Amherst, Massachusetts

By Daniel Benjamin

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.

The rest have been returned to circulation, restored to the life of books. Most of them have been sold, sometimes in packages of 500 or more volumes, to 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, Thailand and Brooklyn, N.Y.

The 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, realized that more was at stake than the survival of the language as a spoken tongue. A native English speaker who was raised in New Bedford, Mass., and did not learn Yiddish until he studied Jewish history in college, Lansky clung to the language with a convert's passion -- in part, he says, because it represented a culture "on the cusp," not in the mainstream but on the periphery. The experiences and insights of Yiddish literature, Lansky felt, should not be lost. "As native speakers pass on," he says, "the books become the sole access to the last thousand years of Jewish history."

Not everyone saw it that way. Lansky's first goal was to muster support from some of the large Jewish organizations with headquarters in New York City. "They all said the same thing: 'Yiddish is dead. Forget it.' " He refused to. Instead, he resolved to scratch along on whatever he earned, and packed off to Maine to work as a migrant blueberry picker for the summer. He made ( enough to have stationery printed. "I had a picnic table and a Government- surplus typewriter. I sat down and started putting out press releases saying, 'If you have old books lying around, send them in . . .' "

Within a month the books started arriving -- by the thousands. Soon Lansky was spending most of his time -- most of the next five years, in fact -- behind the wheel of borrowed or rented vans, collecting books from elderly donors who were too frail to pack and mail their books. Lansky no longer does the driving; a network of nearly 100 volunteers around the U.S. and Canada now handle most of the collecting. "We always expect the deluge to slow down," says Lansky. "Yet we're still getting 600 or 700 volumes a week." Late last year he visited half a dozen cities in the Soviet Union where Jews, taking advantage of the cultural freedom afforded by glasnost, have expressed an interest in establishing Yiddish libraries.

In its first decade, the center's collection has grown to include 25,000 titles. The true measure of its achievement is comparative: scholars estimate that only about 40,000 works were ever printed in Yiddish. With these riches, the center has become a whirligig of cultural promotion, keeping pace with a resurgent interest in Yiddish around the world. It runs an adult-education seminar and a student-intern program, and, using Yiddish-speaking actors in Israel, is taping entire novels. This profusion delights Lansky, whose accomplishments were recognized last July by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago, which conferred on him one of its so-called genius fellowships. The $225,000 award will provide a stipend for five years; it may be a divine repayment with interest for the first four years of the center's life, when he drew no salary. The center supports itself today from book sales, donations and dues paid by some 8,000 members.

Lansky has another book project. This one involves not only old volumes but also the stories of their owners, which he is transcribing for a chronicle of his adventures in book gathering. Shortly after he began his collection runs, he started tape recording his conversations with the donors, many of whom had thought their culture was doomed. "They're giving up a library, and it's like a moment of transition," Lansky says. "They're giving up the library before they die. So they often cry and tell stories."

His first visit -- to an 87-year-old man named Temmelman in Atlantic City & -- was a memorable one. Lansky arrived around noon on a hot summer day to find Temmelman, dressed in a heavy wool suit, sitting in the lobby of his building. "I said, 'I hope you haven't been waiting long.' He said, 'Actually, I've been sitting here since 7 this morning. I didn't want I should miss you.' " Upstairs, in his apartment the old man, in the best East European tradition, served Lansky cookies and hot tea in a glass. Then he began handing him books. Lansky recalls Temmelman regaling him with the history of each volume: " 'Well, Yungerman' -- Yungerman, young man, has kind of become my generic name in all of this -- 'you know, this book we bought in 1925, we went without lunch for a week we should be able to afford it. And this book, this book my wife and I bought in '36, it was a best seller and everybody had to read it.' "

Hours later Lansky prepared to leave, already long overdue for his next stop in Philadelphia. But seeing this, Temmelman called after him, "Eyn minut, Yungerman, where are you running off to? You don't understand." Explains Lansky: "You see, he lived in a high-rise for the Jewish elderly, it was a twelve- or 15-story building. He said, 'You don't understand, all the other people in the building also have books for you.' " Temmelman escorted Lansky through the building, knocking on every door and announcing, "Excuse me, but the Yungerman here needs books." Recalls Lansky: "The people started coming out with bags and boxes and suitcases of books. Some of them had to read poetry to me, and of course everybody wanted me to sit down at the kitchen table and drink more tea and eat cake. It was like visiting my grandmother 20 times in a single day. It was unbelievably difficult, but it really showed me what I was going to be facing over the next ten years."