By Aaron Lansky

In the last issue of Pakn Treger, I made the case for a more holistic Jewish identity: one informed not only by religion, but by its flip side of Yiddish, Jewish experience, and a broad constellation of modern Jewish literature and culture.

This article is about takhles—how we intend to translate that vision into practice.

Although we can’t predict exactly what projects we’ll pursue in the years ahead, we have mapped out four broad goals: to make all Yiddish books available to all; to mobilize a new generation to translate Yiddish literature into English; to further Yiddish language learning; and to offer far-ranging educational programs and advance understanding of the content, context, and progeny of the books we’ve saved.

Three decades ago, my young colleagues and I set out without a penny in our pockets to save a literature. Today, as we prepare to embark on new adventures, we’ve got a huge head start: a vibrant organization, thousands of committed members, an accomplished board, a seasoned staff, a $17-million endowment, an amazing building, and not a dollar of debt.

Here, then, is a road map of four broad routes we intend to travel in the months and years ahead.

Universal Yiddish Library

Since 1980, we’ve recovered more than a million Yiddish volumes, strengthened collections at over 600 libraries, launched the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, and posted 11,000 titles online—prompting The New York Times to declare Yiddish “proportionately the most accessible literature on the planet.”

But the job’s far from over. Even at this late date, we’re still collecting books, including many from overseas. We’re capturing contemporary narratives on video through our Wexler Oral History Project. And we recently joined forces with the Jewish Public Library in Montreal to digitize audio recordings of 235 Yiddish books, along with thousands of hours of lectures and interviews with major Jewish writers, including Chaim Grade, Itzik Manger, and Allen Ginsberg.

Of course, the biggest news these days is demand. Since we placed our books online in March 2009, they’ve been downloaded a quarter million times. As best we can tell, the vast majority of our readers are young people, both here and abroad, who download Yiddish books for scholarly research, literary pleasure, and to better understand themselves.

Although no one knows exactly how many Yiddish titles there are, the best guess is 28,000. The 11,000 we’ve posted so far are, by definition, the most popular, since our holdings reflect what Jews actually read. Several months ago, the Internet Archive, the nonprofit group that hosts our online library, installed a scanning station here at the Center. We’re using it to process a backlog of 4,000 additional titles, some recently rescued, others extremely rare. It will take us about two years to scan them all, by which point 15,000 titles, or 54% of Yiddish literature, will be available online.

Although we don’t own copies of the remaining 13,000 Yiddish titles, we know where to find them: in a handful of major libraries in the United States and Israel. We’re therefore inviting these institutions to join us in creating a shared, open, non-proprietary online collection that we’re tentatively calling the Universal Yiddish Library.

The benefits of a Universal Library are many. Its combined holdings will be more complete than those of any one institution. It will include runs of 3,000 Yiddish journals and magazines, containing articles, poems, short stories, and serialized novels that never appeared in book form. Costs will be shared. And by working together, we’ll have a much better chance of perfecting Yiddish OCR, or Optical Character Recognition: the technology needed to convert our current image files into searchable text. When that’s done, research that currently takes years will be accomplished in a matter of seconds, and Yiddish, once one of the most endangered of literatures, will become the first completely accessible literature in history.

Translation

We’re thrilled by the growing demand for Yiddish books in the original, but we’re also keenly aware that most people can’t read them. We’re also aware that most Yiddish titles—about 99%—have never been translated into English.

Almost ten years ago, we teamed up with the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature to produce the New Yiddish Library: a series of high-quality English translations published by Yale University Press. The editor in chief, David Roskies, recruited distinguished scholars to select titles, edit texts, and provide critical introductions. We’re incredibly proud of the ten titles Professor Roskies and his team have produced over the past ten years. The translations are accurate and beautifully crafted, and the scholarly introductions are an important contribution to the field.

But despite that success, we’ve reluctantly decided to discontinue the series (the last two titles will appear next year). The reasons? High costs, slow sales—and a paucity of translators. Most of our current translators are elderly. One of the youngest, Joseph Sherman of Oxford University, died in 2009, shortly after completing his translation of Dovid Bergelson’s The End of Everything. At our current rate of a book a year, it will be another 25,000 years before all of Yiddish literature is accessible to English readers!

I think it’s clear that the only way we’re ever going to translate large numbers of titles is to deploy large numbers of translators. And the only way to do that is to train and mobilize a new generation. Last winter we met with leading scholars. In the spring, we announced small grants for aspiring Yiddish translators: 37 applied, far more than expected. As we go to press, we’re about to host “Translating Yiddish Literature: Mobilizing a New Generation,” a two-day conference that will bring together translators, scholars, writers, editors, lexicographers, online publishers, and, we hope, loads of young people to address a number of practical questions: What works should be translated? Where can new translators publish? (Suggestions include a translation section on our website and an annual, dedicated “Translation Edition” of Pakn Treger.) How do we help translators find the meaning of words that aren’t in dictionaries? What grants and prizes should we offer? And, most important, how do we train and mentor the next generation?

Yiddish Language Institute

There’s an old joke: a person who speaks many languages is polyglot, a person who speaks two is bilingual, and a person who speaks one is American.

Fortunately, times are changing. Young people in America are coming of age in a bigger world, and their attitude toward languages is becoming more like that of my grandfather, a Galitsianer junkman who spoke seven languages (all of which sounded vaguely like Yiddish). Just as one can’t fully grasp Torah, mysticism, rabbinic texts, or modern Israel without Hebrew, one can’t fully appreciate the literature and sensibility of East European Jews without Yiddish, the language most of them actually spoke.

As befits an organization with books in want of readers, we’ve been teaching Yiddish off and on almost from the very beginning. Now, in response to growing demand, we’re expanding that effort into a full-fledged Yiddish Language Institute. We recently appointed Asya Vaisman, an enterprising young Yiddish teacher and scholar with a PhD from Harvard, as the first director.

Asya is devoted, energetic, and extremely well organized, which is good, because she’s going to have her hands full when she arrives in Amherst next September. Her teaching commitments will include courses for Five College students, Fellows, Steiner Summer Program students, participants in our conferences for adults, and members of the local community.

Fortunately, Asya is adept at computers—she posted her first Yiddish materials online when she was 13. She plans to develop online courses for adults and other students who can’t make it to Amherst.
She’ll also help position the Center as a nexus for the broader field of Yiddish education. Preliminary plans call for regular gatherings of working teachers; a section on our website where teachers can share curricula, texts, worksheets, and other resources; and, with the help of the best teachers in the field, innovative professional training.

Our long-term goal is that Yiddish will assume a place in Jewish education commensurate with its historical significance and that it will be routinely taught in Hebrew schools, day schools, public schools, synagogues, and college classrooms.

Teaching the Flip Side

The Yiddish Book Center began teaching about the wider context of Jewish culture almost as soon as we began rescuing books. In the early days, when we couldn’t afford oil for heat, our students used to huddle around a kerosene heater on cold winter nights. Over the years, we’ve offered summer programs and weekend seminars for adults; internships, fellowships, a winter program, and the Steiner Summer Program for college students; and at least a thousand lectures, discussions, films, concerts, and public events.

Now, as the world grows more diverse and young Jews more eager to understand who they are and where they come from, we’ve decided to dramatically expand our educational opportunities. Toward this end, we recently opened the Kaplen Family Building, an addition that doubled the size of our Amherst headquarters and includes a student center, classrooms, an oral history recording studio, a kosher teaching kitchen, and a flexible performance space. We’ve just taken another big step: appointing Joshua Lambert, a brilliant young scholar of modern Jewish literature, as our academic director. (He’ll be here full-time beginning in January.)

Our goal is to broaden the definition of Jewish literacy to include not just subjects that are already widely taught—Hebrew, religious texts, the Holocaust, and Israel—but also those that aren’t: Yiddish, modern literature, music, film, theater, food, folklore, and other wellsprings of Jewish peoplehood.

Not only do the subjects we teach make us unique, so too does our pedagogy. We’re not an academic institution, but a bridge between the academy and the broader community. University Jewish Studies programs train scholars; our job is to create well informed Jewish citizens by conveying substantive information to all in a manner that’s clear, lively, and fun.

The first of what we hope will be many new programs debuts this coming summer: Great Jewish Books, an intensive, weeklong program for high school students. Josh Lambert and others will lead highly motivated young people on a journey through some of the most powerful works of modern Jewish literature, exploring the ways in which literary themes touch on students’ own struggles to live as Jews in an often perplexingly modern world. Thanks to generous support from Michael Steinhardt, tuition, room, and board will be free—which means the program will be highly competitive. Modern Jewish literature is incredibly compelling, and if we can manage to convey just a fraction of its depth and excitement, we have a good chance of creating lifetime Jewish leaders and readers.

I can envision the day when we’ll be running educational programs in Amherst almost every week and weekend of the year. But even that won’t be enough. Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” If we’re to really make a difference, we have to figure out how to exert leverage to reach students beyond our walls.

One obvious avenue is technology. If we can accommodate forty students in a classroom here, we can reach ten times that number by offering the same course online. We’ve already made tentative forays into online learning: a Yiddish course offered last year featuring Yuri Vedenyapin, and “The Jewish Metropolis,” an online seminar with Professor Samuel Kassow. Distance learning in general is still in its infancy, but as we gain more experience, we hope eventually to expand our nascent efforts into a full, year-round catalog of interactive courses.

An even more powerful way to increase our leverage is to educate teachers, leaders, organizers, and activists, who in turn can share what they learn with others. For the past several years, with support from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and the late Ruthe B. Cowl, we’ve been giving small grants to promising Steiner Program alumni to organize Yiddish-related events on their own campuses. Our Fellows here in Amherst use what they learn on a daily basis to spearhead a wide range of initiatives.

We’re now speaking with colleagues in other organizations about a similar but far larger and more ambitious program loosely modeled on the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Exceptional recent college graduates would study at the Center for a month, a semester, or even a year, and then head into the field as educators, organizers, and cultural entrepreneurs. Some will work in schools, some in camps, and some at existing organizations. Still others will use incubation grants to create start-ups of their own.

There are so many other possibilities: a training program for teachers in Hebrew schools and day schools, or a fieldwork program for energetic retirees. With over a million books and an endlessly fascinating subject—Jews and Jewish history—it’s safe to say that only the sky is the limit.

Conclusion

This article attempts to provide a road map of where the Yiddish Book Center is headed over the next five to ten years. The map is at a scale that highlights the main roads, but leaves out the details. That’s partly because we’re trying to cover so much ground and partly because the details aren’t yet known. When you work with irrepressible young people on a daily basis, as we do, you never know what ideas they’ll come up with next or know quite where they’ll lead you.

I was young myself, just 23, when I founded the Yiddish Book Center. The first time I set out, in a rattletrap truck, I knew exactly where we were going: to save the world’s Yiddish books before it was too late.

If our goals are even more ambitious now, it’s because of a hard truth discovered along the way: earlier generations of American Jews didn’t just toss out their parents’ and grandparents’ books; to a startling degree, they also jettisoned their language, literature, sensibility, and the whole vast cultural side of their identity.

So maybe the Yiddish Book Center’s new directions aren’t so new after all. Thirty years ago we set out to rescue books. Now we’re expanding our mission to reclaim the culture they contain. Books and culture alike are irreplaceable treasures of the Jewish people and prerequisites for understanding ourselves and sharing our heritage with the world.

Personally, I have never agreed with Dayenu, “It Would Have Been Enough for Us,” the song we sing each year at the Passover seder. When the Yiddish Book Center began, I dreamed of a day when Yiddish books would be safe. Now that they’re secure, I dream of the day when they and their progeny will be read. And even that’s not enough. I dream of the day when they can be read in English. I dream of the day when Yiddish, the mame-loshn, the mother tongue of three-quarters of the world’s Jews for a thousand years, will be taught alongside Hebrew in every Jewish school in the land, and no one will wonder why. I dream of the day when Jewishness, that vast dialectical civilization, will be made whole, its flip side reclaimed, its creativity renewed, its memory restored.

In short, after 32 years, new roads are beckoning as never before. How in the world can we stand still?