Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books

Lansky answers many fascinating questions in this book. One that's seldom asked OR answered is "What did they read in the shtetl?" -- not "What did they write?" Lansky's view that all books in Yiddish were valuable distinguishes him from many scholars. When he found translations of major works of Western literature and of a wide variety of subjects, he cherished them. His insight about the people who read the Yiddish books helps one picture the aspirations and motives of our forebears before they came to the US, assimilated, and sent their children to get the education they could only dream about.

All critical faculties to the winds, I'll think about the finer details later. Aaron Lansky's account is an impassioned adventure, a page turner, almost to the point of feeling greedy: how can we rush by so many wonderful characters so fast? I learned a lot, yearned a lot and burned a lot. And now I want to read Yiddish, hug everyone and call to the future: if one young man and a few friends can outwit history, how much more can all of us do!

This is a superb book. I received it as an unexpected gift and started reading it without any expectations, but almost immediately was hooked. I am a longtime bibliophile and normally do focus on books and collecting and thought I have read about and studied everything about books and am therefore somewhat jaded, but in this fascinating story the author, the individuals, and the people as a whole captivated me enormously. To summarize, Aaron Lansky as a young student decides to help save a vanishing literature by collecting as many Yiddish books as he can. He then uses his vast enthusiasm, knowledge and energy to accomplish his most worthy goal. Scouring the country, he meets many elderly people with old books. But he mostly tells their stories which he learns in kitchens over ethnic food - every book comes with a story and some `nosh'. These people all have had compelling, human, tragic, funny and enchanting lives. And the Yiddish literature also comes through in his prose. He covers the general history of Yiddish language and literature in a very un-painful and fascinating way. Yiddish was regarded by intelligentsia as `common' and so the literature was not prized the way authentic Hebrew texts were; in addition Yiddish was a product of the Diaspora and symbolic of subjugation and ancient deprivations. Thus in the later 20th century, most of these books were lightly regarded and often discarded. When Mr. Lansky began his quest these vibrant other-worldly books were in danger of being lost. Although most modern readers only know of Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, there were equally talented authors in all fields of literature who wrote in this lost language of a lost world. What is so very compelling is how people all pitched in and helped in this effort to save an entire literature. Lansky assembles his team of young students and elderly refugees--their common goal is to save a piece of culture. And along the way they come across people so endearing and so grumpy and so funny and with such huge stories to tell that this book deserves a second reading. Most `bibliophile' books focus on the books as objects to be collected. This one shifts the focus to the people and the culture and the history of our common humanity.

Outwitting History works well on several different levels. Judging from some of the other reviews here, if you've ever studied or spoken Yiddish, or know people who do, you'll find this story interesting. But if, like me, you don't know any Yiddish other than schmaltz and oy ve, and you aren't even Jewish, you can still enjoy Lansky's tale of saving hundreds of thousands of books and helping to preserve the history of what may be a dying language. As a college student, Lansky started salvaging Yiddish books that were being discarded. As word got around that someone was willing to shlep old books away, he became inundated with people cleaning out their libraries and libraries who couldn't use the books any longer. Lansky nudged a couple of friends to help him and it turned into a full time job, taking his unreliable pickup truck all over the East Coast and beyond to pick up cartons of books at all hours. Often when Lansky and his helpers arrived, there was a smorgasbord of food waiting for them and the person giving away the books usually had some tales to tell about how they acquired the books, or about what it was like to be Jewish immigrants in New York sixty or seventy years ago. In exchange for the books, Lansky and his friends got an education in a fascinating slice of American twentieth century history. After some twenty-five years of book salvaging, Lansky has a million and a half volumes stored in his National Yiddish Book Center. Although Yiddish is no longer the first language of many, thanks in part to Lansky, many people are rediscovering its literature and culture.

I got this book just yesterday and am almost finished with it already -- it's that compelling. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll meet truly unforgettable characters. You might even end up yearning to learn Yiddish! Most of all, you will feel immense gratitude for the hugely important, but at the time undervalued, work started by this young man back in 1980 to rescue the writings, the vital lifeblood, of an incredibly rich, but dying, culture. I am not Jewish, but I do recommend this book to Jewish people who want to see close up what is being done to recapture missing parts of their history. I also recommend it to anyone else who, like myself, feels enriched by the contributions of the Yiddish culture to our lives, and who wants to read an entertaining saga of how that culture, through the efforts of Lansky and his friends and benefactors, will now never be forgotten. And it was a near thing. Even for those who are already familiar with and excited by Mr. Lansky's project, which after all has received a fair amount of publicity over the years, I still highly recommend this book to fill in the details and bring you even greater appreciation of his efforts. And for those who know nothing about it, and even for those who could care less what has been achieved, it is still a book worth reading, simply as a testament to the immense power of an ordinary person's single-minded passion, dogged persistence and sheer hard work, when it is lived out year after year after year. It's incredibly inspiring to see the magnitude of what this young man and his friends achieved against all odds, and it decisively slams the door on that strength-sapping thought, "But what good can the efforts of one person do?" So read! Enjoy!