Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  “Zogt mir,” said the man with the coffee cup, looking at the five of us in our best post-hippie finery, “ir zent yidishe kinder? (Tell me, are you Jewish children?)”

  “Vu den? (What else?)” We then explained, half in English, half in Yiddish, that we were college students studying Yiddish who had come all the way from Massachusetts to look for Yiddish books. As might be expected, this news elicited considerable excitement.

  “Hey, Moyshe, kum aher un ze vos tut zikh bay di hayntike kinder! —Hey, Moyshe, come over here and see what the kids these days are up to!” We were scrunched together as the news spread and more and more elderly Jews sat down at the table or leaned over our shoulders, asking us a hundred questions that, in their impatience, they then answered themselves. There was a widespread tone of disbelief: Jewish children going to university to study Yiddish! Who ever heard of such a thing? By the time we finished our meal (no small accomplishment, given the size of the portions and the crowd at the table), we had been examined, cross-examined, hugged, kissed, smeared with lipstick, pinched, and blessed more times than any of us thought healthy. We were also given the names of three nearby booksellers who, we were told, were likely to have Yiddish books.

  THE FIRST WAS Rabinowitz’s, just a block away on Canal Street. This was a relatively modern establishment with a large stock of English Judaica. The store did most of its business on Sunday, when second- and third-generation Jews came in from the suburbs to buy gifts for weddings and bar mitzvahs. When we asked the Israeli clerk for used Yiddish books he gave us a blank look and called the boss. The boss, a much older man, explained that he hadn’t stocked Yiddish books for twenty years. He suggested we try Gottlieb just up the street, which happened to be the second name on our list. “Gottlieb’s got a whole attic full of Yiddish books!” the man at Rabinowitz’s assured us. “He’s bound to have what you’re looking for.”

  We walked the few blocks up Canal Street. From the outside Gottlieb’s did not look promising. The building was old and decrepit, the display windows so caked with dust and grime we couldn’t see inside. We opened the door with trepidation, stepped over the threshold, and were immediately swallowed up by must and gloom on that beautiful spring day. Packed from floor to ceiling were tottering shelves of sforim, weighty religious tomes in Hebrew and Aramaic. In the maze of narrow passageways between the shelves, bare lightbulbs hung from frayed cotton cords. The air was stale. As our eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, we could make out a half dozen black-coated Hasidim with long beards and peyes, ritual earlocks, rocking back and forth between the stacks as they leafed through their religious texts.

  I, for one, was not eager to venture farther. Paul, Roger, and I were wearing neither hats nor yarmulkes. Kathy and Laurie were in jeans, young, pretty, and braless, their waist-length hair flowing free.

  “This must be the wrong place,” I whispered over my shoulder. “Let’s get out of here!”

  But my companions were either more oblivious or more determined than I. “We’ve come all this way, let’s give it a try,” said Paul, pushing me deeper into the store. Fortunately, the Hasidic customers were too engrossed in their reading to notice us. We remembered what the man at Rabinowitz’s had said, that Gottlieb had an attic full of Yiddish books. To the right of the front door was a rickety staircase, and so, without asking questions, the five of us just walked on up.

  The stairs creaked and groaned, but none of the Hasidim looked up from their sforim. The second-floor “attic” was brighter than downstairs, its green window shades so torn and tattered that they let ample light filter through. There, in the center of the room, were piled thousands of Yiddish books covered with several inches of dust. They were tossed this way and that, one atop the other. The pile was so prodigious—and had apparently been there for so long—that the floor literally sagged beneath it, and we had to walk slightly downhill to get from the stairs to the books.

  Certain that we had reached the end of the trail—all the Yiddish books we could ever want—we wasted no time in pulling out treasure after treasure, gleefully calling out the authors as we went: “Itzik Manger!” “Sholem Asch!” “Dovid Bergelson!” There was every manner of writing: short stories, novels, scholarly works on Jewish history, essays, polemics, political theory. We were each hoarding personal piles of the books we wanted to buy, hoping that they wouldn’t be too expensive, when suddenly we looked up to see an imposing figure, with a full dark beard, black hat, and black coat, scowling at us from the doorway.

  “Vos tut zikh do? (What’s happening here?)” he demanded. “Who are you? What do you want? Who gave you permission to come upstairs?”

  My friends and I looked at one another, not sure how to respond. Kathy, who was probably the most conciliatory among us, tried to say something, but she was a woman, so the man covered his eyes with his hand and turned away. Laurie, with her bright smile and long red hair, fared no better. Then Roger tried, explaining as best he could that we were college students who had come to New York in search of Yiddish books. “And,” he added with a grin, indicating the pile with a sweep of his hand, “it looks like we’ve found them!”

  The old Jew was not amused. “Shkotsim! Apikorsim! (Non-Jews! Heretics!)” he cursed. “What do you want with Yiddish books? Better you should study Toyre, study Gemore! Far vos zolt ir avekpatern di tsayt mit mayselekh? (Why waste your time with stories?)”

  This abrupt attack was our first introduction to one of the great ironies of contemporary Jewish life: Hasidic and extreme orthodox Jews, the only demographically significant segment of the Jewish population who continue to speak Yiddish and teach the language to their children, are completely hostile to modern Yiddish literature. For them, most Yiddish books are treyf posl, forbidden, unkosher. Works by a writer such as Sholem Aleichem would be as unwelcome in their homes as a slab of bacon. That’s because Yiddish is an inherently modern literature, the product of intellectuals who had broken from the constraints of halakha—Talmudic law. Yiddish writers, almost by definition, embraced worldly knowledge, seeking to reinterpret and reconstruct Jewish tradition in a modern context—an endeavor that, while not without precedent in Jewish history, was nonetheless anathema to the black-coated defenders of tradition. Even when modern Yiddish books were not explicitly antireligious, they were still forbidden, since observant Jews were supposed to spend their time studying legal and religious texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, not reading “frivolous” works such as novels, stories, and poetry.

  What, then, were thousands of Yiddish books doing in a religious bookstore? After the man calmed down a bit he explained that people often came to him with boxes of old books to sell, usually after the death of a husband or parent. He would take the boxes, sell the Hebrew texts, and stash the Yiddish books out of sight in the attic. True, he considered the Yiddish books treyf; but as a Jew with an innate sense of respect for the written word, he could not bring himself to throw them out. And so the pile in his attic had grown larger with every passing year: He didn’t want to throw the books out, but he didn’t want to sell them, either.

  We, for our part, desperately wanted the books, and we suggested what seemed to us a reasonable way out. “Look, we’re not frum—we’re not observant—so there’s no way these books are going to corrupt us any more than we already are. We’re studying Jewish history, the history of all Jews, secular and religious alike. You have no use for the books and we do. For you they’re just taking up space. We have a van parked nearby. How about if we just take them off your hands?”

  I thought I saw the man waver for a moment, but he did not relent. Perhaps he honestly believed that the books would contribute to our moral corruption and he didn’t want the sin on his head. On the other hand, maybe it suddenly dawned on him that there was a commercial market for these old books after all, and he figured he could sell them for a greater profit somewhere else. Whatever the case, he said he needed time to think it over. “Kumt nokh yontef. . . ,” he said, dismissing us with a wave of the
hand. “Come after the Jewish holidays—then we’ll see.”

  It was two weeks after Pesakh. The next yontef was not until Shavues, four weeks away. But we agreed to wait. Two months later, in mid-June, Roger and I returned. The bookseller remembered us, but he wasn’t ready to deal. “Not today,” he said, “today we’re too busy. I’ll tell you what, kumt nokh yontef—come after the holidays. Maybe I’ll have more time then.”

  Nokh yontef? Not counting a few odd fast days, it was three months until Rosh Hashanah, the next Jewish holiday. No matter, the owner was insistent. I went back alone after Yom Kippur, and then returned a few more times during the next few years. I went in the summer, I went in the winter; I went after Simkhes Torah, when it was more than five months till the next Jewish festival. It made no difference, the reply was always the same: “Kumt nokh yontef.” I was still trying several years later when I found the building boarded up and abandoned. By then the Lower East Side was in precipitous decline as a Jewish neighborhood and many storekeepers were leaving. I never did discover the fate of the Yiddish books in Gottlieb’s attic. As far as I know, he’s still waiting for yontef to be over.

  ALL WAS NOT LOST, though, on that first pilgrimage to the Lower East Side. There was still one more name on our list: J. Levine, on Eldridge Street. Levine’s was altogether different from the two stores we had already visited. In fact, it wasn’t really a store at all, but rather a wholesale house, distributing books, vestments, and other religious articles to Jewish bookstores and synagogue gift shops around the country. We rang the bell, stepped through a heavy steel door, and informed the owner, Mr. Levine, a dignified man with a kind face and reassuring smile, that we were students in search of Yiddish books.

  “Yiddish books?” Mr. Levine smiled. “I think I can help you. Follow me, please.”

  He led us onto an old freight elevator, down into the basement, and past shelves and shelves of merchandise: a hundred kiddush cups wrapped in tissue paper, crates of tin-foil menorahs, rows of shofars. Finally, in the farthest corner of the basement, we came to an old-fashioned wooden bookcase packed with about one hundred Yiddish books, all of them in excellent condition.

  “Well, here they are,” said Mr. Levine with a smile.

  “Wow!” was all we could manage; and then I got worried, because they were such important books in such fine condition and we didn’t have a lot of money with us. “Er, how much are they?”

  Mr. Levine looked offended. “Oh, no, you don’t understand. We don’t sell Yiddish books here. These books belonged to my father, alev hasholem (may he rest in peace). My father loved Yiddish, he loved to read Yiddish books. When he died I brought his library down here for safekeeping. I always knew that someday someone would come for it, and it looks like you’re finally here. If you young people are interested in Yiddish, then the books are yours. There’s no charge.”

  He asked us where we were parked. When we told him—in a garage twelve blocks away—he called over two of his warehousemen and had them pack the books into boxes and load them into the trunk of his car. Mr. Levine himself then drove us to our van. When we tried to thank him he cut us short. “All I want is that the books should be read,” he said. “Continue with your studies. That will be thanks enough.”

  Before leaving the Lower East Side we stopped off at Guss’s to pick up a gallon of half-sours for Professor Piccus, along with a few quarts for ourselves. It was late when we arrived home in Amherst, but we stayed up to unpack the boxes and divide the books among us. My share consisted of a beautiful, fourteen-volume “deluxe” edition of the complete works of Sholem Aleichem, its covers etched in gold. I returned to my dorm room, unpacked the books, and spent most of the night trying to read them. In the years since, I’ve collected almost 1.5 million Yiddish books; but those first volumes of Sholem Aleichem, now tattered and dog-eared from use, are, for me, still the most precious of all.

  4. “What Is Mendele Doing in a Fruit Basket on the Floor?”

  I finished college in December of 1976, planning to continue my studies the following fall as a graduate student in East European Jewish Studies at McGill University, in Montreal. But first, with eight months of freedom ahead of me, I decided to “split for the Coast,” taking advantage of a $49 fare to ride the Greyhound to San Francisco. There I hooked up with my college friend Paul Novak, who had accompanied me on my first trip to the Lower East Side, and moved into a railroad flat in the Fillmore district. After a few false starts I landed a job at the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley, a converted mansion on a tree-lined street, that billed itself as the Jewish Museum of the West.

  Chronically underfunded, the Jewish Museum of the West was in no position to hire additional staff—the curator, with a Ph.D. in art history, was making $7,000 a year—and it’s unlikely the founder and director, an affable Jewish Community Federation official based in San Francisco named Seymour Fromer, would have agreed to interview me at all if he hadn’t had a big problem on his hands. Several years before my arrival, the museum’s small library had been overwhelmed by the donation of almost ten thousand Yiddish books from a declining commune of left-wing Jewish chicken farmers in nearby Petaluma. Having no room in the main building, Seymour consigned the Yiddish books to an old carriage house out back. Now he wanted to transform the carriage house into badly needed museum space, but first he had to do something with those books. As soon as he heard that I had studied Yiddish, he hired me on the spot for an effective salary of $1 an hour plus all the duplicate Yiddish books I could carry.

  Talk about hefkeyres (disorder): The carriage house overflowed with books, and it was my job to sort them and weed out the duplicates. I loved every second of it. As word of my efforts spread, curious visitors began to show up. Kathryn Hellerstein, a graduate student of Yiddish poetry at Stanford, came looking for books for herself. Sometimes she brought with her Malka Heifetz Tussman, a distinguished Yiddish poet who seemed to have a personal story about every author I shelved— a remarkable number of whom she claimed had courted her in her youth. Another regular visitor was Dov Noy, head of the folklore department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who was in town as a visiting professor at Berkeley. A native Yiddish-speaker, Dov had been the first professor to teach Yiddish literature in Israel, and he enjoyed regaling me for hours with stories about the books I was sorting and the people who wrote them.

  Perhaps the most revealing visitor was an old man who showed up one day to “tell the truth about all these books.” An early member of the Petaluma commune, he quit after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes in 1956 and had been bitterly disillusioned ever since. “You want to know why these books are in such good condition?” he asked. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because nobody ever read them! The only reason the commune had Yiddish books at all was because the Party made them buy them!”

  Be that as it may, the books were in uncommonly good condition. I remained at the carriage house for four months, until all the boxes were unpacked and the sorting complete. Between work and commuting, I had little time for reading, but a process of literary osmosis took place nonetheless. By the time I got to graduate school in Montreal I not only recognized most authors’ names, but thanks to Malka Tussman and Dov Noy, I felt I knew many of them personally. And, what with all the duplicate books I received in lieu of salary, I arrived with the best personal Yiddish library of any student in my class.

  WHEN I WAS growing up my mother used to call upstairs with the same question: “How would you like your sandwich today, dear, on rye bread or on gayishe?” Gayishe was her folksy Galitsianer pronunciation for goyishe, which, as I learned before I could walk, was synonymous in this context with white bread. Jewish or goyish was the grand bifurcation of the universe. If, on rare occasion, my parents uttered a sentence that did not contain the word “Jewish,” odds were it contained “goyish” instead.

  I learned other aspects of Yiddish sensibility at shul, in the Conservative synagogue we attended every Saturday morning. In the
front rows, where my parents sat with other American-born professionals, the proceedings grew steadily more decorous with each passing year. In the back it was different. There the European-born immigrants davened (prayed): tough Jews in enormous wool taleysim (prayer shawls), bootleggers, peddlers, and junkmen, who drank shnaps (straight whiskey) out of water glasses, munched on herring and raw onions, spoke mostly in Yiddish, and almost never stopped talking. I was seven years old, with a clip-on tie, but instinctively I preferred the heymish, home-grown, back of the shul over the highbrow front, and I escaped there every chance I got. The old men greeted me in their heavy Yiddish accents, hugged me to their bristly cheeks (they never shaved on Shabbos) and let me sit with them while they told and retold their jokes and stories. They listened with one ear to the service and interrupted their kibbitzing only long enough to shout “Omeyn! (Amen!)”

  I learned about Yiddish sensibility at Hebrew school, too—albeit inadvertently. Our teachers taught us to read siddur (the prayer book) and Torah in Ashkenazic Hebrew. There was something strange about these nervous men with their heavy accents. Mr. Asch used to smoke half a cigarette, pinch the end between his fingers, and save the rest for later. Dr. Gross once got so exasperated with a student that he threw the boy’s public-school notebook out the second-story window. Only years later did I learn that most of these teachers were Holocaust survivors, philologists with Ph.D.s from Viennese universities. Not that it would have mattered. We were American kids and we tormented them mercilessly, imitating their accents, hiding their books, placing tacks and bubble gum on their chairs, barraging them with spit balls and paper airplanes. But at least they were colorful. And authentic.