Skip to content

Aaron Lansky: Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books

(Nonfiction, 328 pp. 2005)

In 1980, a twenty-three-year-old student set out to rescue abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Filled with poignant and often humorous anecdotes from Lansky’s travels across the country as he collected books from older Jewish immigrants, Outwitting History also shows how an almost-lost culture of Yiddish writers was preserved by the founding of the National Yiddish Book Center.