A Center that's everywhere

By JENN DIRECTOR KNUDSEN
For The Jewish Review
It’s really a very Jewish story: 3,019 miles from Portland there is a building dedicated to rescued Yiddish books. It exists because of one man’s unquenchable passion. And its board chair is a Portland resident. 
The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., was founded by Aaron Lansky in 1980, the same year it was believed roughly 70,000 books in Yiddish still existed on our continent. That very same year saw the recovery of 70,000 books alone, written in the language that was the mamaloshen (mother tongue) of about 80 percent (roughly 11 million) of the world’s Jewish people for 1,000 years. 
Today the Center’s Yiddish book collection numbers 1.5 million.
And counting. 
Bonus: You don’t have to travel to Western Massachusetts to take advantage of the Yiddish Book Center and its astounding offerings. (Lansky himself said its mere existence does feel “like a miracle.”) 
“Sure, make a pilgrimage,” said Susan Bronson, who is the Center’s first executive director and has held the position for 15 years. “But much of what we offer is not here.”
Which makes it entirely accessible to us here in the Pacific Northwest, and to anyone else, anywhere.
“At the beginning, it was only about collecting books,” Ira Wagner said of the hardscrabble genesis of the Center that now sits on 10 acres of land (with an apple orchard) provided by Hampshire College, Lansky’s alma mater, a couple hours from where the original zamler – book collector – grew up in a southeastern corner of Massachusetts. 
Wagner is board chair of the Yiddish Book Center five years running and a 20-year member. (“I probably first sent them a check for $18 to become a member,” said Wagner, who made Portland home about three years ago.)
“The Center is for the world to know Yiddish everything, instead of knowing little to nothing,” he said. “Over time it became an intellectual institute…a substantive, dynamic, amazing place at the forefront of trying to disseminate this information to the world,” Wagner said in a recent phone interview.  
Scholars like Prof. Natan Meir, chair of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University, mine what he termed the Center’s “invaluable” online resources. 
“Scanned Yiddish books are by far the most valuable resource for me as a researcher,” Meir said via email. 
“The books in their digital library would take me weeks to get through interlibrary loan, if I could get them at all,” he said, adding that he also refers students to the Center’s Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, where learners from near and far gather to dive into Yiddish language and culture. 
“Yiddish is not the whole story of the Jewish people by far,” Lansky said in a recent interview via Zoom, “but it’s a very important chapter in it. Without it, we’ll never fully understand where we came from.”
Speaking of chapters, let’s return to the books.
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Last month, my daughter Alyssa and I had the good fortune to be two of the 10,000 people each year to visit the Yiddish Book Center in person. 
In preparation for my visit – and at Wagner’s very strident recommendation – I read Lansky’s 2005 book “Outwitting History,” whose subheader is no exaggeration: “The amazing adventures of a man who rescued a million Yiddish books.” (I also strongly recommend it.)
In 312 pages, Lansky tells the tale of a venture that began in his early 20s to save the world’s Yiddish books, including those neither the Nazis nor the U.S.S.R. succeeded in eliminating. It was an exhausting hunt from which he never tired. 
“At 23, I had an understanding of what was at stake,” Lansky said. If people’s books in their vernacular are discarded and forgotten, the same would happen to the people themselves.
“Yiddish was quite central to Jewish thought and consciousness. How could a bookish people discard their books?” Lansky asked rhetorically, referring to the core question that launched his literal and physical intellectual trek that began in a U-Haul truck in the mid-1970s. 
The loss of Yiddish books would be catastrophic. Yiddish is one of 18 distinct Jewish languages and has the most current speakers, including some here in Portland. It is the Jewish language spoken today more than any of the others, according to literature from the Center. 
As Dina Gorelik, our Yiddish Book Center (YBC) tour guide, put it, “Most people who fall in love with Yiddish fall in and can’t get out.”
Portlander Perry Hendin, 66, is a perfect example. 
Originally from Western Canada, Hendin said his upbringing was typical of those in his generation: His Yiddish-speaking grandparents immigrated to Canada from Eastern Europe, and his parents also spoke the mamaloshen. He, though, learned Hebrew at day school; Yiddish was not (and so rarely is) part of the curriculum.  
“When I heard that the YBC held a week-long on-site Yiddish course for adults…I decided it was a luxury I wanted to immerse myself in,” said Hendin, noting he – like many students newer to the discipline than he is – took online Yiddish classes during the pandemic.
(Lansky proudly says that learning via the Center never stopped during the pandemic.)
Hendin continued in an interview via email, “When I’m there I am simply in heaven.” 
There, he wanders the stacks of books more than a century old, “weep(s) at the past ancestors’ bygone lives, culture and struggles, and rejoice(s) in the resurrection mission of the organization and the energy of the people there.” 
He adds that Lansky likes to say that most Yiddish speakers in the Center are less than 40 years old. 
Just like our tour guide.
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My daughter and I step into the Center – purposefully designed and constructed to resemble the traditional wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe – and are met by Gorelik, a recent college graduate and one of the Center’s fellows. 
She takes us on a tour of well-lit rooms that house the permanent exhibit that opened one year ago: “Yiddish: A Global Culture.” 
I instantly feel as I do when I walk into any library: So many books, so little time. 
I also feel – as I believe so many American Jews of my generation do – my own personal yet tenuous connection to Yiddish and its culture. My great-grandparents settled in Portland in the early 1900s from present-day Ukraine; they spoke Yiddish while raising children who understood their mother tongue but spoke English. Their children – my parents – knew phrases here and there. I know fewer still.
In the Center, in addition to the books painstakingly stacked seven shelves high, we’re also surrounded by strategically displayed poignant paraphernalia (about 350 objects).
Lansky – his shock of gray hair visible at the top of my computer screen – describes the Center as “a living organization that happens to have a museum on the side.”
Indeed. 
The “museum” portion of the Center includes beautiful art; photographs; shelves of Yiddish typewriters; a room that recreates the turn-of-the-last century Shabbos day salons of Polish Yiddishist I.L. Peretz; and the last Yiddish linotype machine dating to the early 1900s on which the Forverts (Yiddish version of The Forward) newspaper was published. 
Placed against a wall in the “Khurbn/Holocaust: Martyrs, Survivors, and Books of Remembrance” gallery is a haunting sculpture dedicated to the “vanished book” of storyteller Rokhl Brokhes that World War II disappeared from the world. 
Yes, many Yiddish works vanished. But Lansky ensured countless never would, including the first-known published work of modern Yiddish literature in 1864. To shore up the point, Gorelik shares some impressive stats: The Center showcases 25,000 books for sale, priced between $8 and $14 per; it keeps another 100,000 in a downstairs vault; and yet another 750,000 works are in an offsite location.
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Also on the tour, we meet David Mazower, the Center’s research bibliographer and chief curator. 
He said, “The majority of our members don’t have the opportunity to be here and see the Center, but they’re all passionate about the mission,” to which Gorelik recited: “It’s to recover, preserve, teach and celebrate Yiddish literature and culture to advance a fuller understanding of Jewish history and identity.” 
“Even if people can’t come to Amherst, they can come to the Yiddish Book Center,” Lansky said, referring to the frankly overwhelming amount of information available at the Center’s website, such as scanned Yiddish books and those in translation that Prof. Meir of PSU and other scholars access for their research. 
The website also houses a digital Yiddish library of millions of books (including children’s books and works recorded by Yiddish speakers); recordings of public programs; access to live-streamed events, as well as to online language and culture classes, “The Schmooze” podcast and “Weekly Reader” e-newsletter; fellowship, scholarship and summer programs; and interviews with people well-known (like Lenoard Nimoy) and those less so, all of which are part of the Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. 
After our tour, Bronson, the Center’s executive director, invites Alyssa and me into her office for some forward-looking insights.
Speaking at a clip both fast and enthusiastic, Bronson ticks off the Center’s multitudinous programs, those established and new and those Amherst-based and available elsewhere. 
“We’re throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall!” she said. 
For example, in September, our own Eastside Jewish Commons hosted three musical events sponsored by the Arts and Culture Initiative for Jewish Communities. This program, Bronson explains, “is a way to bring Yiddish content into Jewish communal spaces” outside the Center. 
Eric Stern, the EJC’s events coordinator and cultural arts ambassador, brought in a few artists, such as Yiddishist Sarah Larsson and her Minneapolis-based trio Red Thread that performed a variety of pieces including songs in Yiddish. Her concert sold out, Stern said. 
Today, Lansky – who in 1989 won a MacArthur Fellowship (or “Genius Grant”) for his revolutionary and indefatigable work – is 69 and preparing to retire as the Center’s president. In his upcoming role as senior advisor, he’ll continue teaching modern Jewish literature at the Center and perhaps more widely, too, he says. 
Next summer Bronson becomes the Center’s president, overseeing a staff of 43 and continuing to submit grants, cultivate visionary donors and steward its $52 million endowment – all while laser focused on the message of the centrality of Yiddish, to Jews and the wider world.
Head spinning, mind alight, I take a quick break to quench my (literal though also intellectual) thirst before leaving the Yiddish Book Center. A small sign says I’m getting a drink of water at the “Seltzer Shpritzer.” The Center truly offers an education at every turn or, if remote, at every keystroke.
Bronson says the Center has about 18,000 members around the globe, noting – with a nod toward young people – that the barrier to join is low at only $54 a year. 
While no longer “young people,” my final stop was at the Museum Store, where I became one of the Center’s newest members.
A self-described dinosaur who still keeps a hand-written daily calendar, Jenn Director Knudsen has published work in The Boston Globe, The Oregonian, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Forward and HuffPost, among other outlets. Her most recent personal essay is available at The Mother Chapter. Find her on Substack.

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