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Aaron Lansky of Amherst, president of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, poses in a balcony that looks over the center's book repository.
(Bob Stern)
AMHERST -- Western Massachusetts residents would likely argue the area has countless local treasures, and Yankee magazine has deemed the Yiddish Book Center at Hampshire College one of them.
The Dublin, N.H.-based magazine profiled the center in its January 2015 issue, citing the center's expansive collection of 1.5 million Yiddish works spanning from "memoirs and modernist poetry to potboilers and detective novels."
The center was founded in 1980 by Aaron Lansky, then a 24-year-old graduate student of Yiddish literature. Lansky is now the center's president.
The article describes Lansky's quest to save the 1,000-year-old language that blends Germanic, Hebrew, Romance and Slavic dialects, but was forced out of mainstream culture by the Holocaust.
"Except within some Orthodox communities, Yiddish simply wasn't being passed down, and Lansky feared what would happen to the older generation's books when left to the children who couldn't read them. He founded a grassroots organization of volunteers to scour basements and attics across the globe in search of forgotten tomes. When he began, academics were estimating that there were only some 70,000 Yiddish books left outside of libraries," the article's author, Justin Shatwell, wrote.
The center at 1021 West St. in Amherst, Mass., is open to the public Sunday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.