The Weekend Not in Scotland

So we were supposed to go to Scotland.  Why Scotland?  It's never been high on my bucket list.  What do I know from Scotland?  I like bagpipes.  I liked Brigadoon.  I liked Nova Scotia, which means "New Scotland," and where descendants of the original Scotsmen still play bagpipes. I like Pendleton wool plaid.

On the other hand, I hated Braveheart. And for sure, I have no use for Mel Gibson, although I imagine he has no real claim on Scotland.  No, the real reason we picked Scotland was that we wanted to go somewhere, we hadn't done any particular research or planning, and our daughter, who had been there not long before, said that Scotland was "magic."   Our neice, who had spent a semester at Edinburgh, was equally encouraging.  And I figured I had all these other years with which to check off places, at least the high ones, on my bucket list.

I'm a bit less sure about that last part now, because it turns out I didn't go to Scotland; instead, I developed a very painful knee a few weeks before the trip and hobbled around on crutches for a while, convinced I had torn cartiliage and needed arthoscopic surgery.  Turns out I probably don't need surgery now -- just NSAIDs and physical therapy -- but I cancelled the trip to Scotland.

Instead, as a consolation prize, we took up the invitation of a postcard we'd gotten just this past week, to the Community Open House of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.  A mailing with so little notice that it couldn't possibly have drawn anyone from as far away as New Jersey, unless those people just happened to have cancelled other plans for that week.

Now the National Yiddish Book Center was a place on my bucket list, and cheaper to reach than most -- just about three and a half hours away by car.  So I fired up the old seach engine to find the nearest hotel with at least a couple stars that we could stay in for under $130.  It being peak foliage season, that turned out to be the Springfield Sheraton. That's where I'm blogging from tonight, after a beautiful autumn day at the center, which sits in an apple orchard next door to Hampshire College.

Built in 1997, I think, the architecture of the National Yiddish Book Center evokes the low wooden roof peaks of a shtetl.  But the sensibility, while thoroughly Jewish, is also thoroughly northeastern liberal artsy.  The interior is light and airy, the buildings that give an appearance of forming a village are really all interconnected, and the rescued Yiddish books -- the extra copies that you can buy -- sit in a huge library space with the light and colored banners and light-colored Danish modern woods and staircases that bring to mind the late-model children's science museums you take the kids to on vacation in New England.

For those who don't know, the National Yiddish Book Center is the brainchild and life's work of Aaron Lansky, who describes its founding in the wonderfully written Outwitting History.  Go. Get. Download. Read. It tells the story of a 23-year-old grad student who, upon realizing a serious shortage of Yiddish books with which to study for his advanced degree, puts out a call for local Jews to call him before dumping or abandoning their Yiddish libraries.  And how this leads to whole apartment buildings full of Jews entrusting to him the books their children cannot understand or appreciate, and how he has to sit down to a glass of tea, cake and conversation with most of them, and how it eventually leads to a network of dedicated collectors and the amassing of 12 times the Yiddish books that anyone thought were ever in existence, from NYC, and then from Boston, and eventually Buenos Aires, and Zimbabwe, and azoy vayter (etc.)

To avoid a) bringing his parents' house down under the weight of so many books and b) the infighting among Yiddishist academics that prevailed in New York City, Lansky eventually relocates his collecting enterprise to bucolic Amherst, where his undergrad alma mater, Hampshire College, sells him the apple orchard parcel of campus on which the center gets built.

Lansky, who I've tremendously enjoyed reading and also heard once or twice in person at NJ venues, has come to share this mission with a couple generations of new Yiddishists by now, as well as the older generations that sent him or called up his dedicated zamlers to give their books a home or rescue others  from dumpsters.  Steven Speilberg and others have donated the funds to digitize a large percentage of the works and make them available over the web, so that now anyone can make a page or a whole story of Sholem Aleichem or hundreds of other Yiddish writers come out of their very own printers, in Yiddish, on regular printer paper.  20 years ago, this took a trip to a specialized library, to borrow or just read there a book too old and delicate to subject to a copier glass.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I can make up for weeks of not blogging with this one goldene weekend, so I'm going to see if I can post this with my mouseless iPad before ikh gey shlufn, and save the rest for later.