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History. Nonfiction. HTML: "Incredible . . . Inspiring . . . Important." �??Library Journal, starred review "A marvelous yarn, loaded with near-calamitous adventures and characters as memorable as Singer creations." �??The New York Post "What began as a quixotic journey was also a picaresque romp, a detective story, a profound history lesson, and a poignant evocation of a bygone world." �??The Boston Globe "Every now and again a book with near-universal appeal comes along: Outwitting History is just such a book." �??The Sunday Oregonian As a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, Aaron Lansky set out to save the world's abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Today, more than a million books later, he has accomplished what has been called "the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history." In Outwitting History, Lansky shares his adventures as well as the poignant and often laugh-out-loud stories he heard as he traveled the country collecting books. Introducing us to a dazzling array of writers, he shows us how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future�??and how the written word can unite everyone who believes in the power of great literature. A Library Journal Best Book A Massachusetts Book Award Winner in Nonfiction An ALA Notabl… (more)
User reviews
A favorite part of the book for me was the Yiddish phrases that were used throughout. For someone who knows Yiddish (or even, as I do, German), the book really comes alive. Yiddish is a language that not only conveys a message, but it also conveys an attitude. All of the Yiddish phrases are translated (albeit a few not quite literally), but with these phrases come the hearts and the souls of the people who utter them.
I adored reading this book. Its effect on me is my wish to help support Aaron Lansky’s cause, to encourage my friends to donate their Yiddish books to his center, to encourage others to learn and study Yiddish, and to find a Yiddish book to borrow just to see how much of it I can understand (as I do know how to sound out the Hebrew letters). I was truly inspired by this very entertaining read and would highly recommend it to others, Jewish or not. If you have a love of books, you’ll find a lot to like in Lansky’s story.
I'm glad I bought this book, he loved it and so did I.
The book tells the story of a graduate student trying to rescue Yiddish books from elimination, and all the characters he meets along the way. The book is easy to read, funny, inspiring, well writing and a page turner. A story of how one man's passion triumph over the odds.
Not long thereafter, he has opted to become a full-time Yiddish book rescuer rather and a student and academic. Things just snowball from there. He explains in his foreword: "In 1980, at the age of twenty-three, I decided to save the world's Yiddish books. At the time scholars believed 70,000 volumes remained; today, my colleagues and I have collected more than one and a half million -- may of them at the last minute from attics and basements, demolition sites and Dumpsters.
Towards the end of this grand adventure, Aaron explains his way of proceeding with direct-mail fund-raising. He sums up some of the highlights of the past 20 years spent collecting the world's Yiddish books: "I spoke to our members as friends, letting them know what we were doing and why. In addition to an annual renewal letter there were frequent emergencies: to recover those eighty-five thousand folios of forgotten sheet music, to preserve the world's last Yiddish books in the Soviet Union, Argentina, Mexico or Cuba. Our members broke every record in the generosity of their response."
Some of the things I learned from this book include not only the more expected such as Big Names in Yiddish writing and many aspects of Jewish history and culture but also the unexpected like the fact that rescuing books is action-packed and labour intensive. It involves mostly driving, packing and doing some heavy lifting. In the case of gathering books from aging people who are passing along some of their most valued treasures, it involves getting sitting down to eat and to listen to their empassionned stories.
Toward the end, I was curious about the author's personal life and, sure enough, a few pages later, he included a few pages about how and when he met his wife, thereby delivering on every front. A well-written, constantly interesting account of a Very Important Mission.
I don't think I throw the word "hero" around lightly. But by the end of this book, I certainly thought of Aaron Lansky as one.
I really enjoyed this book, which took a compassionate and humorous look at the donors who lovingly passed on their "treasures" and the rescuers who were trying to save the books on limited funds and time (while continually being fed excessively by the donors). As a reader with limited experience of the Jewish/Yiddish world, I found the story to be culturally sensitive, enthralling and hillarious. I would strongly recommend this book. It is very well written as well as entertaining.
The historical reasons leading Yiddish literature's demise are strongly tied to the Jewish experience. Lansky provides glimpses into this historical, and heart-wrenching, past and forces the reader to ask some very hard questions. Some of his stories sound a bit repetitive during the middle part of the book, but when he describes his experiences of crossing national borders to rescue books during the latter half of the book he really hits his stride.
Like it or not, Yiddish literature is finite, bound to a specific time and place. But precisely because Yiddish literature is finite, it is
Well written and interesting.
Aaron Lansky's memoir is a great story of how he began saving Yiddish books, often quite literally from dumpsters, and preserved them for a new generation. His memoir recounts his adventures meeting people who had to pass on their inheritance of literature to him one story at a time, founding the Yiddish Book Center, and finding ways to get more books into the hands of young people. It's inspiring and funny by turns. It reads quickly for nonfiction, dragging a little for me in the middle, but generally page-turning good fun.
The timeline in the book is a bit bumpy, but the major point is less to give a history than to evoke a sense of why the project was important, and worth the doing. On that level, the book succeeds brilliantly.