A klezmer musician who came late to Yiddish, and a handful of Jewish St. Louisans whose elders spoke Yiddish or who spoke Yiddish themselves as their first language have rescued a collection of Yiddish-language books that had been attracting dust as well as a dwindling number of readers. 

This St. Louis story is part of a larger drama in which fans of Yiddish are trying to save the language from extinction.

It begins with Barbara Raznick, who since 1985 has been director of the Saul Brodsky Jewish Community Library. The library is housed in the Jewish Federation Kopolow Building on the Creve Coeur campus of the Jewish Community Center. 

When Raznick arrived two years after the Brodsky library opened, its Yiddish collection was off to a good start. Over the next 10 years, it grew slowly through donations. In the 1990s, a now deceased resident of Covenant House glued pockets into the back of the books so they could be borrowed. By this year, the collection numbered 900 volumes. 

In 2001, Brodsky converted to a digital catalogue. At that time, while making a costly leap into modernity, Raznick was unable to budget for bringing the Yiddish-language collection (with its dwindling following) along online. Additionally, there was no Yiddish-fluent cataloguer at hand. But nevertheless, Raznick said she felt a responsibility to the books, and kept them available as a browsing collection.

Space grows short

Early this year, Raznick began to think that the space occupied by the 900 Yiddish books could better serve readers if it was used for other purposes. She decided to donate the collection to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., whose mission is to rescue, translate and distribute Yiddish books. 

Raznick reached out to Oscar Goldberg of St. Louis, part of a network of zamlers, or volunteer collectors, for the Amherst institution. Through the St. Louis chapter of the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, Goldberg recruited a cadre of heavy-lifters to pack and ship the books to New England.

At least that was the plan – until Szyfra Braitberg, 95, a Shoah survivor from Lodz, Poland, heard about the imminent departure of Brodsky’s Yiddish collection. Braitberg, the resident Yiddish speaker in Congregation Shaare Emeth’s Yiddish Club, shared her dismay with club members. 

For Webster Groves resident Will Soll, who attends that Yiddish Club, it was a call to action.

Soll, a mandolin, guitar and tenor banjo player who leads the band Will Soll’s Klezmer Conspiracy, had an informal first encounter with Yiddish via song lyrics. He was encouraged by the late Ida Stack, a respected St. Louis teacher of Hebrew and Yiddish. In 2006, Soll packed his bags for Lithuania to attend an intensive, month-long Yiddish program at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.

Now retired, Soll has a master’s degree in library science and served at Webster University as a reference librarian and at Washington University cataloging rare Jewish books. It seemed beshert (fated)that Soll would be available to inventory Brodsky’s Yiddish collection. 

For Soll, Brodsky’s Yiddish collection was — and remains — a treasure chest of Jewish culture. During the summer, while completing the inventory, he shared his enthusiasm by organizing an evening of Yiddish booksat the Brodsky library that drew about 16 people, many of them members of St. Louis Yiddish clubs. Also on hand were Braitberg, freshly recovered from hip surgery, and Dr. Ethan Schuman, a Creve Coeur dentist, Nusach Hari B’nai Zion cantor and self-educated Yiddish speaker.

Under Soll’s direction, participants, seated in small groups, wrestled with the Hebrew-alphabet titles and searched out publication dates. One book was “Eretz Yisrael in the Past and Present,” published in 1918 and co-written by David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister.Other titles had copyrights dating back to the last decades of the 1800s and were more than 100 years old.

Soll estimated that 70 percent of the Brodsky collection was published in New York City. But he urged attendees to take note of other cities where books had been printed. For instance, a copy of “Un di Velt Hot Geshvign” (“And the World Kept Silent”) by Elie Wiesel, the world’s most famous Shoah survivor, was published in 1956 in Buenos Aires (predating the French publication of his landmark memoir “Night”). 

Core collection remains here

After about 120 hours of work, Soll completed the 900-book inventory in late September. His pet find was “Oytzer Inzel,” a Yiddish-language version of “Treasure Island” translated for young adult readers. 

“I love what that combination represents: literature deeply embedded in Jewish culture because it is written in Yiddish, but with a broader exposure that includes Stevenson and Tolstoy,” Soll says. 

A wide range of topics and genres are represented in the collection: Tanakh (in the broad sense of scripture and books about scripture), children’s literature, memorial books from the Holocaust, memoirs of Yiddish theater and much more.

Yiddish literature includes titles by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mendele Mokhr-Sforim, I.L. Peretz and  Sholem Asch. The collection also features multiple sets of the complete works of Sholem Aleichem who, as his granddaughter Bel Kaufman attests in the documentary film “Sholom Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness,” died a pauper but, by general agreement, is the most beloved Yiddish writer of all time.

The most eccentric find is “Kentoki,” a book-length epic poem about the lives of whites, blacks and immigrant Jews in the Bluegrass State.

Since Soll completed the inventory, a few hundred books have been earmarked for shipment after all to Amherst’s Yiddish Book Center. Foremost among these is “Noveles,” a 1939 collection of stories by Chana Blankshteyn published in what was then Vilna, Poland, with a foreword by the late linguist, scholar and activist Max Weinreich.

Soll, who believes the only other known copy of the book is in New York at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, is sending “Noveles” by special post to Yiddish Book Center Bibliographer Catherine Madsen, who will forward it to the National Library of Israel.

Of the remaining books, Schuman has adopted about 20 “sacred” books for Nusach Hari B’nai Zion. 

Raznick, meanwhile, has decided to keep a core Yiddish-language collection of 450 books at Brodsky. The books have been shelved by category and continue to be accessible to the community.

From dumpsters to digital library

Soll hopes that eventually the books at Brodsky will be formally catalogued and that the transliterated titles will be merged into Brodsky’s electronic catalogue. It is a modest dream, considering the history of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst.

In 1980, president and founder of the center Aaron Lansky was a 24-year old graduate student, when he began rescuing Yiddish-language books. For nearly two decades, the books collected piecemeal from donors and sometimes on eleventh-hour dumpster runs, were randomly housed in homes, garages and warehouses. Then in 1997, with the help of benefactors, the center was installed in a brand-new, dedicated building on a 10-acre property (formerly an apple orchard) bordering the campus of Hampshire College. A second building was later erected to house the center’s varied educational initiatives.

In 2009, the Yiddish Book Center released 11,000 titles to create a free digital Yiddish library on the Internet, thanks to film director Steven Spielberg, who funded the project and for whom the Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library is named. 

Madsen, the center’s bibliographer, says that 14,000 volumes arrive annually from 150 zamlers located near and far. When Madsen spoke to the Jewish Light, the biggest recent shipment had arrived from the Jewish Museum of Belgium. 

“They’re moving to a new space and couldn’t take the books along,” she said. “We spent all summer unpacking them.”

As donations continue to come in, the center has developed a role as a book bank from which Yiddish collections at schools and libraries are stocked or strengthened. 

For example, library personnel report that Washington University has a Yiddish-language collection of more than 1,200 books on the St. Louis campus. Of these books, in 1994 some 800 were received from the Yiddish Book Center. This collection is available to nonstudent residents of St. Louis, who can borrow books with payment of an annual fee.

Readers who wish to donate books to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., should contact Oscar Goldberg at [email protected] or 314-991-1464. Those who would like to help with the Brodsky Yiddish book project or get more information about it may contact Barb Raznick at [email protected] or 314-442-3720.  Registration is currently open for Introduction to Yiddish II, taught by Dr. Neal Rose, during the Spring 2015 Semester starting on Monday, Jan. 12, from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at Washington University’s University College. Seniors 65 and over, receive a 50 percent reduction of tuition.