Aaron Lansky's unprettified tale of rescuing Jewish books is deceptively simple. He takes a simple story and retells it again and again, changing details each time, and advancing a larger narrative with each retelling. It goes like this. Someone called and said "come save our Yiddish books, they are (1) being thrown in a dumpster; (2) sitting in a basement that is about to flood; (3) moldering in an attic; (4) being thrown out because my parents just died; (5) etc." The author rents an old truck, gets some friends or coworkers together, drives through rain and snow, meets some interesting people, gets fed food from a long ago land, sits and listens to their stories, loads up the books into an old truck as they rest on the edge of destruction, and brings them back to his warehouse to save a culture and redistribute the books to new readers.

This work continues throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the last Yiddish speakers fade away, and continues to this day. He tells this story again and again, and each time we slice through a new corner of the Yiddish world that was, from North America to Eastern Europe to Latin America. We are reminded that this Yiddish speaking world was not all happy Rothsteinesque ("The Joy of Yiddish") cute one word expressions that you can throw into your conversation, but was filled with sophisticated intellectuals and political activists, people who hated each other to their dying day - communists who wouldn't speak to socialists, socialists who despised culturalists, religionists who despised them all, and many more - all of who whom were determined to go to their deaths waging war against their fellow travelers in the land of Yiddish, even as they built a Jewish literature in the larger cultural universe. Indeed, there once was a world. It washed up on American shores and lived fully, but was not able to transmit itself to the next generation.

As Lansky travels from scene to scene, from old age home to dumpster to basement, hunting for every Yiddish book in existence, he introduces us to beautiful people and bitter people alike, and to a vast dying linguistic civilization. It's really fascinating.

For his work Lansky received a McArthur "genius grant" and founded the Yiddish Book Center which collects, preserves, digitizes and distributes Yiddish books. But much more deeply, he meditates on the varieties of Jewish identities and civilizational choices. There was a time in the late 19th century early 20th century when Zionism was just one possible Jewish future, while Yiddish culture debated many others too- a Soviet future, a socialist future, a secularist future, even an American future. Hitler and Stalin annihilated most of those, with only the Zionist option left standing, together with a deracinated American version.

When I lived in Israel in the 1980s, and was busy learning Hebrew, my aunt Elenore Lester, a theater critic in New York, told me about the Yiddish revival. I could not have been less interested - Yiddish was old news and I saw little future for Jewish life in America. Now, in middle-age, firmly rooted in the diaspora, I find questions of Jewish civilization in the diaspora much more engaging and important than questions involving Israel. For me the eternal Jewish question is not to regain the land, but to live in the condition of diaspora, galute. Yiddish civilization and literature puts me in touch with the last moment before the Holocaust and the rise of Israel when we Jews wrestled deeply and long with our place as a diaspora people. Yiddish will not be a spoken language (outside of the Hassidic world) in America again, but the questions raised by its literature are more relevant than ever to the Jewish project of building and maintaining a thriving diaspora civilization, and a unique cultural position within a multi-cultural mosaic.

This was a surprisingly well-written book, with stories that kept me interested, even fascinated, throughout! Lansky had to deal with a very wide range of issues, including marketing, fundraising, storage, domestic and international travel, and digitization, while working with people on an individual level, learning their personal histories at the kitchen table. I recommend this book very highly!

This is the real story of the amazing adventures of 23 year old graduate student Aaron Lansky who took a course in Yiddish and found a life calling. As he gradually learned to read Yiddish he found that there were very few Yiddish books available to be read. This isn't just a Jewish story but a story that reminds us all how easy it is for the modern world to disregard what previous generations cherished. In 1980 when this story starts Lansky learns how to track down Yiddish books and save them from immigrants' uncaring children and grandchildren as well as rain-soaked dumpsters. His adventures will make you laugh and touch your heart. Some of history's best know books and plays are based on original Yiddish stories, read this book to find out which ones. By the end of this book Lansky has a million Yiddish books and a library that lends to anyone who will read them. It is a truly amazing adventure.

I don't know anything about Yiddish, but I loved this book by Aaron Lansky, who describes taking on the task of saving Yiddish literature by preserving any texts in Yiddish he could find--going to yard sales, estate sales, library sales, bookstore closings, and so on. It's sad and yet inspiring to think of Lansky's efforts to save Yiddish publications from extinction.

More than likely, I would not have read this book if it had not been our book club selection for the month. Thanks, book club, for introducing this book to us. I enjoyed the history and especially liked the subject because my best friend growing up was Jewish and I remember her father and grandmother speaking Yiddish. Way to go Mr. Lansky and friends for doing your part in rescuing the Yiddish culture.

A true life adventure story about saving books, Outwitting History details an extraordinary endeavor and accomplishment. Unique and at times absorbing, it reads like a dot.com business startup success story, with success measured in terms of books saved and culture preserved. What began as a simple personal quest by author Aaron Lansky, to learn, read and obtain Yiddish books, morphs and eventually evolves into the founding of the National Yiddish Book Center, repository for 1.5+ million Yiddish books. As Lansky alarmingly discovers that generations of Yiddish speakers, writers and notably readers are dying with future generations in families uninterested in maintaining either the language or books of their ancestors, he perceives an urgent need to collect and preserve generations of Yiddish books before their certain destruction; thus lies the impetus and storyline for the 25 year journey of the Center.
The Center didn’t happen without a lot of hard work, dogged determination and vision, and for many of the chapters of Outwitting History the collection of Yiddish books for the Center reads like the diary entry of anyone who has ever had to hastily move college apartments or pitched in to do so: Receive phone call; urgently assemble team of volunteers and friends; formulate rough plan keeping in mind what can go wrong likely will; find and drive rental truck; deviate from plan as unanticipated event encountered; meet interesting people and be inundated with food; save Yiddish books with great personal histories to donor; feeling of teamwork, camaraderie after accomplishment of something noteworthy. Next chapter: repeat entire process.
By saving books from sure destruction Lansky may have preserved not only the books, but a culture that can be studied and assimilated in some form into the future. His extraordinary accomplishment has certainly contributed to outwitting history.

In the late 1970s, Lansky began taking college Yiddish classes and soon found that it was quite difficult to find books in Yiddish, so he began taking them in. As word got out that he was accepting them, more and more people started calling with books for him to take. In the process, he learned a whole lot about Jewish culture, particularly in the aftermath of WWII, and of the often conflicting views of Yiddish as both language and social construct. I am not Jewish and the only Yiddish I know are the few words that have trickled into American English (kibbitz, tchotchke, etc.), so this book took me into quite unfamiliar territory. Which is really the best part about books.

aaron lansky aveva un sogno- salvare dalla distruzione, dal macero, dal dimenticatoio i libri scritti in una lingua ormai quasi scomparsa: l'yiddish. aaron lansky in questo libro ci racconta come il suo sogno sia diventato realtà.
emozionante.
(per chi volesse saperne di più:http://yiddishbookcenter.org)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book!! It was beautifully written and described so many delightful people with humor, respect, and compassion that I was spellbound throughout.
I learned so much about Yiddish culture and history that I feel like I took a mini course. I also recommend it to anyone feeling a bit lonely. A Humanist's retreat!

Solidne 4,5. Czyta się jak dobrą, przygodową książkę.

I loved this book. Aaron Lanky is my age. He started saving Yiddish books back in the 70s and is now responsible for saving millions of books and the Yiddish heritage. I could see myself doing this. So inspiring.

A "chipper" work about saving books and, in the process, helping a culture to survive. I liked the book overall as Mr. Lansky's personal stories are compelling. I also liked his thoughts about cultural survival - and how, even if you learn Yiddish, you are still several steps away from understanding the culture with its nuances of humor, sexual politics, etc.