For 18 years, the For 18 years, the National Yiddish Book Center has used trucks, handcarts, and an army of zamlers to rescue more than a million Yiddish books and periodicals from the libraries and basements of aging immigrants and their children and grandchildren. has used trucks, handcarts, and an army of zamlers to rescue more than a million Yiddish books and periodicals from the libraries and basements of aging immigrants and their children and grandchildren.
Now the center is turning to computer technology to help those zamlers -- or collectors -- preserve and share that literary legacy.
The center has announced plans to scan and digitize the contents of its collection of more than 22,000 titles, and then to use those electronic "masters" to make the works available to libraries, scholars, and students in electronic and print formats.
It also plans to create an on-line catalogue of the center's holdings, accessible over the Internet. Titles will be searchable by their Roman-letter transliterations as well as with Hebrew characters, with which most Yiddish literature was published.
Aaron Lansky, the center's founder and president, says the project is noteworthy not so much for the technology involved -- other libraries and universities have begun similar digitizing projects -- but because it will allow for the preservation and distribution "of an entire literature."
The publishing of Yiddish literature began in the 1860s and has all but died out today. "Yiddish literature is essentially finite," says Mr. Lansky.
Finite -- but not limited. Yiddish literature "encompasses the full constellation of human creation," Mr. Lansky says, noting that the center's holdings include not only novels and short stories but also poems, plays, essays, and books on political theory, education, and psychology. The collection also includes sheet music with Yiddish lyrics, which will be digitized along with the rest of the collection.
The Massachusetts-based center, which originated in 1980, has been a vital force in preserving and promoting that heritage. It has amassed a collection of about 1.4 million volumes. Most of the works were donated and brought to the center with the help of volunteer book collectors, or zamlers. The word, which connotes people who go out and gather things, came into use in the early 1900s, when some Russian Jews began collecting records of their communities.
Scholars say the digitizing project will be a boon to Yiddish studies, although they also point out that if the center truly intends to digitize all of Yiddish literature, it will have to collaborate with other organizations, such as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York City, which also have significant holdings.
The book center's collection encompasses only about half of all published Yiddish books. YIVO has 40,000 Yiddish titles in its reference library, making its collection the largest of its kind in the United States, and probably in the world.
Mr. Lansky says he believes that the book center's collection includes "the most important works" of Yiddish literature, but that he hopes to work with YIVO and other institutions with large holdings, including Harvard University and the Library of Congress.
In June, the book center moved into its new building, on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. It expects to be able to operate the digital distribution program, once established, on a fee-for-service basis. Still, Mr. Lansky estimates that about $1-million will be needed to make digital copies of all 22,000-plus titles. The center has raised about $250,000, enough to begin the work soon.
Mr. Lansky, who is known for his spirited fund-raising appeals, is offering donors who give $360 or more "an improbable but irresistibly entertaining" two-CD recording of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore, sung entirely in Yiddish.
David G. Roskies, a professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, calls the digitizing project "an amazing blessing" for the study of Yiddish literature. Many of the most popular books in the field are increasingly difficult to find, he notes, including works by the poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, who published in 1920s. He "re-invented Yiddish poetry in America," says Dr. Roskies. Offering a Yiddish poetry course without Halpern's works would be "like teaching a course in American poetry and running out of Robert Frost."
The book center has all but depleted its supply of Halpern's two books, In New York and The Golden Peacock; later editions, published in the 1950s, are riddled with errors, Dr. Roskies says.
Through the digitizing project, however, the center could create new copies of those books, and thousands of others, from the best available editions.
Dr. Roskies says he can always resort to photocopied excerpts -- as he did when he began teaching Yiddish literature, in 1971 -- from hard-to-find books. But teaching from a complete book is better, he says, because students can see the assigned works in context.
The project should also be of use to libraries, Mr. Lansky says, because it will allow the center to begin making Yiddish books available in high-quality editions printed on acid-free paper.
Most Yiddish books were published on wood-pulp paper, which eventually turns yellow and brittle. Many libraries have been reluctant to buy or take collections of the original works, which are expensive to preserve. Even the best of the Yiddish publishing houses were often "shoestring operations" that produced books as cheaply as possible, Mr. Lansky says.
Once a work is digitized, the center will make it available in any of four ways: as a bound library edition on acid-free paper; as a less expensive, spiral-bound student edition; on a CD-ROM; or as an electronic file that can be downloaded via the Internet. The center hopes to have its World-Wide Web site (http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org) operating soon.
The center will also continue to provide original titles as long as supplies last. Some students and scholars prefer the artifactual books, Mr. Lansky notes. "Even if they are brittle, they're great."
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