- ISBN13: 9781565125131
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In 1980, a twenty-three-year-old student named Aaron Lansky set out to rescue the world’s abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Twenty-five years and one and a half million books later, he’s still in the midst of a great adventure. Filled with poignant and often laugh-out-loud tales from Lansky’s travels across the country as he collected books from older Jewish immigrants—books their own children had no use for—Outwitting History also explores b… More >>
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books
Tags: Adventures, Amazing, amazing adventures, Books, great adventure, History, jewish immigrants, lansky, midst, Million, million books, Outwitting, remainder mark, Rescued, twenty five years, Yiddish, yiddish books
#1 by D. C. Palter on April 17, 2010 - 10:16 pm
I hate to be the only reviewer who didn’t think the book was fabulous, but I found it less than compelling. Essentially, there are about thirty or so vignettes that follow the same pattern – Lansky hears of a treasure trove of Yiddish books bound for the trash heap, gathers a bunch of friends, hires a truck, and arrives in the nick of time to save the books while meeting old people who speak in Yiddish and feed him lots of food. The same pattern is repeated over and over for nearly 300 pages. By the end, it was tedious, and I skimmed over the last half without missing much.
From the book I learned surprisingly little about Yiddish literature. A half dozen names were repeated with every load of books recovered, but there was little about the writers or the books themselves.
If you grew up in a Yiddish household and want to read simple stories of meeting old Yiddish speakers, with lots of Yiddish thrown in, you’ll probably find this book to be very satisfying. Otherwise, its enough to read the website for his National Yiddish Book Center.
Rating: 2 / 5
#2 by George Goldberg on April 17, 2010 - 11:01 pm
I agree with what everyone says: this is a wonderful book, often very moving. Sometimes, while trying to read passages to my wife, I had to stop to dry my eyes. There is, however, a fundamental contradiction at the heart of its message. Lansky writes (p. 295): “That is what makes the books we’ve saved so important. In their pages lies a civilization, a missing millenium of Jewish history, the knowledge we need to defend ourselves.” That is, for Jews to defend themselves against the rise of anti-Semitism. But, as Lansky himself relates again and again, the people who created this literature, the people who knew it best, were in extremis utterly unable to defend themselves against the anti-Semites who murdered them by the million. Perhaps if their heads were not always buried in books they might have seen the gathering storm and organized self-defense or fled on time. Instead, they wrote and they read and they studied and they prayed and they, the men – and the women and children who depended upon them – were all slaughtered. Perhaps Yiddish literature is worth saving on its own merits, but surely not for its value as a defensive weapon.
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Jane on April 18, 2010 - 12:10 am
This desire to hang on to history and heritage is noble and necessary. Bravo to the author and his colleagues. There are things that can be expressed in Yiddish, that when translated, need twice as many English words to convey their meaning. Unfortunately, this book is incorrectly marketed as an adventure—we expect to encounter Indiana Jones! With so much built up anticipation, the reader is left with a “hmmm” instead of a “WOW!” at the end.
Rating: 3 / 5
#4 by Philip Greenspun on April 18, 2010 - 2:51 am
This is an interesting personal story about a guy doing something everyone else thought was stupid. It would have been a great 30-page essay for the Web, but in the world of commercial publishing a story needs to fit into a 5-page magazine article or be padded out to fill a 300-page book. This, then, is the padded version.
If you read between the lines of the padded version, what you learn is that this guy got books for free from people anxious to clear out their basements. Then he got Steven Spielberg to pay for the books to be digitized and got some other rich folks to give him $7 million so that he could build himself a nice office in central Massachusetts. Now he sells hardcopy reprints of these books, whose authors and publishers have all died, for $53 per copy from his Web site. It is an inspiring story of entrepreneurship perhaps, but given the digital copies and his non-profit organization’s mission statement to distribute this material widely, one would rather have expected to see these books available for viewing/searching online.
Rating: 3 / 5
#5 by Richard J. Polney on April 18, 2010 - 5:40 am
Seller sent book in excellent shape and the story is a great read on preserving history.
Rating: 5 / 5