Re: For a Dying Literature, a Digital Savior

[Sylvia Schildt <creativa...>]

Yes it's a phenomenal piece of work. And I too will avail myself of it. One
nagging question I did not get an answer to was -- what about royalties to
the families of the writers????


sylvia schildt  


on 5/6/02 6:19 PM, Lori Cahan-Simon at l_cahan (at) staff(dot)chuh(dot)org 
wrote:

> 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."
> 
> 
> 
> 

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