For a Dying Literature, a Digital Savior

[Lori Cahan-Simon <l_cahan...>]

A friend sent this to me and I'm thrilled to post this to the list!
Lorele

For a Dying Literature, a Digital Savior

By Eric Goldscheider
May 6, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com

MHERST, Mass., May 5 ? Antiquated, shmantiquated. Yiddish,
once on the verge of oblivion, is passing a 21st-century
milestone on Monday. As a result of a four-year digitization
project and print-on-demand technology, a literature that
thrived from 1864 to 1939 will suddenly become proportionally
the most in-print literature on the planet.

Readers will be able to go to a Web site (www.yiddishbooks.org)
and order any of 12,000 titles in Yiddish. The contents of
the book will be retrieved from an electronic database,
printed, bound in paperback and shipped within a few days.
Members will pay $21.75 per book, nonmembers $29.

Aaron Lansky, the president of the National Yiddish Book Center,
which initiated the digitization project, said that between
18,000 and 20,000 titles, not including pamphlets and other
ephemera, have been published in Yiddish. With two-thirds of
those books now becoming effectively in print, a much greater
portion of Yiddish literature will be available than is the
case with the literature of any other language, he said.

Mr. Lansky, 46, has been devoting his life to preserving Yiddish
books since 1979 when, as a graduate student at McGill
University in Montreal, he realized that a once-vibrant
literature important to understanding the Jewish experience
was being thrown into trash bins as the last generation of
people who spoke Yiddish as their primary language was dying
out.

Since then Mr. Lansky and his associates have collected more
than 1.5 million volumes containing almost 15,000 discrete
titles. Many have been cataloged and then sold or donated to
libraries around the world.

Books are still coming in from places as varied as musty
basements in New York City and a recently reopened synagogue
in Havana, where Mr. Lansky went two months ago to retrieve
a collection he had heard about for many years.

Four years ago, realizing that many of the books were
disintegrating, Mr. Lansky set out to digitize the collection
to preserve it and make some of the hardest-to-find titles
available beyond a few rare book repositories. He attracted
the support of the director Steven Spielberg, for whom the
digital library is named. Mr. Spielberg donated the first
$500,000 to what became a $3.5 million project.

Rachel Levin, associate director of the Righteous Persons
Foundation, created by Mr. Spielberg in 1994, said, "This
project fits Steven's interest in telling stories of the
Jewish past and using modern technology to do so."

The reasons for saving Yiddish literature go beyond the
entertainment value of its many colorful stories, Mr. Lansky
said. Yiddish, a Germanic language usually written with a
Hebrew alphabet, was spoken by more than three-quarters of
the world's Jews for a thousand years.

What is widely considered to be the first modern Yiddish
story, "The Little Man" by Sholem Abramovitsh, appeared in
1864, when Enlightenment ideas were making their way to
Eastern Europe, Mr. Lansky said. In the decades that followed,
what he described as an "amazing literary outpouring" from
the 11 million Yiddish speakers told much of the story of
Jewish encounters with modernity.

"Even though the literature is finite," Mr. Lansky said,
"it is enormously important because it is the first great
bridge between one epoch of Jewish history and the next.
It is the precursor to our own struggles to figure out what
it means to live as Jews in the modern world."

Mr. Lansky won a MacArthur fellowship in 1989 for his work.
The National Yiddish Book Center, based on the Hampshire
College campus in Amherst, Mass., is also a museum and
cultural center.

The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library promises to have
a major impact on the development of Yiddish, Mr. Lansky said.

"We have really high hopes, because for the first time what

had been a discarded and unavailable literature is available
to all," he said. But, he added: "`Making the books available
was the first step. The second step is to encourage people to
read them."



---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+