Like virtually every other university in the United States, Yale never made any effort to collect children’s literature, partly because the subject was not taken seriously by scholars until well into the twentieth century. Mrs. Shirley’s decision to place her collection in the Beinecke Library has filled that void with a single gesture. A gift of similar stature was presented to the Lilly Library at Indiana University in 1983 by the estate of Elisabeth W. Ball, who with her father, George A. Ball of Muncie, Indiana, had put together a comprehensive collection of historically important children’s books. Most of the great institutional collections of children’s books, in fact, exist because of collectors like Betsy Shirley, Elisabeth Ball, and Ruth Baldwin at the University of Florida. The Toronto Public Library’s premier collection of British children’s literature in North America, extending from 1566 to 1910, is the 1949 gift of an English couple, Edgar and Mabel Osborne, who wanted to establish an important repository in Canada, where they felt treasures of the scope and quality they had assembled might otherwise never be available. The Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books includes a number of historically important books known nowhere else.
Edgar Osborne’s recollections of how the collection got started bear notice. In the introduction to a two-volume catalogue, he wrote: “It began on one of those all too rare occasions when I was able to return to my old home in Hampshire, England. There I found the nursery books I loved so much were lying neglected in the lumber room. The discovery also interested my wife, who wondered if she would be able to rescue the books from her early childhood from her home in the north of England. [Thus] began a partnership in collecting which continues to interest me, and which was of absorbing interest to my wife until her death in 1946.”
In a preface to the 1958 catalogue, Jean Thompson wrote that when the books arrived in Toronto, “it was realized that a unique gift” had been entrusted to the people of Canada. “Here were hundreds of books representing all types and phases of writing for children of the English-speaking world. And here this collection was to remain and grow, housed side by side with a large and active children’s library. This priceless gift makes it possible for us in Canada, whose history began late, to establish a collection which will benefit all students of children’s literature and to lay before them a wealth of material unavailable otherwise in this country.”
In the United Kingdom, the Iona and Peter Opie Collection of Children’s Literature was purchased with £1 million raised through a national appeal conducted under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and was presented to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in 1988. The Opies had gathered twenty thousand rare books, comics, and other ephemera for more than forty years as primary source material for their anthologies and scholarly writings, including The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, The Classic Fairy Tales, and Children’s Games in Street and Playground.
The Betsy B. Shirley Collection is noteworthy for its emphasis on American children’s literature, and the tradition of illustration that is so fundamentally related to its history over the past three centuries. “I wanted American things from the beginning, even if they were copies of the English,” she told me. “I figured that if you could document what young Americans read throughout our history, you could sort of tell what was going on in society. How people treated the young, what they produced for the young, what the taboos were, the attitudes on both sides around the time of the Civil War, all sorts of things like that.”
She pointed out that a 1947 exhibition at the Grolier Club, “One Hundred Influential American Books Printed Before 1900,” included twenty-nine titles written for children, or read by them. At first she thought she would apply that cut-off date of 1899, “but then I would not have been able to include The Wizard of Oz, which is 1900, and how could I avoid going after that?” The collection, which she emphasized will go to Yale, embraces the full thrust of the American experience up to the present, as reflected by the books that children read and enjoyed.
“What Mrs. Shirley has done is extend the limits of a children’s literature collection,” Vincent Giroud, curator of modern books at the Beinecke Library, explained. “The Shirley Collection is an extraordinary record of the production of children’s books from their origins in this country. In some cases Mrs. Shirley was able to acquire the only known copies of certain books. She acquired variant issues which are extremely important, but she also went beyond the books. Her collection includes original art, manuscripts, letters, even some material written by future writers when they were children. She has a remarkable command of the field.” Giroud said that a popular course of children’s literature is taught in the English Department, “so the collection already supports the curriculum. But it is so rich, there are limitless possibilities for research.”
11
Destiny
To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical. One can find in the Yiddish tongue and the Yiddish style expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience, and deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God’s plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Nobel Lecture, 1978
Not long after he graduated from college and began working toward an advanced degree at McGill University in Montreal, an idealistic young man from New Bedford, Massachusetts, determined that his mission in life was to rescue books and preserve a culture that was threatened with extinction. “Yiddish is a dead language,” Aaron Lansky was told when he sought help from major Jewish organizations. “Why waste your time? Go back to school. Go to Israel.”
That was in 1979. I learned about Lansky’s activities ten years later when a brief wire service story reported how this resourceful optimist who snatched books from the jaws of paper shredders and landfills had been given a $225,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Other recipients of the prestigious award since its inception in 1981 have included poets, artists, novelists, archaeologists, paleontologists, scientists, musicians, filmmakers, even a clown and a carpenter—but only one recipient to date has been committed to preserving the books that document a vanishing way of life.
“It started out as a two-year project,” Lansky said the first time we met in an old brick schoolhouse in downtown Amherst, Massachusetts, where his National Yiddish Book Center maintained offices for the first decade of its existence, and only four blocks from the house where Emily Dickinson spent her adult life composing timeless poetry. “Prevailing wisdom then was that there were maybe seventy-five thousand volumes all together in Yiddish kicking around out there in the United States, and that it would take me that long to track them down. When I was done, I would finish my graduate work in Jewish studies and become a teacher.” Three years later, Lansky had gathered 350,000—he had passed seventy-five thousand in the first eight months of his adventure—and volumes were still coming in at the rate of a thousand a week.
By the end of the 1980s, Lansky’s collecting continued unabated, and close to a million books had been sorted and shelved on the fourth floor of an old paper factory in Holyoke, Massachusetts. As the new decade began, thousands of the rescued volumes had been placed in the libraries of 150 institutions on five continents, Yale and Oxford universities among them. Because texts now were available for classroom use, comprehensive courses in Yiddish began to be taught at about fifty universities altogether, and plans were afoot to publish new editions of important Yiddish works.
“I grew up in a home in which books were valued,” Lansky said. “My mother and my grandmother were great readers, but books in general
have always been central to Jewish culture. If you drop a book, you pick it up and you kiss it. Originally this was done because they were prayer books, but it developed that you treat every book with respect, regardless of content.”
Politically active during the 1970s, Lansky considered following his father into the legal profession, but he remained undecided about his future when he entered Hampshire College in 1972. “I took a course on the Holocaust my first semester, and it wasn’t long before I understood just how much of Jewish culture had been destroyed. I also discovered that I was less interested in how all this was accomplished than I was in the rich culture itself. How the Nazis did what they did was a matter of mechanics applied to an evil purpose; what I wanted to know was who these people were they wanted to exterminate, and what their world was all about.”
A nontraditional college near Amherst that encourages “free-intellectual exploration,” Hampshire College allowed Lansky to discover Jewish history while working in tandem with a professor who was equally interested in acquiring the same knowledge. Together, they discovered that for about a thousand years, between 900 and 1900, approximately 90 percent of all Jews had used Yiddish as their primary spoken language. “The more I studied, the more I realized that if I was to understand who these people were, I needed to understand their experiences, and that meant I had to learn Yiddish. It had been the vernacular of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, but as an assimilated American, I only knew it from a distance. I heard Yiddish around the house when I was a kid only when di eyniklekh zoln nisht farshteyn—the grandchildren shouldn’t understand.”
Because the language was taught in only three American colleges at the time, and because at Hampshire he had an open curriculum, Lansky “went off in search of a teacher,” finally finding one across town at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Dr. Jules Piccus, “a dynamic man with bushy white hair and a full white beard,” taught Medieval Spanish Literature and was renowned in academic circles for his grasp of twenty languages, Yiddish foremost among them. “He agreed to teach a small group of students on an informal basis with the single condition that we work hard. In place of tuition, we brought a bottle of wine and a loaf of homemade bread to every class. We met one night a week for two years, and the sessions ran from three to five hours.”
After graduating from Hampshire College in 1976, Lansky began graduate work at McGill University in Montreal under Dr. Ruth R. Wisse. For his master’s thesis, he decided to write about Sholem Yankev Abramovitch (1836–1917), who published under the pen name Mendele Moykher Sforim, which means, literally, Mendele the Itinerant Book Peddler. Mendele’s novel Dos Kleyne Mentschele (The Little Man), published in 1864, is considered the first work of modern Yiddish literature. “Mendele shared the contemporary prejudice that Yiddish was ugly, illegitimate, or at least undesirable,” nothing more than a “necessary evil” to reach a wider audience, Lansky wrote several years later in his master’s thesis. Yet once the author “made the break” and began to write in Yiddish, there was no turning back. “He came to regard Yiddish less as a tool for propaganda and more as an artistic medium in its own right.”
At about this time, as Lansky was beginning to research his thesis, he received a letter from a friend in Ohio who told of a rabbi who had died and left nine hundred Yiddish books. “Nobody knew what to do with them, so they went off to the paper shredder. Not long after that, I went down to New Bedford to visit my parents, and while I was there I went over to our synagogue to talk with the rabbi. I walked into his office and on the floor was a fruit basket filled with a lot of old Yiddish books, and among them was the collected works of Mendele Moykher Sforim. So I said, ‘Excuse me, Rabbi, what is Mendele doing on the floor in a fruit basket?’ ”
The rabbi replied that the books were going to be buried with some tattered Hebrew prayer books in a funeral service. “They were going to bury them with prayer books that were no longer usable. This is a very old Jewish tradition, that you give worn-out books that can no longer be used a proper burial. He said he didn’t know what else to do with them, nobody wanted them. ‘You want the books, you can have them.’ So I put the fruit basket on my shoulder, and I said, ‘Rabbi, if you have more books, I know dozens of people who can read them. Call my parents and they will be happy to pick them up.’ Meantime, I went back to McGill, and I thought, if I could find books like this in New Bedford, imagine what I could find in Montreal.”
Scouting missions were inevitable, and his first explorations in Canada were conducted on a bicycle, later on a moped. “People were calling me, and I was racing around from one end of the city to the other. Before I knew it, my apartment was filling up with books. The kitchen, the bathroom, everywhere you looked, it was completely out of hand. I was inundated.” Before long the inevitable telephone call from New Bedford arrived. “It was my mother. ‘Aaron,’ she said, ‘I think you better come down here pretty soon, because the rabbi has given us so many books we’re afraid the second floor of the house is about to collapse.’ ”
It was at this point, as the books “were piling up and piling up,” that Lansky was struck with a paradox. “I can remember the exact day. I was sitting in class, a cold winter day, and we’re arguing once again where we are going to find the books we need for our studies, and I’m thinking, this is ridiculous. Here we can’t find the books we want for college and books are out there being destroyed. Something needs to be done.” He decided he had to undertake a far-reaching initiative to preserve Yiddish-language books in a center established for that purpose. Thus was born the National Yiddish Book Center.
Ruth Wisse, then professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University, now at Harvard University, encouraged Lansky. “I thought it was a fantastic idea,” she said. “I remember saying this would be one of the great desiderata of Jewish communal life, to have someone collect these books. This was a very particular situation, particular in the sense that here you have a culture of the most bookish people in the world, and suddenly, because they are such a culturally vital people, they leave their language behind and don’t pass it on.”
Wisse recalled her early impressions of young Aaron Lansky. “He had the quality about him of what was then called a ‘flower child,’ a very gentle young man. But I also saw an entrepreneurial quality in him, a really American spirit. And I think that is why he has been so successful with his book center. He has a very down-to-earth approach. He is a realist who doesn’t wallow in sentimentality. He makes things happen. And he doesn’t focus on the past but on the future.”
Before getting started, Lansky sought financial support from “every major Jewish organization” in the United States. “I put on a nice suit, I took the train to New York, and they all told me the same thing: ‘Yiddish is dead. What are you wasting your time on this for?’ That was the general attitude, and there was no money they could spare for the books. Well, I couldn’t sit around and argue with these guys for the next ten years, I just had to go out and do something. I knew books were being destroyed.”
He explained what forces were causing so much inexorable loss. “A grandparent dies and the kids come to clean out the apartment. They find a bunch of old books in a language they can’t understand, and they throw them in the garbage. This has been happening for years.” Especially distressing was how apathy like that runs counter to the historic attachment Jews have for books. “Jews are am hasefer,” he explained. “The people of the book.”
Yiddish is a language with borrowings from German, Hebrew, and Slavic that is written in Hebrew characters; like Hebrew, it reads from right to left. For the better part of a millennium, Yiddish was the principal tongue of Ashkenazi Jews (broadly speaking, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe), who by the end of the nineteenth century represented about ninety percent of the world’s Jews. Unlike virtually every other language, Yiddish does not now have a clearly defined homeland, though it developed in Central Europe and is defined by linguistic historians as a west Germanic language. Accor
ding to the sociolinguist Joshua A. Fishman in his essay “The Sociology of Yiddish,” 10.7 million people spoke Yiddish as their primary language in 1940; forty years later that number had been reduced to 3.7 million, and most of these people were elderly and did not pass the tradition on to their children. Hasidic Jews, however, continue to use the language, leading Fishman to believe the number of people speaking Yiddish will stabilize at about two million by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
“As long as the traditional world remained intact, Jews wrote in Hebrew,” Lansky explained. “Yiddish was the vernacular. When the old world began to break down, Jews suddenly had to figure out what it meant to live in the modern world, and they drew upon this vernacular which represented everyday Jewish experiences to create a whole new literature.”
By far the most prominent contemporary Yiddish voice was the late Isaac Bashevis Singer. Though he spent most of his adult life in New York City, Singer always wrote in the language he learned as a child in the Warsaw home of his father, a rabbi. Singer’s early support of the National Yiddish Book Center brought immediate credibility and needed viability, and he remained an honorary trustee until his death in 1991. When Singer accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, he offered a moving tribute—to his native tongue. He started in Yiddish, declaring:
“The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language—a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government; a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both Gentiles and emancipated Jews.” He then spoke in English: “There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years.” But the language “has not said its last word,” he insisted: it “contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world.” Yiddish, he concluded, is “the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity.”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 48
