Life affirming

The parts about people just dumping books, etc saddened me. I had a hard time with all the yiddish words interspersed and the number of people mentioned. Interesting history. There was humor in the parts about the people feeding them when they came to pick up books and how it took so much longer than they expected. Overall, I did enjoy the book.

If you grew up in a family that spoke Yiddish (even your grandparents) drop everything you're reading and read this next. Even if you're not Jewish, read it. It appeals to everyone. Lansky almost accidentally started to help preserve what scholars thought were 70,000 extant Yiddish books in the world. At last count, he's found (saved, really) over 1.5 million. For Jews of Eastern European heritage, you'll hear your grandparents voices in real life, not borscht belt comedy. Lesn, kinder, lesn!

Even if you're not jewish, you'll see what perseverance can produce. Most of the book focuses on the process of collecting the books, often one by one from elderly Jews moving to nursing homes, but sometimes in groups of several thousand, oddly enough from Hassidic groups who felt that ordinary literature was worthless.

The real purpose of the National Yiddish Book Center, of course is not so much to be a library, but to redistribute the books to a new generation of readers. Unfortunately, Lanky doesn't explain how this is done very well - well, maybe in a sequel.

Yiddish is dying, long live Yiddish! Aaron Lansky, founder of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, shares with us, in this hilarious and moving memoir, his adventures rescuing Yiddish books from the oblivion that demographics seems to promise them. But books aren’t the real heart of this story: people are. Behind every book Lansky and his colleagues rescue is a human life. Their stories will make you laugh, cry, and think.

Wonderfully told story about a man who set out to save Yiddish literature. It's chronicles are often funny combined with the sad strength of the Jewish people as they were forced to relocate from Eastern Europe during the 20th century. His efforts have culminated in a monumental effort that appears to have preserved the Yiddish language and perhaps revived it from it's death throes of 30 years ago. Quite impressive and a much better read than I could have anticipated.

In his early twenties, Aaron Lansky got interested in studying Jewish culture. This led to his life's mission to save Yiddish books before the literature was lost forever. Parts of this memoir are funny, and I was surprised at how moving it was. Lansky captures the characters of the many friends, helpers, and donors that he enlists in his endeavor. One elderly couple would call every six weeks with several hundred books, all bundled into sets of three or four. Lansky told them they didn't need to do that, that the young folks could carry them in boxes. That's how he found out that they carried the books themselves from the donors' homes on the bus, two bundles at a time.
I don't think I'd have been as involved in the story if Lansky had been saving, oh say, china plates or even musical recordings. But I have such a connection to books that it was easy to understand people organizing their lives around saving them. Of course, these are more than mere books-- they're artifacts of a vanishing language that is nonetheless an important part of Jewish heritage. They're important to the rest of us, too: they contain the wisdom, humor, and way of life of a people.

Update 11 April 2024.
I just read this for a second time for a bookgroup. I had to, it had been my nomination. As much as I liked it the first time, I might have liked it even more on this second reading. Lansky did a great job with his book rescue and he did a great job with this book. I just finished writing my own book about my father that I based on his memories that he wrote for me some years ago. My parents didn't speak Yiddish at home; they spoke Polish. We never went to synagogue, we didn't celebrate the high holidays -- we didn't even celebrate Chanukah and the only time we ever had a seder at our house (we always went to friends) my mother served shrimp on the salad. But I always knew we were Jewish. How can you not when all the family, except my parents, was murdered in the Holocaust? This time around I enjoyed the whole book again, from start to finish, but I found some of his comments at the end, of what it means to be Jewish, more meaningful.

This is the story of the rescue of a million Yiddish books. In the process of the rescue, Lansky met many fascinating and interesting people and ate some wonderful food, in great quantities. I laughed, I cried, and I learned quite a bit about my own, Jewish history and culture. I recommend the book for anyone who is interesting in books, culture, languages, modern Jewish history, deli food....
See my blog for more thoughts on the book:
http://beyondthepale-dvora.blogspot.c...

Its rare I give a 5 star on a book I have read; but this one deserves it! Books have always been in my life and they have always been my friends. This story tells the quest of one young man In the late 70's who was Jewish by birth but not actively following his religion. Aaron was in college and decided to study Yiddish. He found a professor who would teach it and a few other students who were interested. But there weren't really any Yiddish books to study, just what the professor had. He finished the course with only one other student. He realized that the Yiddish that was spoken by his grandparents and the older Jews was a dying language. He set out collecting old Yiddish books. The total; he thought; would be about 70,000 books. By word of mouth he started driving all over the country collecting Yiddish books. Twenty five years later he and his followers had amassed over 1.5 million books from around the world! In Moscow during the communist rule all libraries received a list weekly of books that were banned to be burned! Those books were partially made up of Yiddish
works of poetry and novels. All over the world books were being saved by Aaron and his group.
This is a beautiful story of preservation of a forgotten language and the people who donated and their stories.

Did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did. A happenstance mission to save all the Yiddish books, worldwide, becomes a grassroot journey, driven by the author, with many a mishap, history lesson and sit down dinner. The stories told by the numerous book donators were heartwarming, heartbreaking and humorous. I picked up a few Yiddish words that are now part of my vocabulary and learned a lot about the tenacity of preservation. A truly amazing story of how driving dilapidated rental trucks with nickle and dime finances eventually led to a multi-million dollar library housing over a million Yiddish publications. A Bravo! read.

I am fascinated by Jewish culture and this was a good read for that. The trips to collect books and the stories around them did become repetitive though, and could have been a good 80 pages shorter with more/better impact

A terrific read, a window into an important culture, terrific stories. Personally inspiring, to say the least; in the sense that one might change course, or make significant choices as a result of having read this book. Assuming that by "one" in the previous sentence, I actually mean "me".

Aaron Lansky has single-handedly saved millions of books that would have otherwise been destroyed. He founded the National Yiddish Book Center in western Massachusetts--this book is the story of creating the Book Center and what Lansky had to go through to convince people to give up their books. It's a great read.