Aaron Lansky

• A conversation with Aaron Lansky

Biography

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1955, Aaron Lansky grew up in a Jewish home where books were valued, and where Yiddish was mostly a "secret language" spoken by his mother and grandmother when they wanted to keep something hidden from him and his two brothers. It wasn’t until 1973, when as a student at Hampshire College he took one of the first courses ever offered on the Holocaust, that Lansky developed a passionate interest in the culture the Nazis had sought to destroy. "I was 19 when I began studying Yiddish," Lansky recalls. "Suddenly an entire universe opened up to me. It was like discovering Atlantis, a lost continent, a treasure-trove of Jewish tradition and culture, sensibility, wisdom and passion, all locked up in this amazing modern literature."

After graduating from Hampshire College in 1977 with a B.A. in modern Jewish history, Lansky enrolled in a graduate program in East European Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal. There he discovered that large numbers of Yiddish books were being destroyed – not by anti-Semites, but by Jews who could not read the language of their own parents and grandparents. Convinced that someone had to save those books, Lansky, ignoring the cautions of experts who considered the task impossible, left McGill and started what he then called the National Yiddish Book Exchange.

In 1980, when Aaron Lansky issued his first public appeal for old Yiddish books, it was estimated that only 70,000 Yiddish volumes were extant and recoverable. He rescued that many within six months. Today the National Yiddish Book Center’s collection totals over a million volumes, with the core collection stored in our state-of-the-art repository and 11,000 titles available online from our Virtual Yiddish Library. The Book Center also sponsors public events, internships and a wide range of cultural and educational programs designed to “open up” the treasures of Yiddish culture for a new generation.

Aaron’s work has been widely featured on National Public Radio and network television, and was the subject of articles in Time, Smithsonian, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and countless other publications. Esquire Magazine, in 1984, included Lansky in its list of "The Best of the New Generation: Men and Women Under 40 Who Are Changing America." He has since received numerous awards and recognitions, including a National Jewish Book Award, honorary doctorates from Amherst College and the State University of New York, and a 1989 "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. His first book, Outwitting History, is a “rollicking readable account” of the Book Center’s founding, and has received numerous awards since its publication by Algonquin Press in October 2004. Aaron lives in Amherst with his wife Gail, and their two daughters, Sasha and Chava.