Outwitting History (36 page)

In her celebrated short story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Cynthia Ozick captures the disdain of a Yiddish writer toward those who write Jewish books in English:

He found them puerile, pitiable, ignorant, contemptible, above all stupid. In judging them he dug for his deepest vituperation— they were, he said,
‘Amerikaner geboren.’
Spawned in America, pogroms a rumor,
mama-loshen
a stranger, history a vacuum.

Well, I, too, am
Amerikaner geboren,
American born and raised. Like most of my generation, I didn’t speak Yiddish at home, I didn’t study Torah and Talmud in my youth, I didn’t attend Yiddish schools or belong to a Jewish youth movement or grow up with a life-or-death awareness of Jewish identity, and as a result I will never match the native Yiddish fluency or the depth and breadth of Jewish learning of Chone Shmeruk or Ruth Wisse—or of my friend Sam Kassow. Not ten years older than I, Sam is a Russian, German, and Jewish historian who was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany shortly after the war. His mother was a partisan. He knows seven languages, including Yiddish and Hebrew, and is well read in all of them. Our wives are close friends, our children are roughly the same age, and when we get together for
yonteyvim,
Jewish holidays, the kids play while Sam and I drink
shnaps
and talk about Jews. It’s an inexhaustible subject, and what I always realize is that Sam, who is not
Amerikaner geboren,
has more Jewish
knowledge in his smallest fingertip than I can hope to acquire in a lifetime of study.

That incontrovertible fact is not necessarily cause for despair, though; it does not necessarily mean that we’ve reached the end of the road, that Jewish knowledge is condemned to dilution with each passing generation, or that America—a land where
mame loshn
really is a stranger and history a vacuum—does not, perhaps for that very reason, possess certain
mayles,
certain virtues of its own. No one is more aware of America’s promise than Ruth Wisse (born in Romania, raised in Canada, now at Harvard), as she makes clear in her impressions of our dedication:

The new building, architecturally evocative of the wooden synagogues in Eastern Europe, is the most beautiful and certainly the most carefully designed dwelling place that Yiddish has ever had. . . . The Yiddish Book Center has enlisted the American spirit to help save the Yiddish heritage. . . . I have learned a lot from this young man about the potential of good ideas joined to an entrepreneurial imagination. . . . Jews are never more American than when they show initiative on their own behalf. All that Aaron was able to accomplish for the Yiddish Book Center derives from his pride and pleasure in growing up Jewish in New England.

Hineini
—of the hundreds of journalists and scholars who have written about the Center, Ruth was the most perceptive. Despite our abiding commitment to history, my colleagues and I at the Yiddish Book Center do not pine for the Old Country or for the past. We are who we are, where we are, when we are. And in that sense I prefer to compare us not to Chone Shmeruk, a twentieth-century Yiddish scholar, but to Zushya, a nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbi. “When I die,” Zushya
foretold, “God will not ask me, ‘Zushya, why weren’t you more like Moses?’ God will ask, ‘Zushya, why were you not more like Zushya?’” We American Jews are often ignorant of history, but we are shaped and challenged by it all the same. Here on the free soil of New England, where our permanent home now stands, we have as good a chance as any to outwit it still.

Everybody’s mad at us!” Abra Greenberg, the stalwart director of our Yiddish book repository, informed me one hot day in September 1997. Until our new building opened three months before, most of the books we collected had been stored in our Holyoke warehouse, where the public rarely got to see them. Unless we had at least five copies of a given title, they were reserved for major libraries and never listed in our published catalogs. As a result, visitors never knew what they were missing. But now, in the new building, our stacks were open, visitors were welcome, and they were invariably incensed when Abra refused to sell them the particular book they wanted, especially when they could see extra copies sitting right there on the shelf. “What am I supposed to do?” Abra asked me. “Our customers won’t take no for an answer.”

It might seem strange, after collecting more than a million Yiddish books, that we didn’t have enough to go around, especially when the ranks of many authors—Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Guy de Maupassant—were full to overflowing. But when it came to other great writers, such as I. J. Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hirsch Dovid Nomberg, Moyshe Kulbak, Alter Kacyzne, Dovid Bergelson, and
hundreds more, for whatever reason—whether too few copies were printed or the editions were too flimsy, whether they weren’t read enough or they were read too much—our stocks were woefully inadequate. Even if we did have sufficient numbers, all it took was one professor in one university to assign such a book to her class, and poof, our entire supply would be instantly depleted. Keep in mind that we are the only comprehensive supplier of Yiddish books on the planet, and then imagine an analogous situation in any other literature: Say, for example, that in all the bookstores in all the world there were only five extant copies of
Don Quixote, Great Expectations, War and Peace,
or
Moby-Dick
. We’d be signing petitions, convening commissions, appealing to publishers, universities, governments, the United Nations, somebody, anybody, until the missing titles were back in print. Why should Yiddish be any different?

The problem didn’t stop there. Even when we did have sufficient duplicate copies, their condition was often so bad as to render them unusable. That’s because modern Yiddish literature holds the dubious distinction of being 100 percent acidic: printed on inexpensive, wood-pulp paper, which, because of its high acidity, gradually breaks down, turning yellow and brittle and, eventually, crumbling into fragments and dust. Although this is not a uniquely Jewish problem—every library in the world struggles with the Herculean task of conserving books printed after 1850, when pulp paper (as opposed to rag paper) came into widespread use—the problem for Yiddish is particularly severe. Even the best of Yiddish publishers were usually shoestring operations, and more often than not they cut costs by using the cheapest paper they could find.

Like all readers of Yiddish literature, I had grown accustomed to the problem. When I turned the pages of a Yiddish book, I pretty much expected them to crumble. My wife, on the other hand, did not. Night after night she’d watch in disbelief as I lay with her in bed, engrossed
in one or another Yiddish novel, oblivious to the monsoon of paper crumbs raining down on our new cotton sheets. Some libraries had begun to deacidify their most brittle volumes by treating them with alkaline gases or solutions, but the process was expensive (as much as $100 a volume) and it could only arrest further disintegration, not reverse the damage that had already been done. A brittle book would remain brittle, no matter what they did. As a result, many libraries balked at acquiring Yiddish books from us: Already swamped with millions of brittle volumes of their own, why compound their
tsores
by bringing more coal to Newcastle?

So there we were in our brand-new building, Abra and I and a handful of students, surrounded by crumbling books and angry customers, without a clue about what to do to make them happy.

“How about
reprinting
books?” one of our work-study students suggested.

“We tried,” Abra explained. “A few years ago we reprinted a missing volume of the
Lexicon of Yiddish Literature.
It cost us three thousand dollars. Altogether we’ve got about fifteen thousand titles in our collection. Let’s see . . . that would be $45 million to reprint them all.”

“Okay,” the student persisted, “but there’s got to be another way. Have you ever thought of
digitization
?”

We hadn’t; the technology was still in its infancy back then. But the idea was intriguing. Using computer scanners (essentially, high-tech Xerox machines), it was theoretically possible to take an electronic “picture” of every page of every book, store the images in a computer, and use them to print brand-new copies on demand. As far as we knew, no one had ever tried to digitize an entire literature before, but we could think of no compelling reason why it
couldn’t
be done. So we consulted experts at Harvard and Yale and turned to our longtime friend Peter Lerner, an investment analyst with the Kaufmann Fund, in search of a company to whom we could outsource the labor-intensive work of scanning and production. Peter went straight to the CEO of
Danka, a spin-off of Kodak, who agreed to take on the project at a price 95 percent less than that of a larger competitor. Three weeks later, at a factory in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, the systematic digitization of Yiddish literature began.

The process wasn’t simple. First each book had to be “disbound”: the spine cut off so that pages could be fed through the scanner one at a time. Danka had to order special machines from Japan that could scan both sides of the page at once, since many were too brittle to go through twice. Most books were so dusty the technicians had to clean the scanners’ lenses after every pass. At our end, we had to keep up with selection, cataloging, and proofing. And fund-raising. Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation provided a lead gift, in recognition of which we named the project “The Shmuel Shpilberg Digital Yiddish Library,” and our friend Max Palevsky, Spielberg’s first boss, sponsored the Palevsky Literature Collection. For $360, we gave our members a chance to “adopt” a title, adding their name and commemoration to the title page every time the book was reprinted. Even my wife and I contributed—we couldn’t resist the chance to immortalize our parents.

After four years of round-the-clock scanning, our online catalog went live in June 2001 (at www.yiddishbooks.org). Our project director, Gabe Hamilton, worked with colleagues at VTLS, a library automation company, to design an interface similar to that of Amazon.com: You log on, search for books by author, title, subject, or keyword, and click on the titles you want. The order goes straight to the bindery, where it takes only minutes to produce a brand-new acid-free, clothbound copy that looks as good as or better than the original and will last for five hundred years.

Although many individuals still prefer our original “artifactual” books, the reprints are a godsend for libraries, since they require no
conservation and can better withstand the rigors of circulation. We’re now reaching beyond our own collection. Our Noah Cotsen Library of Yiddish Children’s Literature includes almost a thousand Yiddish children’s books, many borrowed from the YIVO. And our David and Sylvia Steiner Yizkor Book Collection, a joint project with the New York Public Library, offers on-demand reprints of almost seven hundred memorial volumes chronicling Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust—a crucial resource for historical and genealogical research.

In many ways digitization is the fulfillment of our original mission: to preserve Yiddish books and make them accessible forever. Our electronic masters—3.5 million pages and counting—take up less room than a shoe box, and we have secreted duplicate copies in secure locations across the country, including a former Strategic Air Command bunker buried deep inside a mountain not a half mile from our Amherst headquarters. Our next step is the Virtual Yiddish Library, an ambitious plan to place the
content
of most Yiddish books online, fully searchable and instantly available, free of charge, to any computer user anywhere in the world. The day our catalog went online, the
New York Times
reported that “Yiddish is now, proportionately, the most in-print literature on earth.” Just as gratifying was a letter from the makers of Trivial Pursuit informing us that an upcoming edition of their popular board game would include the question “What was the first literature to be digitized?” On the flip side of the card, the answer, of course, is “Yiddish.”

E
ARLY ON THE
morning of July 18, 1994, a massive explosion ripped through the main Jewish communal building of Buenos Aires, killing ninety-seven people and injuring two hundred, many of them children. The work of Iranian terrorists, it was the deadliest attack on
a diaspora Jewish community since the Holocaust. Within an hour of the explosion, Shoshana Wolkowicz-Balaban, an Argentinian Jew living in New York, phoned to inform me that the building was home to the largest Jewish library in South America. The next day I wired the head of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, offering to replace every volume that had been destroyed. Four months later, our bibliographer, Neil Zagorin, and Zachary Baker, then head librarian of the YIVO, traveled south to make the necessary arrangements. Their report was chilling:

The scene still resembled a war zone. An immense crater yawned where the front door of the seven-story building once stood; the rear of the structure, open to the elements, leaned cracked and askew, light and plumbing fixtures dangling. Across the street apartment houses gaped, their facades collapsed, skeletal and empty. . . . Deserted rooms with cracked and crazy walls, suspended ceiling beams like broken bones protruding at rakish angles, and the occasional piece of furniture covered with plaster dust were all that remained of the social service agencies on the lower floors. . . . [In the building’s auditorium] a grand piano, its veneer warped by exposure to the elements, still stood—on the edge of nothing. . . . In an adjacent conference room stood a table that rescue teams had used for emergency surgery after the blast.

Because the library was in the back of the building, many books survived, but their pages were covered with pulverized plaster and concrete, and some were stained with blood. Workers carried them down rickety ladders to the basement of an adjacent synagogue, where, as Neil and Zak watched, a small group of volunteers, including students from a local Hebrew school, painstakingly cleaned them, one page at a time.