One hun­dred years ago, the head librar­i­an of the Boston Pub­lic Library’s West End Branch — a young Russ­ian immi­grant named Fan­ny Gold­stein — found­ed Jew­ish Book Week. In time, Jew­ish Book Week became Jew­ish Book Month, orga­nized by Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. The 2026 issue of Paper Brigade pays trib­ute to the woman behind JBC with this con­ver­sa­tion with a present-day fig­ure known for his active role in con­serv­ing and pro­mot­ing Jew­ish books. 

Aaron Lan­sky has worked to pre­serve the rich her­itage of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture since he was a grad­u­ate stu­dent in his mid-twen­ties. After real­iz­ing that the Yid­dish books pub­lished and read by Jews before the Holo­caust were in dan­ger of dis­ap­pear­ing, he trav­eled around the world, res­cu­ing entire libraries from base­ments and even dump­sters — and meet­ing thou­sands of peo­ple with their own sto­ries to share. In 1980, Lan­sky found­ed the Yid­dish Book Cen­ter in Amherst, Mass­a­chu­setts, to house this col­lec­tion. Over the years, the cen­ter expand­ed to offer fel­low­ships, Yid­dish lan­guage cours­es, sum­mer pro­grams, and field work oppor­tu­ni­ties, all intend­ed to pre­serve — and rein­vig­o­rate — Yid­dish cul­ture and memory. 

Lan­sky retired from his posi­tion as the Yid­dish Book Cen­ter’s pres­i­dent in 2025, hav­ing cre­at­ed a lega­cy of inno­va­tion and mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tions to the field of Yid­dish Stud­ies. He received the 74th Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award for Men­tor­ship for pro­vid­ing a new gen­er­a­tion with the tools to con­tin­ue his work. 

In this con­ver­sa­tion, Lan­sky looks back on his career — his ini­tial inspi­ra­tion, the sto­ries he’ll always remem­ber, and the lessons he will car­ry with him as he begins a new chapter. 

Isado­ra Kianovsky: You found­ed the Yid­dish Book Cen­ter over forty years ago, at the age of twen­ty-four. Can you speak about what it was like to be so young with this big idea? Was there a spe­cif­ic instance or expe­ri­ence that con­vinced you to make this idea into a real­i­ty? Did you turn to any men­tors for advice? 

Aaron Lan­sky: Well, the best part about being young is, you don’t know you’re young, and all things seem pos­si­ble. You don’t hes­i­tate — you just jump in. And it was only because I knew the work had to be done that I did­n’t stop to think about it. I knew how to dri­ve a truck and I knew Yid­dish, so I fig­ured that was a pret­ty good combination. 

In terms of men­tors: I was in grad­u­ate school when I came up with the idea, and I dis­cussed it with one of my pro­fes­sors at the time, Ruth Wisse — she’s a remark­able per­son, and a bril­liant schol­ar of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture. She thought it was a great idea: ​“This is the most impor­tant thing that has to be done right now.” So she was total­ly sup­port­ive, and we arranged that I would take what I thought would be a two-year leave of absence from grad school to go save the world’s Yid­dish books. And here I am, forty-five years lat­er … tech­ni­cal­ly still on leave. Ruth and I have stayed very close ever since. She has always been a men­tor and a friend. 

There was Leonard Glick, who was my pro­fes­sor as an under­grad­u­ate at Hamp­shire Col­lege. I remem­ber going off to the library at UMass Amherst, and find­ing Simon Dub­nov’s His­to­ry of the Jews. I brought it back and said, ​“Len, what do you think about this book? Is this impor­tant?” And he said, ​“I don’t know. You’ll have to read it and fig­ure it out for your­self.” Learn­ing along­side a teacher was the best kind of edu­ca­tion. And then my Yid­dish pro­fes­sor, Jules Pic­cus, was extra­or­di­nary. Obvi­ous­ly, nobody starts any­thing com­plete­ly from scratch. You have to have peo­ple behind you. And I had a very good team behind me before I even started.

IK: Absolute­ly. At our sev­en­ty-fourth Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards cer­e­mo­ny, where you were giv­en the Men­tor­ship Award, you quot­ed the Tal­mu­dic rab­bi Chananya: ​“I have learned much from my teach­ers, more from my col­leagues, and most of all, from my stu­dents.” Can you share an inter­ac­tion you had over the course of your career that has stuck with you as par­tic­u­lar­ly mean­ing­ful and resonant?

AL: There’s an embar­rass­ment of rich­es. I once fig­ured out that I had vis­it­ed the homes of about 3,000 peo­ple in the course of col­lect­ing books. That’s an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly large num­ber, con­sid­er­ing how intense the vis­its were. Nobody just gave me their books. I don’t think Jews are con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly capa­ble of that act. Every­body had to talk. Every­body had to sit me down at the table, give me hot tea in a water glass, and ask me a mil­lion ques­tions about myself to make sure I was wor­thy of accept­ing these books, and that we could take care of them.

But they all gave me some­thing besides the books. There was tremen­dous wis­dom there. A lot of them had lived pret­ty remark­able lives. Almost all of them were born in the old coun­try, and many had sur­vived the Holo­caust. None of them had what one would call an ​“easy life.” When peo­ple live event­ful lives, they have a lot of sto­ries to tell.

I heard more sto­ries than I could ever take in. In fact, some­times we used to sit in the truck after­wards with a tape recorder and try to remem­ber what peo­ple had told us. I still have hun­dreds of hours of these tapes. When I wrote my book, I nev­er even lis­tened to them because it was just too much mate­r­i­al. In retire­ment, I would love to go back and actu­al­ly lis­ten to those record­ings. I think there’d be a lot of sur­pris­es in them. 

IK: That sounds amaz­ing. I’m think­ing of the sto­ry in your book about your friends Sam and Leah Ostroff. That was such a beau­ti­ful con­nec­tion that you made over the years. 

AL: They were the most won­der­ful peo­ple. They helped us col­lect oth­ers’ books for years. It could be sev­en o’clock in the morn­ing, and they’d have a great big meal ready for us. Their sto­ries were end­less, and we became very close to them. I’ll nev­er for­get the time Sam called me up and said, ​“I’ve got some more busi­ness for you. Now you’ve got to come and get my books.” 

Sud­den­ly I find myself in the same sit­u­a­tion. At that time, it seemed like it would be a mil­lion years before I would ever get rid of my own books. Like Sam, I’m not exact­ly eager to give up any of them. 

IK: It’s like giv­ing away a part of your own his­to­ry and your own inher­i­tance. And in your book, you men­tion a man who told you, ​“They’re old friends, these books.” Books give us a sense of con­nec­tion, both on the page and with those who we share these sto­ries with. You your­self have made many close friends and allies around the world in your quest to save Yid­dish books. What do you think it is about lit­er­a­ture — about sto­ries — that con­nects us so deeply? And why do you think this bond is so preva­lent in the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in particular? 

AL: Books are a won­der­ful human arti­fact — one of the great things that human beings do is that we cre­ate lit­er­a­ture and tell sto­ries. Robert Frost referred to poet­ry as that which is lost in trans­la­tion. Of course, you could use a com­put­er to trans­late a tech­ni­cal text into a rea­son­able fac­sim­i­le of Eng­lish. But lit­er­a­ture? No, lit­er­a­ture is some­thing very sub­tle and sub­lime. And telling sto­ries is how we under­stand and define ourselves.

So why do Jews val­ue books so much? Why do we call our­selves Am haSe­fer, Peo­ple of the Book? Jews used to say that books were their portable home­land — for much of Jew­ish his­to­ry, we had no coun­try of our own, and as a result, books were the defin­ing fac­tor in our lives. Books are what gave us our iden­ti­ty in so many dif­fer­ent ways. When I was a kid, if we dropped a book on the floor, we were taught to pick it up and kiss it. To this day, I have to hold myself back from doing it. That would get very exhaust­ing after a while in my line of work — there’s not enough chap­stick in the world. 

I find it very stir­ring that we val­ue books in that way even when they are no longer of use. You know, books with shamot—God’s name in them — are giv­en a prop­er bur­ial. Jews used to build genizahs — rooms where they would lock up books and papers that were no longer usable, and they just would lie there for cen­turies. When I start­ed the Yid­dish Book Cen­ter, peo­ple said, ​“Are you going to be build­ing a genizah for Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture?” And I said, ​“Oh, no, God for­bid!” It was exact­ly the oppo­site: I want­ed to col­lect books not to store them away, but to put them in the hands of new read­ers. Every box of books was impor­tant, and I was like a trea­sure hunter. I con­sid­er myself one of the luck­i­est peo­ple in the world to have work like that.

IK: I want to return to some­thing you said about trans­la­tion. Trans­la­tion is such a human art, and there’s real­ly no way to auto­mate it. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen a renewed inter­est in Yid­dish Stud­ies that the Yid­dish Book Cen­ter has been such a huge part of sup­port­ing. The Yid­dish Book Cen­ter is not only a repos­i­to­ry of Yid­dish lan­guage books, but also offers dynam­ic ini­tia­tives in Yid­dish lan­guage, his­to­ry, arts, and trans­la­tion. A prime exam­ple of this is the new trans­la­tion of Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daugh­ters, which was trans­lat­ed by Rose Wald­man, a for­mer Yid­dish Book Cen­ter fellow. 

In your own book, you write that post-Holo­caust Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture was pri­mar­i­ly used to ​“eulo­gize a world that had been destroyed. As a result, trans­lat­ed titles were often those that cast the old coun­try in a rosy glow, while those that por­trayed Jews as real-life human beings with frail­ties and foibles, con­flicts and con­tra­dic­tions … were … large­ly over­looked.” I feel like Sons and Daugh­ters has less of a rosy glow. It shows a com­pli­cat­ed fam­i­ly that is mov­ing away from the tra­di­tion­al world of their par­ents. Do you see this shift in which books are being trans­lat­ed — a shift toward more real­is­tic Jew­ish sto­ries? What can Yid­dish books in trans­la­tion tell us about the state of Jew­ish life today?

AL: Nobody knows how many dis­crete Yid­dish titles there are. It was such a com­plete his­tor­i­cal rup­ture that we lost track of our own lit­er­a­ture to such a degree dur­ing the Holo­caust. But of all those books, some­thing like two per­cent have been trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish so far. That’s a vast cul­tur­al trea­sure that’s large­ly inac­ces­si­ble to every­body except the rel­a­tive­ly few peo­ple who still are able to read Yid­dish. Not only has the Yid­dish Book Cen­ter col­lect­ed all of these books in Yid­dish, but also we dig­i­tized them. With­in a mat­ter of sec­onds, you can search about ten mil­lion pages of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture. In Yid­dish, they call this a hayn­tike velt—a mod­ern world, today’s world. 

All that being said, most peo­ple still need to read Yid­dish books in trans­la­tion. Yes, I’ve said for years that the books that had been trans­lat­ed were the schmaltzy ones, those that por­tray that world in a soft­er focus. Before the Sec­ond World War, there was very lit­tle in the way of trans­la­tion of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture. But after the war, every­thing changed, of course. I think it was a nor­mal instinct; the rub­ble was still piled high in the cities of Europe at that point, and peo­ple want­ed to eulo­gize the world that had been destroyed. As trans­la­tion began to pick up, a lot of the great books of the pre­war era were trans­lat­ed. Books by writ­ers like Y. L. Peretez, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Itzik Manger. The biggest lacu­na in all of this was lit­er­a­ture by women; there were thou­sands of women who wrote in Yid­dish. So once we put all the books online, sud­den­ly all that lit­er­a­ture became avail­able. We start­ed our trans­la­tion pro­gram, and it end­ed up being a far more ambi­tious project than I ever imag­ined. It begged the ques­tion: are there Yid­dish mas­ter­pieces that haven’t been dis­cov­ered yet?

I have a tan­gen­tial con­nec­tion to the Grade book that just came out. After Grade’s wife, Inna — who was very pro­tec­tive of his works after his death — passed away, no one knew who all this mate­r­i­al in her apart­ment belonged to. The Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tor’s office of the Bronx sent some­body down there to check it out before they could throw every­thing away. And it just so hap­pened that the per­son they sent there was a young lawyer who had tak­en a course in Yid­dish at Colum­bia many years before. Thank God for that, because oth­er­wise, we would have lost everything. 

He got in there and said, ​“I think these are Chaim Grade’s papers.” So he wrote a let­ter to me, Ruth Wisse, the YIVO Insti­tute in New York, and the New York Pub­lic Library ask­ing us to help assess what was there. YIVO real­ized there was a man­u­script, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Der Forverts, and end­ed up hir­ing Rose Wald­man to do the trans­la­tion. I spoke with Rose about what she was doing with this book. It sound­ed so inter­est­ing to me. I can’t imag­ine that the book will be a beach read, but I’m look­ing for­ward to read­ing it.

There are a lot of trea­sures still out there. I am one hun­dred per­cent sure of that. There’s going to be a lot more com­ing, and I can’t wait to see it. 

IK: I know this is an impos­si­ble ques­tion, but is there a par­tic­u­lar book (in Yid­dish or oth­er­wise) that has deeply impact­ed you, the work you do, and the way you view the Jew­ish world? 

AL: In some ways, I could tell you that every sin­gle book that you see here in my office has shaped me in some way. The rea­son I love to hold onto books is because the books we read make us the peo­ple we are. And so yes, there­fore I val­ue every book that I’ve read.

But are there books that made a par­tic­u­lar impact on me? Yeah, there are a lot. My favorite Yid­dish book of all time is prob­a­bly the only Yid­dish book that most peo­ple have heard of, and that’s Tevye der milkhik­er—Tevye the Dairy­man—by Sholem Ale­ichem. The sto­ries in that book were the basis for Fid­dler on the Roof. But Fid­dler on the Roof was such a bowd­ler­iza­tion of the orig­i­nal sto​ries​.In the movie, Tevye has the sup­port of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in his shtetl. But in the orig­i­nal sto­ry, Tevye lives in the mid­dle of nowhere, where there are no oth­er Jews around. When each of his daugh­ters in turn brings in the chal­lenges of moder­ni­ty, Tevye has to fig­ure it out for him­self. That’s what makes the sto­ry so res­o­nant. Tevye becomes a pre­cur­sor of us — of the read­ers — in his own time. Now that we’re dis­tanced from the orig­i­nal reli­gious texts, we also have to make up our own minds all the time. There’s not a day that goes by when you’re not mak­ing choic­es as a Jew in the mod­ern world. We’re always chang­ing. We’re always walk­ing a tightrope. The Tevye sto­ries antic­i­pate that mod­ern dilem­ma so bril­liant­ly. Tevye does­n’t exact­ly give us answers, but he tells us how to ask the ques­tions, and to keep ask­ing the ques­tions. And for that rea­son, I love the book.

IK: That’s such a nice place to end. A sheynem dank.