Aaron Lansky greets Yiddish Book Center alumni at our recent translation conference.

Dear Friends,

I’m writing to ask you to renew your annual membership in the Yiddish Book Center – and to tell you about our incredibly exciting plans for 2012 and beyond.

The big news these days is that the Center is teeming with talented young people, and they’re accomplishing more than we ever thought possible  Limoshl – for example?

In June, two of our young fellows traveled to Montreal’s Jewish Public Library to pick up the 200 redndike bikher (talking Yiddish books) you’re helping us re-master.  When they arrived, they found something even more astounding:  1,500 well preserved reel-to-reel recordings of lectures by and interviews with almost every major Yiddish writer of the last century! 

I can’t begin to overstate the significance of these tapes.  The oldest date back to the 1940s.  They include talks at the Jewish Public Library by Chaim Grade, Itzik Manger, Kadya Molodowsky, Rokhl Korn, and Sholem Asch.  There’s a lecture by Szmerke Kaczerginski recorded in Montreal in 1953 – less than a year before the great Holocaust poet died in a plane crash in Argentina. There are even tapes in English, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Saul Bellow, Mordecai Richler, and Leonard Cohen. 

We’re now partnering with the Jewish Public Library to remaster these tapes too and make them available to all.  Our technical experts in Boston estimate it will take two years to complete the job.  When the work is done, anyone with an iPod, a smart phone or a personal computer will be able to download these recordings and listen to lost voices we never thought we’d hear again. 

It’s safe to predict that many of those new listeners will be young people – the same young people who have downloaded a quarter-million Yiddish books from our online library over the past three years. 

Young people are re-energizing and transforming every aspect of our work.  Eighteen of them, including two from Australia, joined us for last summer’s Steiner Program.  They studied Yiddish three hours a day, explored modern Jewish history and literature, sang Yiddish songs, put on plays, joined us for a field trip to the Yiddish-speaking Hasidic enclave of Boro Park, and learned more in seven weeks than we or they expected.  I know – our daughter Sasha was one of the students.  She began the program with only a smattering of Yiddish words; now, when she phones or Skypes from college, she speaks to me only in Yiddish.

Our latest group of year-round fellows, who arrived in September, are using their Yiddish knowledge to spearhead a number of major projects.  Joshua Price, a recent graduate of Yale University, is adding Hebrew-character search capability to our online library – a boon to Yiddish readers abroad, for whom our transliteration system is less than intuitive.  Josh has also taken charge of the in-house scanning station you helped sponsor, training and supervising the staff and volunteers who keep the cameras clicking eight hours a day.  We’re now working with major Yiddish libraries in the United States and Israel to add thousands of additional titles and establish Yiddish as the first completely digitized literature in history.

If you can’t read Yiddish in the original, we haven’t forgotten you.  Another fellow, Sara Israel, a Steiner alumna who graduated last year from McGill, arrived here in September and immediately set to work organizing an international working conference on Yiddish translation.  We had budgeted for 25 participants; by the time the event took place in mid-November, 90 were on hand, many of them young and some from as far away as London and Cambridge, England.

The challenge addressed by the conference is formidable: of an estimated 45,000 Yiddish titles, barely two percent – two books in a hundred – have been translated into English.  And that’s not to mention the untold thousands of stories, poems, memoirs and serialized novels that appeared in more than 3,000 separate Yiddish newspapers and magazines.

As you know, the Yiddish Book Center began working on translation almost ten years ago.  Together with the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, we commissioned senior scholars and translators to publish ten well-regarded volumes through Yale University Press.  The only problem: most of our translators are elderly, and at our current rate of a book a year it will take another 39,000 years before all of Yiddish literature is accessible to English readers.

Which is where our conference comes in.  As we see it, the only hope for translating large numbers of books is to mobilize large numbers of translators, and that means training a new generation.  Among the decidedly takhlesdik (practical) questions on our agenda:  How do we identify books to translate?  How can we help with publication and dissemination?  (Ideas include a dedicated section on our website and an annual “Translation Issue” of Pakn Treger.)  How can we develop a “wiki” database to provide the meaning of words that don’t appear in published dictionaries?  And most important, what training programs and fellowships will it take to inspire, train, and mentor a new generation?  

The conference produced a raft of brilliant, ambitious, game-changing ideas, and we’re already at work putting them into practice.  I’ll be sure to let you know what happens.

All of our current projects – tapes, books, oral history, translation – are a logical outgrowth of our original mission: to rescue the treasures of Yiddish culture and make them available to all.  Now we’re increasingly focused on the next logical step:  to develop innovative educational programs to share the content, context and progeny of the books we’ve saved.

Toward that end, I’m proud to announce that two sensational young scholars will be joining the Center’s staff.  The first, Joshua Lambert, will arrive in January as our Academic Director.  With a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Michigan, Josh has a unique gift for conveying complex ideas in a clear, straightforward manner.  You may already be familiar with his work from his popular roundup of new Jewish books in the online magazine Tablet.

The second new staff member, Asya Vaisman, will join us next fall as head of our new Yiddish Language Institute.  A native of Russia, Asya graduated from Barnard in record time and went on to earn her Ph.D. in Yiddish at Harvard.  She intends to hit the ground running with on-site and online Yiddish courses for students of all ages.

With Josh and Asya in place and the Kaplen Building complete, we’re now able to vastly expand our educational offerings.   This coming summer, from July 29 – August 5, we’ll introduce “Great Jewish Books,” a residential program designed to introduce promising high school students to the sort of modern Jewish literature – from Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, English and other languages – that they’ve likely never encountered before.  Thanks to the generosity of Michael Steinhardt, 18 brilliant, inquisitive 11th- and 12th-graders will attend the program completely free of charge.  They’ll live on a college campus, learn from great teachers and prominent writers, hike, bike, swim, and cultivate an interest in Jewish books that will last a lifetime.  If the program is even half as successful as we expect, we can imagine expanding to three sessions and a hundred students or more within the next three years.

Of course, no matter how many programs we offer we realize that there’s a limit to how many students we can accommodate here in Amherst.  If we’re truly to succeed in restoring the “flip side” of Jewish life, we need to leverage substantive learning beyond our own walls. 

One approach is online education.  As I write, 90 students are enrolled in Professor Sam Kassow’s riveting three-part series on “The Jewish Metropolis” – twice the number who attended the program in person.  More than 900 are tuning in each week for Yuri Vedenyapin’s “A shmek Yidish – A Taste of Yiddish,” a series of Yiddish lessons for beginners.  Eventually we hope to offer a whole catalog of online courses that you’ll be able to enjoy at nominal cost, at your own pace, in your own home.  

A second, even more powerful way to exercise leverage is by teaching people who in turn will share what they learn with others.  As early as next fall we plan to introduce a year-round schedule of immersion programs for recent college graduates (and, eventually, energetic retirees).  Just as our Cultural Liaisons are now organizing Yiddish-related events on college campuses, we hope to create the Jewish cultural equivalent of the Peace Corps, with well trained emissaries working with energy and imagination to expand Jewish discourse, restore missing knowledge, and foster new creativity.

In short, 32 years since we first set out to rescue Yiddish books, we have a very real chance of repatriating their content with new generations and restoring the totality of modern Jewish identity.  But we can’t succeed – we can’t save books, re-master tapes, train translators, hire new staff, introduce new programs, or dream new dreams – without your renewed support.

It’s impossible to overstate how much your membership renewal means to us.  Even after all these years we remain a proudly grassroots organization, and we depend on this single, annual mailing for fully one third of our total budget! 

So I’m writing to ask you to renew your membership for 2012.  To encourage you to increase your contribution, we’re offering three irresistible premiums: 

• For a tax-deductible contribution of $100 or more, we’ll send you an exclusive set of 12 blank note cards featuring charming, full-color illustrations from Yiddish children’s books.  (My favorite comes from the 1913 Yiddish version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.  You haven’t lived till you’ve heard Mowgli speaking in Yiddish.)
• Increase your contribution to $360 and we’ll enroll you in our President’s Circle, which entitles you to the 12 illustrated notecards, plus a boxed, 14-CD, English audiobook of I.J. Singer's masterpiece, The Brothers Ashkenazi.  Originally published in 1936, this epic novel follows a Jewish family in Lodz from the city’s founding through the rise of Communism and the turbulent upheavals of the First World War.  The critic Joseph Epstein called it “the greatest Russian novel ever written in Yiddish.”
• If you’re able to increase your tax-deductible contribution to $1,000 or more, we’ll recognize you as one of our Brilyantn (Jewels) and send you the notecards, the CD set of The Brothers Ashkenazi, plus a new, hard-cover copy of the limited edition classic, Photographing the Jewish Nation.  This beautifully printed, large-format book features 170 original photographs from S. An-sky’s ethnographic expedition to the Ukraine in 1912.  (An-sky’s fieldwork inspired his immortal play, The Dybbuk.)  In the words of David Roskies, “Here, recovered and recorded at the last conceivable moment, is the living shtetl, those market towns large and small that were once home to the majority of Jews in the world.”

Whatever you can afford, I want you to know how much your renewal means to us.  If you’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, if you share our vision, if you want us to continue to save books, re-master tapes, train translators, welcome young people, and inspire students of all ages, then now is the time to renew your membership for 2012.

Please – won’t you renew your membership by sending your most generous, tax-deductible contribution right now, while it’s still on your mind?

Mit a hartsikn dank – With heartfelt thanks,

Aaron Lansky
President

P.S.  If you’re pleased with all we’re doing – and if you share our bold vision for the future – then now is the time to renew your membership for 2012!  Please – won’t you help us continue our work and realize our dreams by sending your annual, tax-deductible contribution today?   Not a member yet?  Now is the perfect time to join us and help us save books, share stories and engage a new generation.  A sheynem dank – my personal thanks!