Sholem-aleykhem! I’m writing to ask you to renew your annual membership in the Yiddish Book Center. The last time I wrote you was to let you know that I’ll be retiring in June after 45 years on the job. Together we’ve built a strong, vibrant, and resilient organization, and I’m confident it will continue to thrive and grow under the leadership of my successor, our current executive director Susan Bronson. As for me, I won’t be far away: I’ve agreed to stay on as a senior consultant, and I hope to begin teaching through the Center in the fall.
For now, though, I want to report to you one last time as president on what we’ve accomplished with your support over the past year and how we plan to continue our remarkable work in the years ahead.
I think you’ll agree that the world has sometimes felt kapoyer—upended—during the past year. And yet here at the Yiddish Book Center demand for our work has never been greater. Thousands of books continue to arrive from all over the world. Last month, for example, Ron Dunsky, a former student of mine from Montreal whom I hadn’t seen in almost 50 years, arrived with a U-Haul truck to deliver the Yiddish and Hebrew library of his grandfather, Shimshen Dunsky, a writer, translator, educator, and activist who died 44 years before. Many of the books were personally inscribed by their authors—a veritable who’s who of modern Yiddish literature.
Other books this past year came from less likely sources, such as the Jewish Hay Fever Association of Bethlehem, NH—a town in the White Mountains where Jews used to go to escape the pollen and pollution of the city. And it’s not just books! An old friend, Shoshana Balaban Wolkowicz, got her birthday wish when her son Matti agreed to drive her to the Center to see our new exhibition and deliver a gift: the portable Yiddish typewriter on which Shmuel Rozhanski, her long-ago boss in Buenos Aires, edited the 100-plus volumes of a reprint series called Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Masterworks of Yiddish Literature).
Our graduate fellows have been putting in long hours to unpack, sort, and process the steady influx of books and other treasures. They’re diving into our enormous collection of Yiddish sheet music (including recently donated opera guides for Carmen, Faust, and La Traviata). They’re documenting Yiddish “zines”—a contemporary form of countercultural Yiddish journals. And they’re organizing our ever-expanding collection of Yiddish type, including ornate fonts, king-size wooden “poster type,” and stunning colophons and engravings. Caleb Sher, the Richard S. Herman Endowed Senior Fellow, has been presenting papers and inviting experts to our underground vault to explore what is now thought to be the largest and most diverse collection of Yiddish type ever assembled.
Visitors continue to stream into the building to see Yiddish: A Global Culture, the new permanent exhibition that curator David Mazower and his team spent five years assembling. Global in scope yet deeply personal, it tells the often-surprising story of modern Yiddish culture through rare objects, family heirlooms, photographs, music, radio recordings, and videos. Visitors are blown away by displays of Jewish creativity that most barely knew existed. “Here in front of me,” Jennifer Stern wrote in the Forward, “accessible yet fragile, were treasures of the Yiddish culture I’ve come to care about so deeply. I’ve rarely been more intimately connected to Yiddishkeit in all its wonder and variety.”
The number of visitors is about to increase even further thanks to our inclusion in Bloomberg Connects, a mobile app that highlights notable museums and cultural spaces around the world. We’re now working on traveling and online versions of the exhibition for those who can’t make it to Amherst to see it in person.
In the meantime, the Universal Yiddish Library, another hugely ambitious long-term project, is nearing completion. As you know, we’ve been working for decades to capture digital images of our books and share them online, free of charge. Three months from now that effort will culminate when we officially launch the Universal Yiddish Library: a project we’ve spearheaded with the National Library of Israel, the New York Public Library, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to combine our respective digital holdings and make every page of almost every Yiddish book searchable through a single portal. Yiddish, a literature you helped us rescue from basements and dumpsters, is poised to become the most accessible literature on earth.
Our Wexler Oral History Project is proving itself similarly indispensable by capturing in-depth interviews with native Yiddish speakers and children of Yiddish writers, artists, and other cultural activists whose stories would otherwise be lost forever. The interviews have been filmed all over the world in Yiddish, English, Russian, Spanish, Hebrew, and other languages. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities—and the efforts of project director Christa Whitney and her staff—viewers will soon be able to search for individual names, places, words, and phrases across thousands of hours of recordings and see on their own screen the exact moments where the terms were spoken. Filmed in high-definition video and available for free on our website, the interviews have been downloaded 10 million times and are recognized as an essential source for scholarly and journalistic research.
Of course, we’re not only saving books and stories—we’re also offering innovative educational programs for students of all ages. At a time when antisemitism is on the rise, fostering a deeper understanding of Jewish history and culture has become more necessary than ever. Talented high school students came to Amherst this summer for Great Jewish Books, a weeklong residential program where they discovered works of modern Jewish literature that most had never encountered before. “My Jewish understanding is forever changed,” one student wrote. “I am taking away a newfound desire to read, learn Yiddish, and explore Jewish literature.” If experience is any guide, many of our alumni will return for our Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, enroll in Jewish studies courses in college, and possibly teach Yiddish and Jewish literature themselves one day.
We’ve seen a remarkable increase in recent years in the number of people who want to learn Yiddish. All over the world enrollment in Yiddish language courses is on the rise. We’re offering classes of our own, both in person and online, including our rigorous but ever popular Steiner Program for college students and the Bossie Dubowick YiddishSchool for adults. We understand, however, that we can’t begin to accommodate everyone who wants to learn, which is why Asya Vaisman Schulman, the director of our Yiddish Language Institute, has leveraged our efforts by creating a state-of-the-art textbook and launching a program to train and certify Yiddish teachers, who in turn are sharing what they learn with students of their own.
Since not everyone can learn Yiddish well enough to read it, we’re also stepping up our efforts to translate Yiddish literature. Twenty years ago, scholars estimated that fewer than 2 percent of all Yiddish titles were available in English. Our solution was to launch a fellowship program to train a new generation of Yiddish translators and leave it to them to peruse our online library titles and choose works to translate. Twelve years later more than a hundred of our alumni are at work on book-length titles. In order to get their work into the hands of as many readers as possible we founded White Goat Press, our own publishing imprint. So far we’ve released beautiful, affordable editions of 22 titles, with many more coming soon. In addition to work by our own fellows, recent releases include new translations by some of the most accomplished people in the field, such as Warsaw Testament by Rachel Auerbach, translated by Sam Kassow; Celia Dropkin’s Desires, translated by Anita Norich; and the second volume of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s essays selected, translated, and edited by David Stromberg. Loads more lie in store.
It’s hard to remember sometimes that I was only 24 years old when I founded the Yiddish Book Center. I can only marvel at the vision it took for you to join me. Forty-five years later, in a front-page story about my pending retirement, the New York Times described the Center as “one of the nation’s leading Jewish cultural institutions.”
You and I have a license to kvel, to take pride in how far we’ve come—and how much our spirited and resourceful staff members continue to accomplish. There’s so much more I’d like to tell you, including game-changing educational ventures, public programs, podcasts, publications, and a great deal more. Space, however, is limited, so that will have to wait for our next letter. For now, I want to end with a personal appeal: to make your renewal contribution extra generous this year, to assure that all you and I have built together will continue to thrive and grow for many years to come.
Annual membership in the Yiddish Book Center is still $54 and includes a subscription to Pakn Treger, our English-language magazine, discounts on gifts and books, and invitations to special events. To encourage you to increase your contribution this year, we’re offering four enticing incentives:
• For a tax-deductible donation of $100 we’ll send you a set of our exclusive Yiddish Celebrity Cards. In our grandparents’ day, there was a brisk market for postcards featuring Yiddish and Hebrew writers, entertainers, and religious and political leaders. We’ve selected 24 of those images, including many from our permanent exhibition, and reprinted them on sturdy card stock with lively descriptions.
• For $150 we’ll send you the Yiddish Celebrity Cards plus a pass that entitles you to unlimited free admission at Jewish museums across the country.
• For $360 we’ll send you the cards, the museum pass, plus a hardcover edition of one of the latest releases from White Goat Press: Journey Through the Spanish Civil War by S. L. Shneiderman, whose daring coverage earned him the moniker of “the first Yiddish war reporter.” Translated by Deborah A. Green, Shneiderman’s long-ago dispatches remain a vivid, ground-level record of the conflict through a uniquely Jewish lens.
• For a contribution of $1,000 or more we’ll proudly acknowledge you as one of our Brilyantn (Jewels). You’ll receive all of the above premiums, we’ll honor you in Kvel, our donor magazine, and the next time you stop by we’ll be pleased to welcome you in person, chat with you over a glezl tey (a glass of hot tea), and give you a private tour of the new exhibition.
Who knew, when we set out to collect books that few wanted and fewer still could read, that we’d end up saving more than a million volumes and posting them online, where they’d be downloaded more than five million times? For that miracle and so much more I can never thank you enough. Now, with new dangers on the horizon, with so much accomplished and so much yet to do, with me retiring and an exceptional new leader about to take my place, I’m hoping not only that you’ll renew your membership but that you’ll be able to increase your donation this year. Whatever you can afford will make a difference. Please—won’t you renew your support by making your most generous tax-deductible contribution today?
Mit a hartsikn dank (With heartfelt thanks),
Aaron Lansky
President
P.S. You can renew your membership online right now. I’ll be waiting to hear from you this one last time before I retire. A sheynem dank—my personal thanks!