Jewish Geography
institution Lansky founded in 1980 as a then 24-year-old grad- uate student of Yiddish. More than one visitor to the YBC’s campus in Amherst, Massachu- setts has compared the shelves and shelves of Yiddish books, rescued from dumpsters and the attics and basements of ag- ing readers, to the colossal gov- ernment warehouse seen in the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark . But Spielberg also seemed to understand what has driven Lansky, who retired in June as the centre’s president; his successor is Susan Bronson, the centre’s executive director for the past 14 years. Lansky started amassing the collection by going door to door, asking elderly Jews and their offspring for the books they might otherwise have thrown away. The rescue proj- ect could easily have remained a warehouse of old books, dusty treasures mouldering in the dark, occasionally accessed by scholars and hobbyists. In- stead, the collection of some 1.5 million volumes is the founda- tion of an institution that now includes Yiddish classes, aca- demic fellowships, a training program for translators, schol- arly conferences, a publisher of books in translation, an oral his- tory archive, a podcast, and that digitized library of both classic and obscure Yiddish books. The Yiddish Book Center celebrates and commemorates what Lansky calls “one of the most concentrated outpour- ings of literary creativity in all of Jewish history,” lasting rough- ly from the 1860s to the imme- diate aftermath of World War
CULTURE AARON LANSKY BUILT A HOME FOR YIDDISH BOOKS. NOW HE’S HANDING OVER THE KEYS by ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
STEVEN SPIELBERG had already donated money to the Yiddish Book Center when he asked if the centre’s founder, Aaron Lansky, might fly out to Los Angeles and drop by his office. The filmmaker doesn’t usually meet with the beneficiaries of his philanthropy, Lansky told me recently, but wanted to explain his support for what is now the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library at the YBC, an online col- lection of more than 12,000 Yiddish titles. “‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that what I do for a living is I tell stories,’” Lansky recalls Spielberg telling him. “‘The idea that you have miles of Jewish stories that have yet to be told, that’s just irre- sistible to someone like me.’” Spielberg may not even have been the first supporter of the Yid- dish Book Center to find something, well, Spielbergian about an
Reproductions of book and magazine covers hang over the main book room of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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