Saving yiddish books. Rewiev of Aaron Lansky’s Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, trans. Agnieszka Nowak-Młynikowska, Sopot: Smak Słowa, 2020. ISBN 978-83-66420-14-4, pp. 368.

Abstract

After World War II, the United States became the main center of the Yiddish language. Families emigrating from Eastern Europe to the USA often took books with them, and later printed their literature in the settled areas. The Yiddish-language book collections were later rejected due to the fact that Jewish immigrants were often insatiable readers, and when they died, their huge and valuable collections ended up in the hands of children or grandchildren who did not know the language of their ancestors. Under favorable circumstances, they land up in synagogue libraries, but predominatingly they fetch up in attics or even in trash, which caused their irretrievable destruction. Young American Aaron Lansky, together with a group of aficionados, decided to save this heritage, thanks to which 1.5 million books were saved.