Outwitting History

Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky is a book about the author's efforts to rescue a large number of books in the Yiddish language from destruction.

According to the book, at age 23 Lansky read that thousands of the few remaining Yiddish books in North America were being discarded by the children of the books' original Yiddish-speaking owners. The books meant nothing to many of those who had inherited them, as they had no knowledge of Yiddish. Thousands of volumes were thus being consigned to dumpsters and a whole literature was in danger of being lost. Lansky felt compelled to preserve the language, and issued a public appeal for unwanted Yiddish books. He received a very large number of responses and set out, with a team of volunteers, to retrieve and store the remaining Yiddish books.

Aaron Lansky's accomplishments

Today, Aaron Lansky is the president of the Yiddish Book Center, which holds more than 1 million Yiddish books.[1] In 1985 he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his efforts in saving Yiddish books.

Outwitting History won the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award.[2]

Notes

  1. Lansky, Aaron (2004). Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. p. 289. ISBN 1-56512-429-4.
  2. "Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books A Reading and Discussion Guide" (PDF). The Massachusetts Center for the Book. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 8, 2012. Retrieved April 28, 2015.

Sources

gollark: This occurs in the final phase of potatoBIOS initialization:```luaif potatOS.registry.get "potatOS.immutable_global_scope" then setmetatable(_G, { __newindex = function(_, x) error(("cannot set _G[%q] - _G is immutable"):format(tostring(x)), 0) end })endif meta then _G.meta = meta.new() endif _G.textutilsprompt then textutils.prompt = _G.textutilsprompt endif process then process.spawn(keyboard_shortcuts, "kbsd") if http.websocket then process.spawn(skynet.listen, "skynetd") process.spawn(potatoNET, "systemd-potatod") end local autorun = potatOS.registry.get "potatOS.autorun" if type(autorun) == "string" then autorun = load(autorun) end if type(autorun) == "function" then process.spawn(autorun, "autorun") end if potatOS.registry.get "potatOS.extended_monitoring" then process.spawn(excessive_monitoring, "extended_monitoring") end if run then process.spawn(run_shell, "ushell") endelse if run then print "Warning: no process manager available. This should probably not happen - please consider reinstalling or updating. Fallback mode enabled." local ok, err = pcall(run_shell) if err then printError(err) end os.shutdown() endendwhile true do coroutine.yield() end```
gollark: (this applies after all the legacy `os.loadAPI` stuff loads anyway)
gollark: Too bad.
gollark: I would apply this to the various `_ENV`s, except that probably would break shell.
gollark: I *could* have a "strict" option where it makes all the tables immutable too, I suppose.

See also


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