Mamaloshen

 

Got Books?

Little did she realize her usual weekly volunteer day would not be another ‘business as usual’ one. It would present a mysterious finding prompting her to take unusual action. She also didn’t fathom that by that action she instantly became part of a rescue operation over forty years in the making, the likes of which the world had never witnessed, and may never witness again ……

Each week Debra* spends a day at Listen, a bustling thrift store in Lebanon, NH. Her assigned task consists of combing through and sorting the prodigious pile of donated books the store processes each month. 

As she separated biographies, mega-page classics, pulp fiction, best sellers, travel guides, etc., etc., into piles, she came across a fragile, older volume written with a bizarre font in a strange appearing language, perhaps Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, or ? Being concerned it might be a holy book, Debra set it aside for respectful TLC handling. Shortly afterward she called me to help investigate. 

The next day, as we sat at my dining room table examining the volume, it was immediately clear to me the book’s title did indeed use the Hebrew alphabet, but the text was not Hebrew, it was actually Yiddish, a language once considered …. dead.  

In the late 1800s Yiddish flourished as the vernacular among Jews of Eastern Europe. The language was rich with expressions blended from its German base with a ‘gemishe’ of contributions from Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic and Romance languages. Despite its ubiquity, during the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s Germany’s Third Reich murdered the majority of the world's Yiddish speakers. Currently it is spoken by perhaps a million people globally, primarily within ultra-Orthodox communities in the United States, Israel, and Europe. The epicenter of Yiddishkeit in the US, however, happens to be in of all places, on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, a town in Western Massachusetts. 

Yiddish also just happens to be ‘mamaloshen’ for me, my mother tongue. It’s the language my parents and I spoke at home as was common for recent Eastern European immigrants in the 1950s. But once I enrolled in public school and my parents continued focusing on the job of assimilation, English gradually replaced Yiddish. So it took digging into my brain’s Yiddish archive combined with Debra working the Google to decode the book title. 

 

Turns out, the mystery book was veteran newspaperman Samuel Isban’s chronicle, titled Illegal Jews Part the Seas. It was about Aliya Bet, the clandestine mission to smuggle European Jewish refugees past the British blockade and deliver them to Palestine during the restrictions of the UK’s Paestine Mandate. Isban reports as an eyewitness of the voyage which attempted to ferry 1,500 concentration camp survivors cramped aboard a barely  seaworthy vessel.

Despite a growing interest in revival of Yiddish, it wasn’t a stretch to believe the book would likely attract more dust on Listen’s shelves than interest. Fact is, these days there remains a paucity of Yiddish readers. However, I knew where Illegal Jews Part the Seas would be welcomed ..... the Yiddish Book Center, of course! Not only would the volume be welcomed, it would be translated, digitized, catalogued, and cared for so everyone on the planet could have access to enjoy and learn from it.

The story of the YBC’s success is stranger than fiction and truly a miracle. It all began with the impossible dream of a young graduate student, Aaron Lansky of New Bedford, MA. Aaron was pursuing a degree at McGill University in Montreal about Mendele Mocher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller), considered to be the Grandfather of Yiddish Literature. He soon ran into a major stumbling block - there were no Yiddish books. What to do? 

In Chapter 4 of Lansky's memoir, Outwitting History, he describes the moment when he felt in his bones that Yiddish culture was disappearing at a staggering rate.  

Thinking precious Yiddish books might be hidden in the personal libraries of Montreal’s senior Jewish community, Aaron started a door to door campaign to find and save these books, ultimately leading him in 1980 to found the Yiddish Book Center. By then Aaron had assembled a team of volunteer book collectors, aka zamlers, to help with the legwork of canvassing local communities in the hunt for Yiddish ‘gold’. 

 

To date approximately 1.5 million volumes have been rescued. The vast collection serves as foundation for an institution encompassing Yiddish-language instruction, university scholarships, translator training programs, academic conferences, a publishing house for translated works, oral history archives, a podcast, and a digitized library of classic and lesser-known Yiddish texts. Among Lansky’s accolades, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, i.e., a "genius grant”, in 1989 as a cultural preservationist.

Circling back to Debra, her mysterious find did receive the respectful TLC it deserved. It also reconnected me to the rescue effort. Back in the ‘90s my son and I proudly served as zamlers. 

I recently re-upped my deployment. 

My son Josh with part of our 'zamler-collected' Yiddish books.
The stash was soon sent to the Yiddish Book Center

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Debra* - not her real name

photos and scans - David Greenfield