redolent of Jewish marginality. In America, a land of unprecedented freedom and opportunity, Jews found tolerance for religious differences but not for differences of language or culture. Although a handful of writers continue even today to publish in Yiddish,for the most part they are very old, and their remaining readers are few and far between. With one or two exceptions, there has never been a significant Yiddish writer born in America. Like it or not, Yiddish literature is finite, bound to a specific time and place.
But precisely because Yiddish literature
is
finite, it is enormously important, a link between one epoch of Jewish history and the next. Its world’s having been ferociously attacked and almost destroyed only serves to underscore its significance. The books we collect are the immediate intellectual antecedent of most contemporary Jews, able to tell us who we are and where we came from. Especially now, after the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century, Yiddish literature endures as our last, best bridge across the abyss.
9. “People Are Dying Today Who Never Died Before”
There was a Sisyphean dynamic to our work: The more books we collected, the more the word spread, and the more the word spread, the more books there were to collect. By midwinter of that first year on the road it was clear that immigrant Jews had been more avid readers than anyone imagined. Yiddish books were scattered in virtually every city in North America, and there was no way that we, a handful of young people with extremely limited resources, could collect them all on our own. We needed help! So I decided to organize a network of zamlers, volunteer book collectors, who would gather books in their own communities and ship them to our Massachusetts headquarters.
The idea was not without precedent. In the late nineteenth century the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow issued an appeal for zamlers to round up communal records and other historical documents in the remote
shtetlekh
of the Russian Pale. These documents served as primary sources for Dubnow’s many books, including the
History of Jews in Russia and Poland
and
The World History of the Jewish People
. When the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, was founded in Vilna in 1925, hundreds more zamlers answered the call, shipping bundles of documents to its archive. This ingathering continued until the Nazis invadedPoland and seized the YIVO headquarters, hoping to use its extensive resources for their own racist research. Although many of YIVO’s scholars were forced to work for the Nazis, they did so with quiet courage, often risking their lives to smuggle documents out of the archives, to be reclaimed after the war. Were it not for those early zamlers—and the heroism of librarians and scholars, many of whom were killed—the documentary record of almost a thousand years of Jewish life in Eastern Europe would have been lost.
It was this
yikhes,
this model, that I had in mind when I drew up plans for a “second wave” of zamlers—this time to save Yiddish books. I spent several days with a typewriter, a T square, and a bottle of rubber cement, putting together a prototype Zamler’s Packet, a do-it-yourself kit containing posters, fill-in-the-blank press releases, shipping labels, and step-by-step instructions—in short, everything a volunteer would need to run a successful local Yiddish book drive. I borrowed money to have the packets printed, and then sent out letters and press releases in the hope of recruiting a small group of volunteers. The response was enthusiastic. People signed on all across North America. Some were elderly, others were young people who didn’t speak a word of Yiddish; but they were all grateful for the chance to
act,
to do something practical to reclaim a culture that was disappearing before their eyes.
In New York City, so many volunteered that I decided to call a meeting to coordinate their efforts. Stuart Schear, a recent graduate
But precisely because Yiddish literature
is
finite, it is enormously important, a link between one epoch of Jewish history and the next. Its world’s having been ferociously attacked and almost destroyed only serves to underscore its significance. The books we collect are the immediate intellectual antecedent of most contemporary Jews, able to tell us who we are and where we came from. Especially now, after the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century, Yiddish literature endures as our last, best bridge across the abyss.
9. “People Are Dying Today Who Never Died Before”
There was a Sisyphean dynamic to our work: The more books we collected, the more the word spread, and the more the word spread, the more books there were to collect. By midwinter of that first year on the road it was clear that immigrant Jews had been more avid readers than anyone imagined. Yiddish books were scattered in virtually every city in North America, and there was no way that we, a handful of young people with extremely limited resources, could collect them all on our own. We needed help! So I decided to organize a network of zamlers, volunteer book collectors, who would gather books in their own communities and ship them to our Massachusetts headquarters.
The idea was not without precedent. In the late nineteenth century the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow issued an appeal for zamlers to round up communal records and other historical documents in the remote
shtetlekh
of the Russian Pale. These documents served as primary sources for Dubnow’s many books, including the
History of Jews in Russia and Poland
and
The World History of the Jewish People
. When the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, was founded in Vilna in 1925, hundreds more zamlers answered the call, shipping bundles of documents to its archive. This ingathering continued until the Nazis invadedPoland and seized the YIVO headquarters, hoping to use its extensive resources for their own racist research. Although many of YIVO’s scholars were forced to work for the Nazis, they did so with quiet courage, often risking their lives to smuggle documents out of the archives, to be reclaimed after the war. Were it not for those early zamlers—and the heroism of librarians and scholars, many of whom were killed—the documentary record of almost a thousand years of Jewish life in Eastern Europe would have been lost.
It was this
yikhes,
this model, that I had in mind when I drew up plans for a “second wave” of zamlers—this time to save Yiddish books. I spent several days with a typewriter, a T square, and a bottle of rubber cement, putting together a prototype Zamler’s Packet, a do-it-yourself kit containing posters, fill-in-the-blank press releases, shipping labels, and step-by-step instructions—in short, everything a volunteer would need to run a successful local Yiddish book drive. I borrowed money to have the packets printed, and then sent out letters and press releases in the hope of recruiting a small group of volunteers. The response was enthusiastic. People signed on all across North America. Some were elderly, others were young people who didn’t speak a word of Yiddish; but they were all grateful for the chance to
act,
to do something practical to reclaim a culture that was disappearing before their eyes.
In New York City, so many volunteered that I decided to call a meeting to coordinate their efforts. Stuart Schear, a recent graduate
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