• Effort To Preserve Yiddish Works Not 'Bupkes'
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[URL="http://www.npr.org/2014/08/09/338975625/effort-to-preserve-yiddish-works-not-bupkes"]NPR Link[/URL] [quote=NPR]Plays, poetry, novels, political tracts — all were published in Yiddish until the Holocaust. A great deal of these works can now be found at the National Yiddish Book Center in Western Massachusetts. The center was founded by Aaron Lansky, who began his efforts to save Yiddish books in 1980, while enrolled in a Jewish Studies program at McGill University in Montreal. "I started putting up notices in the Jewish delicatessen and the laundromats in the Jewish neighborhoods," Lansky says. "That I'm a young grad student ... looking for books." Lansky was surprised to learn that the offspring of Yiddish-speaking immigrants were throwing out large quantities of old books. "I'm racing around the city on a bicycle and the piles in my apartment are getting higher and higher," he says. When Lansky and one of his teachers started going through the piles, they realized that they had some of the greatest treasures of the Jewish people and that they were "just here for the taking." Large numbers of Yiddish books were first published in the 1500s. They were aimed mostly at women and poorly educated men who could not read Hebrew. In the late 1800s, there was an explosion in Yiddish publishing. Lansky says that in addition to translations of Tolstoy and Shakespeare, there were political tracts, science texts and fairy tales translated into Yiddish. There were also short stories and novels by writers such as Sholem Aleichem and S. Ansky. "It embraces all the great themes of all modern literature: the conflict between the individual and the collective, power and powerlessness, sexual awakening ... struggles for social justice, war and peace," he says. "There's very little you won't find in the pages of Yiddish literature." The National Yiddish Book Center's headquarters is on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. It is a light and airy structure that recalls a wooden synagogue in one of Eastern Europe's shtetls or small towns. The oldest books are stored in a climate-controlled vault on the lower level and newer books are upstairs on shelves. Books are still being published in Yiddish today in the U.S., Israel, Europe and South America. "In Yiddish, you'd say 'ahrange fallen een a schmaltz grube.' And that means fell into a bucket of fat. You hit the jackpot!" says Sebastian Schulman, who coordinates the center's program to translate Yiddish books into English. "And that's really what I felt what happened when I got into Yiddish." The National Yiddish Book Center pays people to translate a small number of Yiddish books each year. It has a website called Taitch, where a community of 200 translators discusses the origins and meanings of Yiddish words and phrases.[/quote]
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