Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky is a memoir published by Algonquin Books in 2004. It was the recipient of the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. The book is about the author's efforts to rescue a large number of books in the Yiddish language from destruction.
According to the book, at age 23 Lansky read that thousands of the few remaining Yiddish books in North America were being discarded by the children of the books' original Yiddish-speaking owners. The books meant nothing to many of those who had inherited them, as they had no knowledge of Yiddish. Thousands of volumes were thus being consigned to dumpsters and a whole literature was in danger of being lost. Lansky felt compelled to preserve the language, and issued a public appeal for unwanted Yiddish books. He received a very large number of responses and set out, with a team of volunteers, to retrieve and store the remaining Yiddish books.
Synopsis
When Aaron Lansky was a Yiddish student in the late 1970s, he found it difficult to obtain Yiddish books for his studies. This caused him to have the idea of asking the broader community for Yiddish books, which he did by putting up signs around his area asking for donations. He quickly found that the number of individuals and institutions who wanted to donate books was enormous, as was the sheer number of books, which would otherwise be discarded. Lansky appealed to Jewish institutions to assist with his project of saving the Yiddish books, but there was very little interest from Jewish institutions to assist. For many, Yiddish was an unwanted and unwelcome reminder of an immigrant past. So, Lansky had to go about his project largely without institutional support. Lansky did gather community members who shared his care for preserving Yiddish, and they would assist him in the collection and transfer of the books. He recounts how emotional the process of picking up books often was, with the donors commonly insisting that the “zamlers” (book collectors) stay for food and crying when they eventually did hand over their precious books.
Background
Aaron Lansky began his work in collecting Yiddish books when he was a graduate student studying Yiddish literature. His initial interest in collecting second-hand Yiddish books emerged because he had difficulty finding the Yiddish texts required for his studies. When he began advertising locally that he was looking for Yiddish books, he was quickly overwhelmed by the response of donation offers. In mid-July 1980 Lansky set out on his first formal book collection trip. Soon after, Lansky realized that a huge project was emerging and that he would not be able to collect all the available Yiddish books on his own and so enlisted volunteer “zamlers”, helpers who would collect books in conjunction with him.
In 1980 Lansky founded the National Yiddish Book Centre, which would ultimately hold over a million salvaged Yiddish Books.
In 1989, Lansky was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship for his work in preserving Yiddish literature and culture.