Saving Yiddish books

Yeah, I know.  You want to read my take on “Super Tuesday.”  You wonder what I think of Nikki Haley dropping out.  

Instead I’m writing about Aaron Lansky who was a grad student in Montreal in the 1970s taking courses in Yiddish lit at McGill University.  He was having difficulty getting books in Yiddish.  He then discovered that many of the elderly Jews in Montreal whose ancestors emigrated from eastern Europe to escape pogroms, were throwing out books in Yiddish because no one could read them.

Lansky began to collect these books.  He took a two-year leave of absence from grad school and recruited zamlers who schlepped cardboard boxes of books to a factory loft in western Massachusetts.

Those books are now in the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.  Mr. Lansky is 68.  His center has approximately 1.5 million volumes.  What a mensch.

Info about Mr. Lansky was found in Joseph Berger, “He Rescued 1.5 Million Books in Yiddish.  That’s Chutzpah!” New York Times, (Feb. 29, 2024), pp. A1, A11.  [That headline, by the way, misuses the word “chutzpah.”]  

And, by the way, Haley won Vermont.  She shouldn’t have dropped out.  As Vermont goes, so goes the nation, to misquote an old saying about Maine.