Word: yiddishe
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Aaron Lansky glances at the forest of jammed bookshelves surrounding him: "The word for it is hemshekh -- a continuity. This is from the world Hitler tried to destroy." Lansky, the executive director of the National Yiddish Book Center, is standing in the center's annex in Holyoke, Mass. There, on the vast, hangarlike floor of a renovated paper factory, are stored about 700,000 of the 900,000 Yiddish books that the center has collected...
...institutions as diverse as the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, the University of Melbourne in Australia and the public library in Cincinnati. To stock their private libraries, scholars around the world have come to rely on the center, which is the world's largest supplier of out-of-print Yiddish books. A Korean academic who lives in Tokyo orders his books from the center's office, which occupies a century-old brick schoolhouse in Amherst only four blocks from Emily Dickinson's home and 15 miles from the Holyoke annex. So do readers -- tenured or not -- in such places as Guam...
...retrieval of the books and their return to use are the focus of the center's mission of salvaging a vanishing culture. In 1980, when he was 24, Lansky founded the center because he feared what would happen as the last generation of native Yiddish speakers began to die -- not ultra-Orthodox Jews who still speak Yiddish but the heirs to the essentially secular Yiddish culture of Europe and North America, which the ultra-Orthodox reject. The libraries of these aged people, he worried, would be thrown out, and a world would be lost...
That process could have been the coup de grace for Yiddish, a fusion of German, Hebrew and Slavic languages that was the lingua franca of Ashkenazic Jews for most of the past millennium. In this century the language had already suffered the cataclysm of the Holocaust as well as the adoption of English by most North American Jews, the suppression of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, and the decision by Israel to bypass Yiddish and give Hebrew the status of a national language. Lansky, who in 1979 was a graduate student in Yiddish literature at McGill University in Montreal...
...novel it might have become. The year is 1870, and Yozip Bloom, a Russian immigrant and itinerant Jewish peddler, roams the Pacific Northwest. He is kidnaped by an Indian tribe that calls itself the People. For reasons not entirely clear, Yozip has been singled out as the spokesman, Yiddish-inflected English and all, who will defend the rights of the People against the perfidious, treaty- breaking whites...