Outwitting History
Aaron Lansky
Workman Publishing
<p><B>This true story of a quest to save Jewish literature is "a detective story, a profound history lesson, and a poignant evocation of a bygone world" (<I>The Boston Globe</I>).</B><BR /> <BR /> In 1980 an entire body of Jewish literature&#8212;the physical remnant of Yiddish culture&#8212;was on the verge of extinction. Precious volumes that had survived Hitler and Stalin were being passed down from older generations of immigrants to their non-Yiddish-speaking children, only to be discarded or destroyed. So Aaron Lansky, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, issued a worldwide appeal for unwanted Yiddish works.<BR /> <BR /> Lansky's passion led him to travel from house to house collecting the books&#8212;and the stories of these Jewish refugees and the vibrant intellectual world they inhabited. He and a team of volunteers salvaged books from dusty attics, crumbling basements, demolition sites, and dumpsters. When they began, scholars thought that fewer than seventy thousand...</p></BR>