times reported that “Yiddish is now, proportionately, the most in-print literature on earth.” Just as gratifying was a letter from the makers of Trivial Pursuit informing us that an upcoming edition of their popular board game would include the question “What was the first literature to be digitized?” On the flip side of the card, the answer, of course, is “Yiddish.”

  EARLY ON THE morning of July 18, 1994, a massive explosion ripped through the main Jewish communal building of Buenos Aires, killing ninety-seven people and injuring two hundred, many of them children. The work of Iranian terrorists, it was the deadliest attack on a diaspora Jewish community since the Holocaust. Within an hour of the explosion, Shoshana Wolkowicz-Balaban, an Argentinian Jew living in New York, phoned to inform me that the building was home to the largest Jewish library in South America. The next day I wired the head of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, offering to replace every volume that had been destroyed. Four months later, our bibliographer, Neil Zagorin, and Zachary Baker, then head librarian of the YIVO, traveled south to make the necessary arrangements. Their report was chilling:

  The scene still resembled a war zone. An immense crater yawned where the front door of the seven-story building once stood; the rear of the structure, open to the elements, leaned cracked and askew, light and plumbing fixtures dangling. Across the street apartment houses gaped, their facades collapsed, skeletal and empty. . . . Deserted rooms with cracked and crazy walls, suspended ceiling beams like broken bones protruding at rakish angles, and the occasional piece of furniture covered with plaster dust were all that remained of the social service agencies on the lower floors. . . . [In the building’s auditorium] a grand piano, its veneer warped by exposure to the elements, still stood—on the edge of nothing. . . . In an adjacent conference room stood a table that rescue teams had used for emergency surgery after the blast.

  Because the library was in the back of the building, many books survived, but their pages were covered with pulverized plaster and concrete, and some were stained with blood. Workers carried them down rickety ladders to the basement of an adjacent synagogue, where, as Neil and Zak watch
ed, a small group of volunteers, including students from a local Hebrew school, painstakingly cleaned them, one page at a time.

  The bombing in Buenos Aires was a reminder that assaults on Jews and Jewish books are not a thing of the past. All over the world there are ominous signs that anti-Semitism is on the rise. And the tragedy this time is that as lies about Jews grow more extravagant and calumnies more outrageous, most of us know too little about our history and culture to refute them.

  Historical amnesia is a dangerous malady, especially for a people whose identity is as dependent on historical memory as ours. And the hour is later than many of us think. Two years ago, as part of our annual Summer Program in Yiddish Culture, Moshe Waldoks delivered a lecture on Jewish humor. A child of Holocaust survivors, a native Yiddish-speaker, a rabbi deeply steeped in Jewish learning, Waldoks was riotously funny—so funny that our adult participants, my wife and I included, were holding our sides, tears rolling down our cheeks, and I was beginning to regret our not having a defibrillator on the premises. After one particularly funny Jewish joke, I happened to turn around to look at our eight student interns, all of them between eighteen and twenty years old. They were standing in a row in the back, arms crossed, and except for one young woman whose parents came from Mexico, they were completely stone-faced. They weren’t laughing. They hadn’t even cracked a smile. Gail and I spoke with them after the lecture to find out why. “We didn’t think it was funny,” one intern explained. “We didn’t get the joke.”

  This was not a good sign: If our smartest and most Jewishly committed young people no longer get the joke, it means that on the most fundamental level, they don’t understand Jewish culture.

  That is what makes the books we’ve saved so important. In their pages lies a civilization, a missing millennium of Jewish history, the knowledge we need to defend ourselves. Moreover they contain a sensibility, born of marginality, that our fractured world desperately needs. After all, nothing heightens one’s commitment to social justice more than injustice, nothing hones one’s love of peace more than a few thousand years of violence and oppression. Yet at this precise moment, when threats of terrorism, environmental catastrophe, and nuclear annihilation have the whole world feeling vulnerable, when Jewishness has more to say than ever before, what do we do? We disavow our past, jettison our books, and forget to teach our children who they are.

  There’s a saying that a person who speaks many languages is a polyglot, a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person who speaks one language is American. How many American Jews speak Yiddish anymore, and how many are likely to take the time to learn? Our work at the Yiddish Book Center is more than academic. If Yiddish books are even half as important as we think they are, if they really ought to be read, then our next big job is to translate the best into English—the language most readers understand.

  Which reminds me of an encounter twenty years ago, when, after a lecture in Los Angeles, I was approached by a determined, white-haired woman clutching a thick sheaf of yellowed paper.

  “Yungerman!” she said. “My name is Trafimov, I am a Yiddish poet. Please, you must help me!”

  “Of course, Mrs. Trafimov,” I replied, “what can I do for you?”

  “I brought you my poems,” she said, indicating the dog-eared pages in her hand. “I want you should translate them right away into English.”

  I explained that translation was a laborious process, that I was working fourteen hours a day as it was, and that, regrettably, I didn’t have the time to undertake a project of such magnitude.

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m old, I’m sick. I need you to translate me before I die so my grandchildren should know who I am!”

  Although I gave her the names of several people I thought could help, I’m not sure whether her grandchildren ever did get to read her poems while she was still alive. Twenty years later, with her generation of Yiddish writers now all but gone, it occurs to me that the imperative for translation has changed: It is no longer a matter of grandchildren knowing their grandparents, but rather of grandchildren knowing themselves.

  Granted, there are those for whom the very notion of translation seems an act of betrayal, an insult to the original books we’ve worked so hard to save. Back when I was a college student, my Yiddish teacher, Jules Piccus, caught me off guard one day by asking if I had ever read Don Quixote. In truth, I had barely skimmed the book when it was assigned in high school, but I did own the record of “Man of La Mancha,” which I figured ought to count for something, so I answered halfheartedly in the affirmative.

  Jules raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really,” he said, “I didn’t know you could read Medieval Spanish.”

  “Oh no,” I explained, “I read it in translation.”

  “Translation?” Jules bellowed, “What the hell is that?”

  It’s hard to believe, but he insisted that he had never read a book in any but its original language. If he didn’t know the language he went out and learned it. “It’s like the Italians say,” he vociferated, “Traduttore, traditore—all translators are goddamned liars!”

  Easy for him to say, with twenty languages under his belt. But he did have a point. The few times I’ve had occasion to compare a Yiddish original side by side with its English translation, I’ve been aghast at how sharply divergent the two texts often are. Translators make mistakes, they revise, bowdlerize, or even change endings to suit their own interpretations. I was once at a lecture where Isaac Bashevis Singer told of his own travails:

  “There was a line in one of my books,” he related, “in which I said that a woman ‘hot oysgeshrign azoy vi a froy in kimpet.’ In English, this was translated as, ‘She cried out like a woman in labor,’ meaning like a woman about to give birth. When the book was translated into Hebrew, the Hebrew translator didn’t know Yiddish, so he had to work from the English translation. In Hebrew the line became, ‘She cried out like a woman in the Histadrut’—like a woman in the Labor movement.”

  Of course, when it came to translation Singer was more fortunate than most. His first translator was Saul Bellow, whose masterful rendition of “Gimpl tam (Gimpel the Fool)” appeared in Partisan Review in 1953. (Bellow told me that Singer never hired him again, afraid that people would attribute his stories’ success to their translator and not their writer.) In later years, as his English improved, Singer himself oversaw his translations—perhaps the only real guarantee of accuracy.

  Even more dismaying than how Yiddish books were translated was which Yiddish books were translated. There is an old Yiddish expression: “Ale kales zenen sheyn, ale toyte zenen frum (All brides are beautiful, all dead people are pious).” In the decades following the Holocaust, there was an understandable attempt to eulogize a world that had been destroyed. As a result, translated titles were often those that cast the Old Country in a rosy glow, while those that portrayed Jews as real-life human beings with frailties and foibles, conflicts and contradictions— in short, the best literature—were, with notable exceptions, largely overlooked. Even today, only one-half of one percent of Yiddish literature—one Yiddish title in two hundred—is available in English translation.

  So in 2001 we teamed up with Neal Kozodoy, editor of Commentary and head of the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, to launch “The New Yiddish Library,” an international initiative to identify the best Yiddish books and make them available in accurate, literate, and above all, readable English translations. Under the leadership of our editor-in-chief, David Roskies, the first-ever professor of Yiddish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, our editorial board has identified scores of spectacular titles, virtually all of them unknown to English readers. Forthcoming translations include:

  Smugglers (1920). Twenty-two-year-old Oyzer Varshavski’s debut novel about the upending of traditional values in a Polish shtetl during the “total war” of 1919 when everyone from rabbis to prostitutes resorted to smuggling.


  When All Is Said and Done (Nokh alemen, 1913). Dovid Bergelson’s masterpiece about the independent daughter of a traditional, aristocratic Jew, who tries to find meaning in a chaotic, radically changing world.

  Zelmenyaners (1931). Moyshe Kulbak’s comic novel about a Jewish family during the era of Soviet collectivization.

  Ordinary Jews (Yidn fun a gants yor, 1935). Alternately described as a biographical novel and an epic, Yehoshua Perle’s “book of vanished life” deploys a unique, naturalist style to tell the story of a Jewish boy growing up in a provincial Polish city.

  The Poetry of Moishe Leib Halpern. Poet, painter, and bohemian, Halpern led a tormented life on the streets of New York but produced some of the most exquisitely crafted modernist poetry of the twentieth century. John Hollander, the distinguished American poet and scholar from Yale University, will capture Halpern’s impassioned Yiddish voice in English.

  Collected Writings of Rachel Auerbach. With her keen powers of observation, Auerbach left an incomparable journalistic record of Polish Jewish life, both before and during the Holocaust. Her courageous first-person reports from the Warsaw ghetto— included in the underground Oyneg Shabbos Archive—were buried in milk cans and recovered from beneath the rubble after the War.