By Sam Apple. The Jerusalem Report. Aug 30, 1999

Aaron Lansky built a stunning home for the 1.5 million Yiddish books he found and saved. But it's unclear whether he or his staff can even read the books, never mind advance the cause of Yiddish culture.

PICK UP AN ARTICLE ON Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the National Yiddish Book Center, and you're likely to read something like this line from the Baltimore Sun: "Aaron Lansky is bringing the 1,000-year-old language back to life in a quiet cedar-sided building tucked in the rolling hills of the Holyoke Range." It's hard to blame The Sun for such hyperbolic prose. In the last decade, few magazines or newspapers, from Time to the New York Times to The Jerusalem Report itself, have resisted the urge to wax poetic about Lansky's one-man crusade to save Yiddish literature. A 1997 Forward piece went so far as to give him credit for "creating a new Yiddish movement." Lansky did indeed save over a million Yiddish books from destruction and has built a beautiful home for them in Amherst, Massachusetts. But contrary to popular belief, to the extent that a new Yiddish movement exists, it is not emerging from here. Although Lansky says that visitors will come "not only to discover the past but to understand the ways in which the past can begin to sustain new creativity," the Center focuses on older rather than newer culture, on the history rather than the future of Yiddish. This effort, though perhaps lacking some of the excitement of new Yiddish culture, is unquestionably laudable. Only there's a problem. No one at the Center is an expert on Yiddish literature or the culture from which it emerged, and Aaron Lansky has a seemingly thin attachment to historical accuracy.

In 1980, then a 24-year-old Yiddish graduate student at McGill University, Lansky recognized a brewing crisis: North America's remaining Yiddish books (at the time the total was grossly underestimated to be some 70,000) were literally being thrown away. The children and grandchildren of European Jewish immigrants were simply discarding the deteriorating Yiddish volumes they could not read. Unable to attain the support of the major American Jewish organizations, Lansky began hitchhiking from city to city, collecting funds and Yiddish books as he went.

Seventeen years and 1.5 million books later, Lansky stood in front of 2,500 invited guests for the dedication of the Book Center's new home, which sits at the edge of an apple orchard on the Hampshire College campus. Lansky told the joyful crowd that the $ 8-million wood-faced structure, designed to evoke the architecture of a European shtetl, could be seen "as a sort of Jewish Atlantis," adding that "a lost continent of Jewish culture will come alive here." By then, Lansky had successfully solicited a $ 1-million grant from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation and $ 600,000 from the Kresge Foundation, but he was still principally dependent on much smaller donations from the Book Center's approximately 30,000 members. His new building completed, Lansky turned to the central paradox now facing the Center. Although some programming, notably the popular retreats with Jewish educators, had gone on for years, the organization's primary mission was always to collect Yiddish books, distributing duplicates to libraries. But the building was designed to attract visitors, and at the dedication Lansky predicted 50,000 of them in the next year. The dilemma, as Lansky readily acknowledges, is that more than 99 percent of those who walk through the Book Center's doors don't speak or read Yiddish. What exactly were those 50,000 imagined guests to do beyond stare at the stacks? Something had to be done, as Lansky puts it, to make the books "come alive for those who cannot read them." With this goal in mind, the Book Center has just unveiled a $ 300,000 permanent exhibit, "A Portable Homeland." But even a quick stroll past its elaborate displays, which, according to Lansky, "tell the fascinating story of Yiddish literature, set within a lively literary and historical context," reveals gaping holes in the historical narrative. Missing is the grittiness and the crime of the early immigrant experience. Also missing is the story of Israel becoming the main center of Yiddish study and life after the war. But most striking is the scant reference to the left-wing politics that played such an integral role in modern Yiddish culture. The brief mention of the workers' struggles sounds almost apologetic: "Living conditions in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side were deplorable, and working conditions in the sweat shops even worse. Not surprisingly, many Jewish workers turned to politics and union organizing." Next to some copies of the old Yiddish newspapers, the text reads, "Their titles revealed an unbounded - some may say naive - faith in the future."

Lansky's reluctance to fully engage with the political dimensions of the Yiddish world was regularly a point of contention with Jeffrey Sharlet, who edited the Pakn Treger (Book Peddler), the Book Center's lavishly designed and editorially intelligent English-language magazine, from 1995 to 1998. Sharlet gives credit to Lansky for allowing him to write on leftist history, including a 1997 cover piece on the Yiddish-speaking veterans of the Spanish Civil War. But he also says that it was not uncommon for Lansky to encourage him to "lay off the leftist stuff for a while." Another former employee remembers that "it wasn't good to acknowledge the Communist literature or to talk about Communists as living, breathing parts of Yiddish culture." Lansky acknowledges that "socialist politics was central to modern Yiddish literature," but insists that "it is not the Book Center's place to go into the minutiae of the politics of the Yiddish world." In a feature piece on the Book Center two years ago in the New York Times, Lansky told an interviewer that the institution does not "want to get involved in rancorous debate over who should have done what in 1905." But it is one thing to not become involved in a debate and another to ignore its existence altogether. Then there is the problem of staffing at the Center. By Lansky's accounting, out of the current 17 employees, only four have fluent Yiddish (and even this number has been called into question by individuals familiar with the organization). Moreover, none of the four Lansky mentions, himself included, have PhDs in Yiddish literature (Lansky dropped out of graduate school when he began collecting books), and the only native Yiddish speaker is Henia Lewin, the on-staff Yiddish educator. One former employee, who left the Book Center within the last few years and who asked not to be named, said that Lansky "had very few people on staff who knew anything about Yiddish language or culture, including people in programming positions."

LANSKY SAYS that the absence of Yiddish experts is largely a consequence of geography and limited resources: "We're outside the major centers of Jewish scholarship and there are just not that many trained Yiddish scholars altogether." But he maintains that the Center has strong social and intellectual ties to the academic community. But a number of individuals familiar with the workings of the Book Center believe that Lansky's decision not to hire Yiddish scholars stems from a need to maintain total control of the organization. Rakhmiel Peltz, who heads the Judaic Studies department at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, and who worked at the Book Center briefly in the 1980s, says that the Center has always suffered from "founder's disease," and that it can never be bigger than Lansky. Lansky denies that's true. Of course, if the head of the Book Center cites a problem of geography, it almost begs the question of why he built it so far from a major center of Jewish life. The answer, apparently, again reflects Lansky's aversion to politics. According to Lansky, the Book Center was built on the grounds of Hampshire College, about an hour-and-a-half drive from Boston, and almost twice as far from New York, in order to avoid the political squabbles that come with being situated in large Jewish communities.

In his defense, Lansky adds that the Book Center has never had a great need for scholars because it was never intended to be a Yiddish research institute, a function that is filled by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. And the Book Center has run and sponsored many excellent programs, including annual summer internships for college students. But the Book Center's schedule for the next six months reveals the cost of having few experts around. Almost every other event on the schedule is a Yiddish film, which, however interesting, do not require traveling to the Amherst center to see. As David Roskies, a professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, puts it, "You can't pay for programming. You have to have the people to generate the programs. And it's not clear that Lansky has those people." Ruth Wisse, an open Lansky supporter, acknowledged the lack of expertise at the Center in a 1997 article in Commentary. Mentioning the Yiddish mistakes she noticed on signs and in the speeches at the building dedication, Wisse bemoaned that "not even the champions of Yiddish culture in America are truly at home in the language, and this in a civilization that has historically prided itself on literacy and intellectual achievement."

But Wisse told The Report that she sees the problem "not that the Book Center is not attracting great scholars of Yiddish, but that there are none." When asked why major universities have been able to find them (Rakhmiel Peltz estimates that there are some 80 individuals in the U.S. either specializing in Yiddish studies or competent to work in it at an academic level), Wisse responds by asking me what I would do if I had a choice between being a professor at Harvard and working at the Book Center. But that loaded question doesn't quite explain how it is that the Book Center, with a breathtaking location and annual operating budget of over $ 2 million, cannot entice even one PhD to its staff.

But perhaps Wisse is right. American Jews today may very well prefer the whitewashed depiction of turn-of-the-century Yiddish life in America and Eastern Europe provided by the new exhibit. And perhaps not many will notice the Yiddish mistakes or miss the top-notch programming that could have been. The unsettling irony of the National Yiddish Book Center and its new exhibit may be that in its attempt to smooth over the imperfections of the Jewish past, it has exposed the imperfections of the Jewish present.