How One Book Collector Can Make A Difference

What can one person do – about anything> For one guy who was concerned about the disappearance of his heritage, he made his mission to collect over 1,500,000 books – all in a language that was quickly fading – Yiddish. The remarkable story is told in a 2004 book, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued A Million Yiddish Books.

 

Author Aaron Lansky went on to be the founder and president of the National Yiddish Book Center (www.yiddishbookcenter.org). According to his book’s back flap, “The Center has translated Yiddish titles into English; digitized the entire collection and placed it online (with the help of Steven Spielberg); distributed books to students, scholars, and nascent Jewish communities throughout the world; and sponsored programs to help fuel a renaissance of Jewish literature in his country.”

 

Lansky’s tireless efforts should be a model to anyone who thinks they can’t make a difference. It is just an incredible, uplifting story that I could not put down until I read through it. I never read a book in Yiddish but recall learning a few words, like schmuck, putz, chutzpah, klutz, nosh, and mensch – all of which have made it into the mainstream American lexicon. Schmooze, schtick, kvetch, schlep… so many good words!

 

The author saw in the early 1970’s that Yiddish was fading as a spoken language. Though for most of the last millennia, Jews in central and eastern Europe had spoken Yiddish and not Hebrew, or German, it was falling out of use. He decided he wanted to collect books in Yiddish before they were all destroyed and discarded.

 

His book identified the steps, setbacks, and his wins that he undertook and experienced in order to finance and facilitate the finding and storing of tons of forgotten and ignored books.

 

“It was the holocaust, in the end, that sounded the death knell of Yiddish literature in Europe – and paradoxically gave rise to its most powerful expression,” Lansky writes. Yiddish literature would later find its largest audience in America.

 

Making sure Yiddish literature will not be consigned to oblivion, Lansky single-handedly preserved and revived Yiddish literature. Esquire magazine had praised his organization’s efforts as “the most grassroots Jewish organization in America.” Once the Virtual Yiddish Library went online, having scanned over 35 million book pages at the time, The New York Times proclaimed: “Yiddish is now proportionately, the most in-print literature on Earth.”

 

His preservation – and readily available collection – of Yiddish literature mirrors the remarkable resilience of the Jewish people, who despite a history that includes thousands of years of war, anti-Semitism, slavery, the Holocaust, and deportations, are still here, vibrantly contributing to society.

 

“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 probably 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.”

--Aaron Lansky, Outwitting History

 

 

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About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 4.4 million pageviews. With 5,300+ posts over the past 14 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs  by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2025.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully).

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum