This week I went to visit the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA; I have been wanting to go there fo
This week I went to visit the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA; I have been wanting to go there for quite a while and with extra time this week staying in MA, I decided to visit. https://www.yiddishbookcenter.orgDesigned to look a European village or shtetl from the outside, the museum is amazingly large. The 12-minute orientation movie will tell you that the project that started the museum expected to collect ‘maybe’ 70,000 books in Yiddish and reached that the first year - over 30 years ago! The collection is now 1.5 million volumes and they receive at least 1,000 more every month. 10% are in the museum at any time and you are welcome to peruse the stacks, pull a volume, and start reading … provided you read Yiddish. The current conservation project aims to digitize every volume in the collection and have all of them available for free on the internet. In one exhibit, you could pick up a volume and try to guess what it was - I picked up a copy of 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ - in Yiddish! Quite a few gallery rooms with many different rotating exhibits - the one upstairs is 'The Lost Synagogues of Europe’ -postcards from a collection of synagogues - all of which have been destroyed by the two world wars. A wonderful exhibit of clips from Yiddish movies (the woman dressed in man’s clothing is Molly Picon - VERY YOUNG!, along with posters from movies, the Yiddish Theatre, etc. There was also a hall of vintage Klesmer music playing. There are two performance spaces in the museum - one rather large where they will hold 'Yidstock’ this July.The reproduction of the Yiddish Print shop has the only known Yiddish linotype machine, along with front pages of contemporary news headlines - lots of Yiddish newspapers in NYC - now going away.Two galleries were needed to display 'The Posthumous Landscape’- of photographs taken in present-day Poland by David Kaufman. The photo of the Jewish man sitting in a deteriorating synagogue was the most striking, disturbing, and moving of the exhibit.Sheet Music - you need Yiddish sheet music? They received thousands of sheets of music from warehouses of defunct Jewish music publishers!The large family section has dozens of Jewish children’s books - in English - along with famiy games, reading areas, etc. One of them was similar to 'Mad Libs’, and as you can see from the last photo - don’t just stand there - “SCHLEP! Don’t walk! to your nearest library today”. They also have a large bookstore and gift shop.I found the entire experience fascinating - and made me wish I could read Yiddish! -- source link
#amherst massachusetts#yidstock