Heritage
Categories: History , Rediscoveries , Nonfiction
In Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use," a mother and her two daughters view the cultural importance of some beautiful inherited quilts in different ways. The plan is for the uneducated daughter to get the quilts when she marries, and when the quilts wear out, the uneducated daughter knows how to quilt and will make some more.
The educated but mean daughter, who doesn't know how to quilt, is appalled that a piece of history will be lost when the quilts wear out. She wants to preserve the quilts and hang them on her wall. Our sympathies are meant to be with the uneducated mother and daughter--but the mean daughter does have a point. The quilts will wear out, and a piece of the characters' family and ethnic heritage will be gone.
It's sort of the same with books.
Most of the books I've been trying to sell on eBay and Amazon are worthless junk that probably exist in huge numbers everywhere. And yet, I can't bring myself to throw them out. There's the Friends of the Library donation box, and I suspect I sometimes donate books that end up being discarded (for good reason) by the Friends. It just seems wrong to throw out a book that hasn't been chewed on. Is the 1995 Gale Guide to Internet Databases likely to be useful to anyone? No! Should it be thrown out? I'm not sure. Speaking from my own attempts to learn JAVA, I wonder at the utility of the 1997 JAVA in a Nutshell: a Quick Desktop Reference, although the book is now checked out. (Trust me, the JAVA virtual machine is a lot better now than it used to be.) What happens when we lose living memory of what it was like to use the Internet in 1995?
You can't preserve all books, but at least anyone who speaks English can read the two computer books I mention above, if their research or naivete leads them in that direction.
This is not the case with Yiddish. Twice, I helped a former friend move, and while I found the process very annoying, schlepping ill-chosen thriftstore purchases; random old newspapers and junk mail; and incomplete Scrabble sets from house to truck to house to truck to house--I think I felt the some of the same kind of reverance she felt when carrying the boxes of Yiddish books she had inherited from her grandfather.
Yiddish is Old German, with a lot of words borrowed from Hebrew and other languages, written in Hebrew script. It was spoken particularly by Jews in eastern and central Europe roughly the 10th century until the mid-20th century and was an important written language from roughly the late 1800s until World War II. It's spoken now ("in a mummified form" I learned in a documentary on Isaac Bashevis Singer) by Hassidic Jews, scholars, and an increasing number of young people who realize that Hebrew in not the only Jewish language, that before the beginning of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers, many in Eastern Europe.
My former friend couldn't read even the books' titles, but she knew they were valuable. My friend and I quarreled, but I often think of those books, which have no doubt by now been damaged beyond readability by basement leaks and acidic paper. I urged her to donate them to a place where they could be conserved, but she didn't want to give them up. Some day, she hoped, she would be able to read them herself.
Fortunately, I wasn't the only person who thought books in a language few people can read should be preserved, and other people have actually done something about it.
Aaron Lansky, who eventually won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship for his work at what became the National Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst, Massachusetts. He recounts his story in a 2004 memoir, Outwittng History. Amazingly, he started collecting Yiddish books, mostly previously destined for the trash bin (or indeed, actually found in a dumpster) in his early 20s. He had studied Yiddish at a time when very few young people did and was able to speak in Yiddish with the aging immigrants who wanted a safe repository for their personal libraries. The thought was that there were probably about 80,000 books in Yiddish left; by now, according to the National Yiddish Book Center Web site, there are over a half million, collected by the Center from all over the world, in the Amherst collection and in other libraries.
Lansky's book is mostly the story of increasing success. His foundation, now 25 years old, has recently won a $2 million grant. The story is a sad one as well, of course; over the ten years about which Lansky mostly writes, he finds that he's collecting fewer books from elderly immigrants and more from their descendants, who are less likely to know Yiddish. Another disturbing story is his visit to the Newark Public Library (whose Web site suggests it has cleaned up its act), which at the time of the book was mostly being run by "sullen teenagers" who sometimes threw away books rather than reshelving them. Lansky was able to rescue much of the library's Yiddish collection.
The Library has many books on Yiddish and the history of Yiddish, as well as older books written in Yiddish. Here are just a few:
- Stardust lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America
- The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
- Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation
- Meshuggenary : Celebrating the World of Yiddish
- Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in all its Moods
You can buy reprints of Yiddish books from the Center, as well as books about Yiddish, and they are working to translate and digitize other important works.
