A Real Mensch

The language is 1,000 years old, and the man who set out to save it, 42. In the context of a culture that is 4,000 years old, the perspective is important. The Yiddish language and its literature were hardly born yesterday. Aaron Lansky, in a manner of speaking, was.

As it turns out, his relative youth was an asset, for the massive undertaking that became the $8-million National Yiddish Book Center here required the hubris--or, better yet, the chutzpah--of the young. Salvage the entire written record of a rich but endangered language? Find a home for what he thought would be 70,000 volumes--but to date numbers 1.4 million printed works? Garner support in the form of crumpled dollar bills alongside hefty foundation grants? Build a magnificent compound, an architectural gem that sits amid a 10-acre apple orchard and has fast become a literary shrine?

Lansky smiled, revealing deep dimples that the grandmothers who come to visit him love to remark on. He offered a small, almost modest shrug. When his work started, he was quite young. “This seemed doable.”

Lansky was 23 when he began his one-man crusade to preserve the written record of an oral tradition that was fading fast. He was, he is quick to admit, not at all religious.

His 1968 bar mitzvah in the old whaling town of New Bedford, Mass., was more social than spiritual. His parents spoke Yiddish rarely, when they didn’t want the kids to know what they were saying. The family went to temple on important holidays only, and when they did, they sat in the front, the part of the synagogue their son remembers as “more decorous than substantive.”

Hard to believe, but Lansky swears he had never even heard of the Holocaust when he enrolled in a seminar on the subject as a freshman at Hampshire College here in the Pioneer Valley, where a consortium of five fine institutions share classes and professors. “It was completely by accident. It was an ancillary selection for me,” he said of his decision to sign up for one of the first Holocaust courses to be offered anywhere.

Little could he then--an “18-year-old kid with a bad public school education”--know that what sounded like “an interesting social science course” would lead to a life’s mission. Lansky leaped right past the budding field of Holocaust nostalgia, viewing it as lachrymose. Rather, when the semester was over, “I had some gut sense that I was interested much less in the process of destruction and far more interested in learning who were these people that the Nazis sought to destroy.”

His curiosity led him to explore the social and cultural history of his own people. To his surprise, he learned that for the last 1,000 years, 80% of the world’s Jews spoke Yiddish.

For Lansky, Yiddish had always had a mysterious cant. It was the tongue spoken by “the old men in the back of the synagogue, unwashed old guys, tough guys, they owned junkyards and factories. They would sit in the back of the temple and drink whiskey out of water glasses and talk all the way through the service, in Yiddish. So I knew Yiddish had soul. I knew it had authenticity. That was all I knew.”

Lansky found a professor at the University of Massachusetts here, the late Jules Piccus, to teach him Yiddish. “It became an intellectual interest of such urgency that I just had to do it,” he recalled.

Together, they began reading Yiddish literature. What an adventure: “It was like discovering Atlantis,” Lansky remembered.

In the summer of 1976, Lansky was running a fruit juice stand in Boston’s Copley Square. Business was not so hot, so Lansky spent most of his time reading. The book that engaged him most had a memorable title, “The Schlemiel as Modern Hero.” Lansky finished the book, folded the juice stand and headed off to study with the author, Ruth Wisse, then a professor at Montreal’s McGill University.

“Every week, Ruth would say, ‘Read such and such,’ ” Lansky said. But “such and such” was hard to find. “It was all out of print. We had to find old Jews who had good libraries. We went knocking on doors. It was an impossible situation. I started putting up notices in Jewish delicatessens and Laundromats in the Jewish neighborhoods: ‘Graduate student seeking Yiddish books.’ Before I knew it, the phone was ringing off the hook. It was really quite amazing.”

Lansky went home to visit his parents and stopped by to visit the family rabbi. He noticed a basket of old Yiddish books. The rabbi confessed he was about to bury the books, an act of reverence. No one could read them anymore, the rabbi said sadly. The rabbi brightened when Lansky asked if he could have the books.

Back in Montreal, Lansky got a call from his parents telling him to get back home in a hurry, and to bring a truck if he could. “The rabbi is giving us so many books we’re afraid the second story will fall down,” his mother said.

Right about then, Lansky experienced what in some traditions is known as an epiphany. “I had enough sense to know that these books had to be saved,” he said. “It seemed to me so fundamental, a question of Jewish survival.” Lansky, a wiry, compact man with blue eyes and perpetually tousled hair, saw no option but to take on the task himself.

He dropped out of graduate school--and just in the nick of time, said Wisse, now a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard. “His sense of timing was great, and also fortuitous,” Wisse said. Yiddish books were ending up in trash heaps. An older generation was dying off. Its children and grandchildren saw no reason to preserve works they could not read. “Five years later, there would have been no books left to save,” she said. “Five years earlier, there would have been no interest.”

*

In his new role as cultural archeologist, Lansky decided he needed a secondhand van. He borrowed a suit and called on prominent Jewish philanthropists. “Everywhere I went, the answer was the same,” Lansky said. “ ‘Don’t you know that Yiddish is dead?’ they would say.”

Fruit, it seems, was part of Lansky’s economic destiny. He spent the summer picking blueberries in Maine and made enough money to have letterhead printed. “The National Yiddish Book Exchange” sounded so official that by 1980, Lansky was ready to incorporate. He needed a headquarters, and Wisse urged him to go back to where he had gone to college, where his passion had begun.

“Ruth was adamant,” Lansky said. “She said that if I wanted to make it clear that I was speaking for a new generation, I had to be in a Jewishly neutral location.” Five blocks from Emily Dickinson’s house, Lansky thought: “How could you get more Jewishly neutral?”

By word of mouth as he traveled around the country, Lansky recruited a small army of zamlers, volunteer book collectors. Within eight months, Lansky and his brood had rescued 70,000 books. Every week, at least 1,000 more would pour in. The 86-year-old father of novelist Leon Uris offered 300 books. The widow of folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote to donate hundreds of autographed volumes, explaining that her mother had been a Yiddish poet.

One cold winter night, Lansky received a phone call. He took a 2 a.m. train to New York City, and with a hastily assembled group of zamlers, worked in the freezing rain to rescue 8,000 books from a huge dumpster.

In 1989, Lansky’s efforts won him a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. His organization grew, to a present total of 30,000 members. He took over an old silk mill, an abandoned roller rink and a former schoolhouse to store the books and sheet music that were streaming in, by now from around the world. It was time, Lansky decided six years ago, to dignify his project with a proper address.

Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation donated $250,000 to help construct the Yiddish book center; the Kresge Foundation provided $600,000 and the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation of Baltimore gave $1 million. But at a recent Sunday simkhe to celebrate the building that was dedicated June 15, Lansky said most of the $8 million came in small amounts from individuals.

Lansky interviewed 20 architects, many of them Jewish, in his search for the right design. When he said he wanted a building with “a sense of historical memory--but not a Yiddish theme park--no one got it.” At last Lansky met with “an unlikely candidate for this job, an old-line Yankee architect named Allen Moore” from Newburyport, north of Boston.

The resulting building, with its meandering, shingled roof line, was inspired by an 18th-century synagogue in Wolpa, Poland. Lansky calls the structure “Haimish modern,” and the newspaper the Jewish Standard called it “a postmodern shtetl.” With his wife, Gail, Lansky’s daughters, 5-year-old Sasha and Chava, 3, dug the first shovelfuls of dirt for the center at last year’s groundbreaking.

“Surely,” Lansky told a crowd that filled the center’s soaring, sun-filled auditorium, “this must be the most beautiful sight that Yiddish has ever known.”

*

Wisse, Lansky’s old professor, was present when the National Yiddish Book Center was dedicated. “The place is such a happy place, such a beautiful place,” she said. Art exhibits abound, and a Yiddish Linotype machine, the only one known to exist, is on display.

Wisse’s voice was soft, full of joy, as she said, “What I most appreciate about the center is that there is so much loss in this culture, so much that pulls you down. It’s wonderful to have a place that is so buoyant.”

Lansky shares this vision of “a place where young people can come and learn about Jewish culture in a context that is not just about victimization.” He does not delude himself into thinking that he has launched some kind of Yiddish renaissance.

Still, he promises that the center will continue to grow. He hopes that the group’s magazine, Pakn Treger, will mature into “the Jewish New Yorker.” He envisions more educational outreach efforts, even a Yiddish summer camp.

And fruit is in the future. “There are 40,000 pounds of apples out in that orchard,” he said. “We expect soon to have an annual fall Yiddish apple festival.”