Lansky's quarter-century quest not only helped keep Yiddish literature from slipping into history, but also provided him with plenty of terrific material for his first book. Granted, a story about collecting old volumes in an obscure language initially sounds less than thrilling. But thanks to Lansky's storytelling skills, this memoir lives up to the "amazing adventures" advertised in its title; it's quickly clear why he's been dubbed "the Yiddish Indiana Jones" and "the Otto Schindler of Yiddish literature." Lansky's recounting of his personal mission may come off as self-aggrandizing to a few readers. But most will likely view the book as a great tale filled with memorable anecdotes and a rich cast of characters who reflect the endangered culture they're trying to save.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

Fun fact: I had no idea, as I sat reading this book in January 2025, that Aaron Lansky was up for the National Jewish Book Award’s 2024 mentorship designation! I picked this book to read in December, thanks to a BookTube TBR game, hee. I guess sometimes the stars align.

Less surprisingly than all of that: I really liked this book. I’ve been giving lots of 5 stars to Jewish historical and cultural nonfiction lately, so I guess this is relatively unsurprising.

In this book, Lansky recounts being a young graduate student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, attempting to study the Yiddish language but with a dearth of available books. The solution to this problem appeared to be just beyond his fingertips, as this era of time was when many elderly Ashkenazi Jews in America found themselves ready to bequeath their collections of Yiddish books, but without any direct heirs. Enter the “Youngerman,” often with a beat up truck, driving up and down the east coast, ready to take boxes of old books off their hands.

This was more than about cleaning their closets. For many aging Jews, giving their books to a burgeoning student of Yiddish meant re-living their formative experiences. Alas, like so many Jews of their generation, as they arrived in America they embraced cultural assimilation, effectively cutting themselves and their descendants off from the Yiddish language. But now they, and Lansky, recognized how much they had left to lose.

The beginning of this book is a somewhat charming (and also somewhat tense when it comes to preserving moldering books) account of a young Jewish man lifting the curtain to a vanishing past, as evidenced by Yiddish books and elderly Jews feeding him too many Entenmann’s cakes. Soon the project grows even larger, as he saves discarded library collections headed for the dustbin, backlogs from barely surviving American Yiddish institutions and, ultimately, trips abroad to Cuba and other places.

By this point, it’s clear that Lansky is spearheading some sort of nonprofit—a repository for the Yiddish literature that largely detailed the world of 19th and early 20th century Ashkenazim, and also an advocacy group for academic institutions and Soviet Jewry now visible behind the disintegrating Iron Curtain. Lansky intended to play a big part in the resurgence of Yiddish scholarship, and thus the Yiddish Book Center was born.

The book moves from quirky tales of building the collection to literary criticism of some famous books, to ruminations on how the nuances of Yiddish culture are understood today. Yiddish as an evolving entity might be more part of our past than part of our future. But in reclaiming cultural memory, we may make things new again. Many Yiddish speakers were lost to the Holocaust. Now, the language is seeing a resurgence.

Lansky ends the book with his opinions on what was lost with assimilation, in that losing a connection with the past “it is no longer a matter of grandchildren knowing their grandparents but grandchildren knowing themselves.” Like many people embroiled in Jewish learning, myself included, he believes our cultural legacy has much to teach us about the issues facing society today. And indeed, many younger Jews, particularly “anti-Establishment” ones, to borrow from TABLETS SHATTERED by Joshua Leifer, are looking for connections to Jewish heritage in innovative ways.

Maybe I’d quibble that focusing too narrowly on Yiddish misses a broader Jewish experience. Both this book and TABLETS SHATTERED made me think about a certain level of dismissiveness when it comes to the nuances of American Jewish life beyond assimilation and “the Establishment.” But as someone who values the past, I laud Lansky’s efforts, especially in regards to the Yiddish Book Center being able to meet non-speaking Jews where they are. Oh boy, would I like to go there. Also, as library science student, I got some geeky excitement over nods in the 1990s to curating and digitizing the book collection.

We’re now some 30-to-40 years in the future past the events of this book, and the “Youngerman” has turned into a retiree. I’m grateful that Lansky, older generations, and a whole bunch of other scholars and volunteers, aided to a new dawn for Yiddish literature and culture.

This was a ton more fun than I expected. Lansky brought to life the distinction between the Jewish religion and the culture. I admittedly don't know as much Yiddish as I'd like and unfortunately I don't know how to change that but this really as inspired me to try and learn more. It is amazing to me that, though the generation of Yiddish speakers is all but gone, there is still so much of modern Jewish culture that has been influenced by this unique language.

Shmegegee, shmuck, putz, meshugana…this is the Yiddish I grew up around, a Yiddish that permeated many Jewish households on Long Island. Until I was a teenager, I didn't know that my father could speak Yiddish. I didn’t know anybody could speak Yiddish, that it was a full language with verbs and adjectives, and not just insults. My father learned Yiddish from his grandparents who helped raise him. My great grandmother Anna swore at us in Yiddish, her Alzheimers stealing her love from us. She scared me, and I never knew the dedicated mother and grandmother, who never learned to read or write, but made sure all her children had a decent education.

My education never included a formal study of Yiddish. Like other immigrant groups who lost their native tongues, Eastern Europeans Jews disposed of Yiddish in favor of English. A few years ago, when I went with my aunt and uncle to visit the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA. To be honest, I do not remember much about the visit, except feeling a little confused why a Yiddish Center was located in rural Massachusetts. I did not fully understand the purpose of the National Yiddish Book Center until I read Outwitting History, an engaging triumphant story that once again illustrates Margaret Mead's famous quote that "A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

I found the book at my grandma’s house, and started to read, hoping it would help me fight my insomnia. At midnight, I became engrossed in readable, inspiring story of the creation of the Yiddish Book Center. I enjoyed the book for so many reasons. I love the idea of someone coming up with an idea, and seeing it to fruition. Aaron Lansky wanted to save Yiddish literature, and he went about it in the most physical and basic ways. With friends, he collected books from damp basements, dusty attics, and garbage filled dumpsters. Numerous practical problems, from storage to money, didn't stop him.

But even as the books piled up, the bigger question arose -- Who would read these books? Who would care? Everything else had been lost in the once vibrant life and culture of Eastern Europe. There was no physical home to return to. Not for the people and not for their books. Mr. Lansky tells the story of his visit to a small village in Lithiuania that once had been filled with thousands of Jews and now had only one small stone to commerate the demolish Jewish cemetery. Other headstones had been turned into walls and steps. There was no home to go back to. This and other experiences strenghtened his desire to give the books a homeland, an Israel for books, but without the contentious borders. The story of how the center got the funding and support is told with both love and drama.

Mr. Lansky does not make himself the hero of the tale. He generously includes all those who helped, including great tales of the elderly Jewish people who handed over their books like they were handing over their children. Mr. Lansky traveled everywhere to get the books, from Cuba to the former Soviet Union. It was a tale of saving an endangered species before it was wiped off the earth. Thanks to the full digitization of all the books in the collection, all of Yiddish literature is now available to be printed and sent anywhere in the world. Yiddish was the first language to have its entire literature fully digitized.



Judiaism emphasizes the seperation of the holy and the unholy. The Sabbath and the other days of the week. Lansky writes about the differences between the holiness of Hebrew and the earthiness of Yiddish. The earthiness of Yiddish has definitely inflitrated the English and the Yiddish I was brought up among. Also, the love of social justice and learning, intricately linked to the language, pervaded my upbringing and dominates my life today.

Will I go out and learn Yiddish now? I will ask my grandma, aunt and dad for a few lessons. Probably not, but I will seek out the translated books, and yes something will be lost in the translation, but the spirit will stay on.

Recommended readings and websites from the book:
- A Brief History of Yiddish Literature

- Modern Jewish Short Stories and Diasporan Culture www.jafi.org.il/education/juice/histo...

- Books by Isaac Loeb Peretz

- Books by Sholom Aleichem, especially Tevye’s Daughters on which Fiddler on the Roof is based

For information on the center, go to http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org

Aleichem Sholom!

I fell in love with this book. I'm just about to send my dad a copy, and I'm seriously thinking about learning Yiddish.

This is a well-written and informative book that provides an insight into „Yiddishkeit“ , its history and culture and into Ashkenazi Jews‘ fierce love of books, their „portable homeland“. It also illustrates the hostility felt towards Yiddish by extreme orthodox Jews as well as by the founders of the modern state of Israel.

With modesty and a fine sense of humour the author tells us how he and an ever-growing number of „zamlers“ with hard work and extraordinary determination rescued a million and a half yiddish books, at the same time rescuing Yiddish heritage, testimonials to a lost way of life and a world that was destroyed.
My "kvetch" is that towards the middle the book gets quite monotonous with all that shlepping and transporting of dusty books in dilapidated vans in the pouring rain and all that eating of gefilte fish, kugel, blintzes, etc., etc. at kichen tables.

In the second half the book gathers speed as the rescue operations extend to Cuba, the Baltics and the Sowjet Union.
It’s a worthwhile read, quite moving at times (though I am surprised by the many 5-star reviews) and it’s good to know that all that hard work resulted in the magnificent Yiddish Book Center.

Aaron Lansky tells us about a lot more than just his efforts (and those of his many, many supporters) to rescue Yiddish books. He interweaves his stories with a history of Yiddish language, culture, and literature. Although these brief history lessons are not nearly as entertaining as his anecdotes of traveling around the globe (although mostly to New York) to collect the books, put together they make for an engaging, even enlightening read.

This was an Amazon Kindle Daily Deal and I definitely got my $1.99 worth! Lansky provides some of his family background and his interest in the Yiddish language, which leads to saving the heritage of Yiddish literature before it disappears for good. Often, he and his volunteers literally went door to door, asking (usually aged) strangers for their books. This naturally took a lot of chutzpah - but the response was more often than not beyond positive. Lansky also discusses Yiddish authors and literature along the way, and piqued my interest in reading some of the books he mentions. It's a very story-based book, wrapping up with the opening of the National Yiddish Book Center.

My knowledge/appreciation of Yiddish pretty much starts and ends with the likes of Mel Brooks and Fiddler on the Roof; but that didn't affect my appreciation of Lansky's efforts in the slightest. I think anyone with an interest in literary heritage and how culture is/is not transmitted to the next generation would find this book interesting. Recommended as a library read at least.

This is definitely one of the best books I have read this year. Once I picked it up, I had go on until I was finished. This is the story of Aaron Lansky and his quest to save Yiddish books. At a time when even most Jews had given Yiddish up as dead, Lansky had the vision to rescue the lost books of Yiddish and then place them in the hands of people who needed them. So, pulling up his bootstraps, with help from various people, and a lot of guts, he went around collecting books, leading to the eventual foundation of the National Yiddish Book Center.

The stories in the book vary from very moving to humorous. From digging books out of dumpsters to meeting with elderly Jews who passed their collections to him one book at a time, Lansky's adventures take him around the world. And all this before the Internet was around. We take for granted that you can digitize books now (and they do digitize books now), but back in the early 90s, the technology to do so was brand new, untried. We also get to see him travel from Africa to Europe and even Latin America and the Soviet Union. And yet, for all the books he saves, there are so many lost. And indeed, Yiddish still is a relatively small language, so to speak, and one that is endangered. But it is also a language of history, of culture, of memory, and one that a new generation now wishes to discover, or rediscover, as a way to get to know its heritage. So there is some hope. ]

In the process of reading the book, you also get some lessons in the history of Yiddish and a little lesson in world history as well. So it makes for a very good book to read. If you are a reader who likes to read about books, who likes a good tale, and a little history, then this is definitely a book for you. It may, as it did for me, make you wish you could go out and read some of the many works and authors that Lansky mentions in the book. Sadly, I can't read Yiddish, but I can hope maybe to get a hold of one of the new translations of Yiddish works the NYBC is putting out (it would be nicer if one day I could learn to actually read the language). In the meantime, get a hold of this book.

Lovely and very touching book, and I was even mentioned in it when he tells about the Amia bombing in Buenos Aires “a small group of volunteers, including students from a local Hebrew school, painstakingly cleaned them,”
I will never forget that night when our idish teacher phoned us and asked us to go to a cellar to rescue the books. Thank you Aron Lansky for telling the world about us and mainly thank you for your work. You are a hero!

Probably really 3.5 stars - it's an interesting and heartfelt story about saving books and I enjoyed it.

This book gives an interesting perspective on a people and culture that are quite foreign to me. Initially I was a little thrown off by its total lack of a chronological order but it more than made up for it by introducing interesting people and bringing to light some compelling ideas. The most obvious of these is the conflict between new and old. Of course there are certain aspects of the idea that are specifically Yiddish but all people and cultures must grapple with how much of our past do we bring with us and how much do we leave behind to be replaced by the newness. Another prominent theme is simply the importance and value of books. Without being obnoxious the author shows and obvious passion both for Yiddish history and the books that capture the history. I enjoyed reading of a man who has so obviously found his "calling" in life and considers it in a very thoughtful way.