David Rothman writes “In Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, author Aaron Lansky tells how he has looked beyond the brick-and-mortar incarnation of the National Yiddish Book Center and entered the digital era. Lansky and his colleagues have not just founded a home for slowly disintegrating paper books given away by aging immigrants whose sons and daughters are ignorant of Yiddish. They have also established a Virtual Digital Library Project. Led by a Lansky associate named Gabe Hamilton and financed by Steven Spielberg, the Project has already digitized 3.5 million pages of Yiddish books, making available print-on-demand versions of the works of such greats as Sholem Aleichem and I.J. Singer, older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
David Rothman writes “In Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, author Aaron Lansky tells how he has looked beyond the brick-and-mortar incarnation of the National Yiddish Book Center and entered the digital era. Lansky and his colleagues have not just founded a home for slowly disintegrating paper books given away by aging immigrants whose sons and daughters are ignorant of Yiddish. They have also established a Virtual Digital Library Project. Led by a Lansky associate named Gabe Hamilton and financed by Steven Spielberg, the Project has already digitized 3.5 million pages of Yiddish books, making available print-on-demand versions of the works of such greats as Sholem Aleichem and I.J. Singer, older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Please note that the digital library is just one detail in a book that is undeniably a bibliophile’s delight despite the horrors recounted in such chapters as “The Great Newark Book Heist.” “The library,” writes Lansky, “had been in disarray since 1969, when, in the aftermath of the Newark riots, a newly elected administration targeted it as an elitist white institution and tried to shut it down.” Further atrocities continued into at least the ’80s when a young library worker tipped off Lansky that several thousand Yiddish books were about to be tossed out. Almost one third of the collection was already gone.
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