AMHERST, Mass. — Brittle with age and crumbling, the world’s largest collection of Yiddish literature is being given new life.
The National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst announced it will receive $500,000 from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation to create a digital Yiddish library of 20,000 out-of-print, irreplaceable texts.
The project will begin immediately and use digital technology to permanently preserve works of modern Yiddish literature, very nearly obliterated during the Holocaust. Similar technology was used in Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History archive. That project preserved on digital video the eyewitness testimonies of 50,000 Holocaust survivors, rescuers and liberators.
Digitized books in “The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library” will be reprinted on demand, or alternatively issued as CD-ROMs, and made available via the Internet. Officials at the center say this is the first time that virtually an entire modern literature will be preserved in digital form.
Emerging in the 1860s, modern Yiddish literature encompasses novels, plays, poetry, stories and essays by writers including literary masters such as Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Often viewed as a bridge between the world of Jewish tradition and modern, industrialized society, the Yiddish works are a unique record of Jewish life and thought in Eastern Europe and America before the Holocaust.
With demand for primary Yiddish sources increasing worldwide in recent years, Aaron Lansky, the center’s founder, sees digitization as a historic effort. “This is a finite [body of] literature,” he said. “Since the Holocaust, the culture of our immediate forebears resides largely in these books and we ignore Yiddish literature at our peril.”
This year marks the milestone 18th year the National Yiddish Book Center has spent recovering what amounts to almost 1.5 million Yiddish volumes. In a fitting tribute, the electronic preservation process will give new life to the books in the center’s collection. Most are printed on acidic, wood-pulp paper which is deteriorating with age.
Although it must destroy the books it preserves by removing spines in order to scan pages, the process will not affect artifact copies, many of which are duplicates, according to Nancy Sherman, Lansky’s executive assistant. And copies of the most popular titles are in short supply.
Neil Zagorin, the center’s bibliographer, said, “everybody seems to want the poetry of Itsik Manger, who published collections of poetry before the war which are long out of print.”
Zagorin said that memorial books are also highly sought after. These are books containing maps and genealogies written mostly by Holocaust survivors about their hometowns. Most of the books were published in very limited quantities by a landsman shaft, a hometown association organized in the New World, he said.
The project has been a major financial undertaking during a year of anticipated — and unanticipated — budget shortfalls. In a September letter to members, Lansky said an operating budget deficit of over $900,000 required him to issue an emergency appeal, even though the center raised more than $3.3 million in major gifts and grants this year. Those grants, however, were earmarked mostly for the digitization and endowment funds, according to the letter.
The center has grown to become the world’s largest supplier of out-of-print Yiddish books, with an $8 million facility on the campus of Hampshire College. Spielberg gave $250,000 toward construction of the organization’s permanent home in 1995.