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sabotabbyOutwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of A Man Who Rescued A Million Yiddish Books, Aaron Lansky
"M'tor nisht myaesh zayn (You must never despair). It says in Perek,: 'Loy alekho hamelokhe ligmor... It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.'"
We all know that I am a softie at heart who cries at sad movies. It's rare that I cry while reading trade non-fiction, though. Outwitting History is a short read, but took me around a week to finish because I had to keep putting it down to reach for the Kleenex. I'm not even exaggerating.
Lansky studied Yiddish as a grad student, and came to discover that thousands—indeed, over a million—Yiddish books were at risk of being destroyed as their original owners died. He embarked on an odd sort of quest to rescue the books—and along with them, the remnants of Yiddish language and culture—from oblivion.
The writing is engaging, luminous in passages, full of wit and sorrow and the burden of history. Lansky and the people he encounters—idealistic students and aging immigrants alike—are compelling, memorable characters. But above all, this is the story of the death of a culture, and since it's my culture, I took it very personally. Lansky doesn't idealize it—in one heartbreaking section, he talks about the remaining Yiddish organizations, almost all of which were socialist or Communist, and how they refused to cooperate even to save their own resources and spaces. Nevertheless, he brings to life a lost era of refugees, Bundists, activists, writers, and poets, and makes you feel their loss with razor-sharp precision.
The good news is that the Yiddish Book Center does exist, and continues to digitize and translate its large collection. This somewhat mitigates the pain of reading about people who could be my grandparents or great-grandparents sobbing as they surrendered their precious book collections, the "portable homeland" that was frequently the only thing of value they had ever owned.
Related, I also saw:
Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, currently showing at the Gladstone.
This exhibition consists of four rooms, showcasing comics on themes of sex, family, culture, politics, and the body. Primarily black-and-white, underground-style, and brutally honest, these are frequently hilarious reads. (My favourite, by Sharon Rudahl, was called "How I Got Purged From My Women's Group," and is a must-read for strident feminist types.)
Speaking of awesome feminists,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monster_grrrl, her roommate L., and I caught:
Rasputina (with Ariel) at Lee's Palace
I first saw Rasputina years ago, opening for—someone. It's a testament to how good they are that I honestly can't remember who it was I'd actually gone to see.
They're still that good. Better, even. There's been some turnover in the band, and increasing levels of sophistication in their lyrics and composition, and they told us some wonderful stories about early American history, Emily Dickinson, feral children, and the time Melora was in a threesome with a party that shall be named and an albino abominable snowman.
[Rasputina cover Heart's "Barracuda"]
The opening band were godawful, butmonster_grrrl did an excellent imitation that was almost worth suffering through them.
And a last bit of music:
Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune
I have such good friends. I hadn't even heard that there was a new movie about Phil Ochs, butbcholmes and C. contacted me almost simultaneously to make sure I knew about it.
It's very good. It's of the talking-heads-and-old-footage school of documentary filmmaking, but you don't really mind because the talking heads are interesting and the old footage included a great deal I hadn't seen. (Did you know that there was a music video for "No More Songs"? I didn't even know that they made music videos back then.) The interviews ranged from those you'd expect (Billy Bragg, Michael and Sonny Ochs) to rather surprising (pre-sellout Christopher Hitchens what? Taking the same stance on the Dylan-Ochs rivalry that I do? Say it ain't so!).
There's a certain amount of hard-to-take historical inevitability. Oh, Phil Ochs went to Chile, you say? And became friends with Victor Jara? This ends about as well as you'd expect.
The thing about Phil Ochs is that a movie about him isn't just a nostalgic look at a time when musicians were actually involved with the protest movement. It's kind of depressing how current his songs are, when I read about what's going on in Wisconsin or Bahrain or Libya.
[Also, he seriously had a sense of style, which is rare in a folksinger.]
"M'tor nisht myaesh zayn (You must never despair). It says in Perek,: 'Loy alekho hamelokhe ligmor... It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.'"
We all know that I am a softie at heart who cries at sad movies. It's rare that I cry while reading trade non-fiction, though. Outwitting History is a short read, but took me around a week to finish because I had to keep putting it down to reach for the Kleenex. I'm not even exaggerating.
Lansky studied Yiddish as a grad student, and came to discover that thousands—indeed, over a million—Yiddish books were at risk of being destroyed as their original owners died. He embarked on an odd sort of quest to rescue the books—and along with them, the remnants of Yiddish language and culture—from oblivion.
The writing is engaging, luminous in passages, full of wit and sorrow and the burden of history. Lansky and the people he encounters—idealistic students and aging immigrants alike—are compelling, memorable characters. But above all, this is the story of the death of a culture, and since it's my culture, I took it very personally. Lansky doesn't idealize it—in one heartbreaking section, he talks about the remaining Yiddish organizations, almost all of which were socialist or Communist, and how they refused to cooperate even to save their own resources and spaces. Nevertheless, he brings to life a lost era of refugees, Bundists, activists, writers, and poets, and makes you feel their loss with razor-sharp precision.
The good news is that the Yiddish Book Center does exist, and continues to digitize and translate its large collection. This somewhat mitigates the pain of reading about people who could be my grandparents or great-grandparents sobbing as they surrendered their precious book collections, the "portable homeland" that was frequently the only thing of value they had ever owned.
Related, I also saw:
Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, currently showing at the Gladstone.
This exhibition consists of four rooms, showcasing comics on themes of sex, family, culture, politics, and the body. Primarily black-and-white, underground-style, and brutally honest, these are frequently hilarious reads. (My favourite, by Sharon Rudahl, was called "How I Got Purged From My Women's Group," and is a must-read for strident feminist types.)
Speaking of awesome feminists,
monster_grrrl, her roommate L., and I caught:Rasputina (with Ariel) at Lee's Palace
I first saw Rasputina years ago, opening for—someone. It's a testament to how good they are that I honestly can't remember who it was I'd actually gone to see.
They're still that good. Better, even. There's been some turnover in the band, and increasing levels of sophistication in their lyrics and composition, and they told us some wonderful stories about early American history, Emily Dickinson, feral children, and the time Melora was in a threesome with a party that shall be named and an albino abominable snowman.
[Rasputina cover Heart's "Barracuda"]
The opening band were godawful, but
monster_grrrl did an excellent imitation that was almost worth suffering through them.And a last bit of music:
Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune
I have such good friends. I hadn't even heard that there was a new movie about Phil Ochs, but
bcholmes and C. contacted me almost simultaneously to make sure I knew about it.PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE: Movie Trailer. Watch more top selected videos about: Peter Yarrow, Kenneth Bowser
It's very good. It's of the talking-heads-and-old-footage school of documentary filmmaking, but you don't really mind because the talking heads are interesting and the old footage included a great deal I hadn't seen. (Did you know that there was a music video for "No More Songs"? I didn't even know that they made music videos back then.) The interviews ranged from those you'd expect (Billy Bragg, Michael and Sonny Ochs) to rather surprising (pre-sellout Christopher Hitchens what? Taking the same stance on the Dylan-Ochs rivalry that I do? Say it ain't so!).
There's a certain amount of hard-to-take historical inevitability. Oh, Phil Ochs went to Chile, you say? And became friends with Victor Jara? This ends about as well as you'd expect.
The thing about Phil Ochs is that a movie about him isn't just a nostalgic look at a time when musicians were actually involved with the protest movement. It's kind of depressing how current his songs are, when I read about what's going on in Wisconsin or Bahrain or Libya.
[Also, he seriously had a sense of style, which is rare in a folksinger.]
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 11:16 pm (UTC)Lol. Those guys are friends of mine.
In their defense I don't think they've played together for years.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 11:45 pm (UTC)They seemed to individually have talent. As a band, not so much.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 01:05 am (UTC)I relate to Phil Ochs a whole bunch. It is unfair to label him as an earnest lefty folksinger—if anything, he was far more critical and sarcastic than his contemporaries, and some of his songs were clearly trolling. He was also a crazy. But one thing I didn't know was in addition to the above he was a total camwhore. You get the sense that all of the pictures taken of him involved him being all, "Oooh, take a picture of me in front of this. It'd be so ironic."
I feel so cheated that he died before I was born.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 01:56 am (UTC)This is explained properly in the movie, BTW.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 02:42 am (UTC)