Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  In the Nazi-imposed ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw, the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum handpicked a clandestine group of scholars, poets, playwrights, novelists, and journalists to chronicle daily life. Operating under the Hebrew code name Oyneg Shabes (The Joy of the Sabbath), they started out as social scientists, reporting in meticulous detail on everything from mail delivery to food and sanitation. But as conditions worsened, as starvation and disease ran rampant, as horrifying accounts came back from the death camps—and as it became clear that most of the ghetto’s inhabitants would not survive—many of the Oyneg Shabes chroniclers turned to literature, in both Yiddish and Hebrew, to better convey the unspeakable human tragedy taking place before their eyes. Before the ghetto was liquidated, they buried three separate caches of documents. Part of the first cache, packed into ten tin boxes, was recovered shortly after the war; and the second, sealed inside two aluminum milk cans, was found by Polish construction workers in December 1950. The location of the third cache remains unknown.

  In the Vilna ghetto young Jewish writers, including the Hebrew poet Abba Kovner and the Yiddish writer Avrom Sutzkever, played a central role in organizing a movement of armed resistance. Later they fled to the forests, where they fought on as partisans. In one poem, Sutzkever imagines the partisans melting the lead printing plates of the Talmud to forge their bullets. In another, one of my own favorites, he describes a young woman named Mira who continues to teach Yiddish literature to her students as the ghetto falls around them.

  Immediately after the war, Jews in the displaced persons camps of Europe published firsthand Yiddish accounts. When they couldn’t find Hebrew type, as was often the case, they settled for what was at hand, transliterating their Yiddish memoirs and setting them in German or Polish fonts. Although the survivors eventually rebuilt their shattered lives, Yiddish writers continued for years to wrestle with the political and existential implications of the Nazis’ crimes. Among the most moving volumes we found were yizkor bikher (memorial books), massive compendia in which émigrés and survivors reconstructed their vanished hometowns through prose, photos, personal recollections, hand-drawn maps, and endless lists of names of those who died.

  Of course, even without the depredations of the Holocaust it’s not clear that Yiddish would have prevailed as the spoken language of the majority of Jews. In interwar Poland, Yiddish was already losing ground against Polish as younger Jews acculturated. In Palestine and later in the State of Israel, Zionist ideology predicated itself on “negation of the galut,” rejection of the diaspora, leaving little room for Yiddish, a language redolent of Jewish marginality. In America, a land of unprecedented freedom and opportunity, Jews found tolerance for religious differences but not for differences of language or culture. Although a handful of writers continue even today to publish in Yiddish, for the most part they are very old, and their remaining readers are few and far between. With one or two exceptions, there has never been a significant Yiddish writer born in America. Like it or not, Yiddish literature is finite, bound to a specific time and place.

  But precisely because Yiddish literature is finite, it is enormously important, a link between one epoch of Jewish history and the next. Its world’s having been ferociously attacked and almost destroyed only serves to underscore its significance. The books we collect are the immediate intellectual antecedent of most contemporary Jews, able to tell us who we are and where we came from. Especially now, after the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century, Yiddish literature endures as our last, best bridge across the abyss.

  9. “People Are Dying Today Who Never Died Before”

  There was a Sisyphean dynamic to our work: The more books we collected, the more the word spread, and the more the word spread, the more books there were to collect. By midwinter of that first year on the road it was clear that immigrant Jews had been more avid readers than anyone imagined. Yiddish books were scattered in virtually every city in North America, and there was no way that we, a handful of young people with extremely limited resources, could collect them all on our own. We needed help! So I decided to organize a network of zamlers, volunteer book collectors, who would gather books in their own communities and ship them to our Massachusetts headquarters.

  The idea was not without precedent. In the late nineteenth century the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow issued an appeal for zamlers to round up communal records and other historical documents in the remote shtetlekh of the Russian Pale. These documents served as primary sources for Dubnow’s many books, including the History of Jews in Russia and Poland and The World History of the Jewish People. When the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, was founded in Vilna in 1925, hundreds more zamlers answered the call, shipping bundles of documents to its archive. This ingathering continued until the Nazis invaded Poland and seized the YIVO headquarters, hoping to use its extensive resources for their own racist research. Although many of YIVO’s scholars were forced to work for the Nazis, they did so with quiet courage, often risking their lives to smuggle documents out of the archives, to be reclaimed after the war. Were it not for those early zamlers—and the heroism of librarians and scholars, many of whom were killed—the documentary record of almost a thousand years of Jewish life in Eastern Europe would have been lost.

  It was this yikhes, this model, that I had in mind when I drew up plans for a “second wave” of zamlers—this time to save Yiddish books. I spent several days with a typewriter, a T square, and a bottle of rubber cement, putting together a prototype Zamler’s Packet, a do-it-yourself kit containing posters, fill-in-the-blank press releases, shipping labels, and step-by-step instructions—in short, everything a volunteer would need to run a successful local Yiddish book drive. I borrowed money to have the packets printed, and then sent out letters and press releases in the hope of recruiting a small group of volunteers. The response was enthusiastic. People signed on all across North America. Some were elderly, others were young people who didn’t speak a word of Yiddish; but they were all grateful for the chance to act, to do something practical to reclaim a culture that was disappearing before their eyes.

  In New York City, so many volunteered that I decided to call a meeting to coordinate their efforts. Stuart Schear, a recent graduate of Oberlin College who had been fielding calls for us as an assistant in the education department at the Workmen’s Circle, graciously agreed to serve as host. The Workmen’s Circle—or Arbeter Ring, as it’s known in Yiddish—is a fraternal organization deeply committed to Yiddish culture, and the use of their conference room lent a hekhsher, an imprimatur, a sense of historical connection, to the proceedings. The meeting took place at 7:30 on a Tuesday evening in early February of 1981. The weather was windy and bitter cold, but that didn’t stop a dozen people from showing up. Several were in their early twenties: Stuart; Roger Mummert; Danny Soyer, another Oberlin graduate, who was now doing research on the Jewish labor movement; and one or two others. The rest were in their seventies and eighties. There was no one in between.

  We started out with coffee and cookies, and then I called the meeting to order. “Since many of you will be working together here in New York, I’d like to go around the room and ask each of you to introduce yourselves.”

  That was a mistake. Not for nothing are Jews called “a nation of priests.” Everyone had something to say. I was looking for names, and instead ended up with life stories. The most memorable was Mr. Berger, a dapper octogenarian who, in defiance of the howling weather outside, sported a dazzling suntan (as though he had just spent the day playing pinochle on Miami Beach), carried a pearl-handled walking stick, and wore a cream-colored linen suit, a silk shirt open at the neck, a straw cap, and shiny white loafers. Alas, for a man who positively radiated good health, he was utterly preoccupied with death.

  “I’m here tonight,” he began when it was his turn to speak, “because my friends, the ones who really care about Yiddish, couldn’t make it. Do you know where my friends are tonight? They’re toyt, geshtorbn, nayn eyl
en in drerd (dead, deceased, nine cubits under the ground)! I’m here tonight to do the work they can no longer do themselves.”

  It was an hour and a half before all twelve people at the table had had their chance to davenen baym omed, to take the floor and speak. I then stood up, told a bit about the Yiddish Book Center, outlined my plans for a network of volunteers in New York, and passed around Zamler’s Packets with freshly printed instructions, posters, and press releases.

  “Now just one minute!” interrupted Mr. Berger. “I can see from these packets that you know all about marketing. If I ever need a good public relations man I’ll be sure to call you. But let’s face facts, PR isn’t going to help us collect Yiddish books. The people with Yiddish books don’t read PR. In fact, they don’t read anything anymore! Do you know where the people with Yiddish books are now?”

  “Florida?” ventured Roger.

  “Dead!” shouted Mr. Berger, with a whap of his walking stick on the table. “Toyt! Geshtorbn! Nayn eyln in—”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Berger,” I broke in, “but if you’ll just let me finish I think you’ll see we’ve made adequate arrangements to pick up books after people have passed on.”

  “After they’ve passed on? Let me tell you something, yungerman, you may run an organization but by me you’re still a pisher, wet behind the ears. You don’t know the first thing about how the world works, you haven’t seen what I’ve seen, you don’t walk around with death breathing down your neck every day like I do. Take it from me: You don’t go to people after they die, you go before they die!”

  “And how do you propose doing that?” asked Stuart, who, working with older Jews every day at the Workmen’s Circle, was having trouble hiding his annoyance.

  “Simple!” shouted Mr. Berger, whapping his walking sticking again against the Formica tabletop; “You go to the hospitals! You set up shop in the Intensive Care Unit.”—Whap!—“When it looks like some old Jew is about to breathe his last”—Whap!—“you rush over to him and ask him for his Yiddish books!” Whap! Whap! Whap!

  Stuart was aghast. “Mr. Berger, if you think I’m going to walk into a hospital and—”

  “Why not? You’ll be doing these old Jews a favor! You’ll take a load off their chests! They can die easy, knowing someone will take care of their books after they’re gone!”

  The strategy was unsettling at best, and it was some time before I could restore order and bring the discussion around to my original if admittedly less sensational plan of canvassing apartment buildings and hanging posters in Laundromats, synagogues, and senior centers. After the meeting, Stuart, Roger, and I stayed behind to clean up. When we finally made our way to elevator, Mr. Berger was waiting for us. He pushed the Lobby button with his walking stick.

  “Do you want to know what the real problem is?” he asked as the elevator descended. “The real problem is that people are dying today who never died before!” With that he donned his straw hat, turned smartly on his white loafers, and tapping with his pearl-handled walking stick, proceeded calmly into the winter night.

  Mr. Berger must have returned to Florida, because we never heard from him again. But notwithstanding his pessimism, the zamler network proved successful. More than two hundred people signed up, from Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard to Nome, Alaska. Where we could, we set up drop-off points: In El Paso, Texas, it was the Ave Maria Religious Store, where the proprietor, Jules Novick, advertised “Crucifixes, Wholesale and Retail” and set aside room in the back for Yiddish books.

  For many of our zamlers, saving Yiddish books became their life. Sorell Skolnik, for example, was a resolute woman in her seventies who lived in the Mohegan Colony, a community of anarchists and other progressive Jews just north of Peekskill, New York. The first time we visited Sorell was in 1981. Pat Myerson, Fran Krasno, and I arrived cold and tired at the end of a particularly trying day. We had been drinking caffeinated tea and eating sugary cakes at the homes of older Jews since early morning, and we cringed at the idea of having to force our way through the frosting of one more Entenmann’s. What a surprise, then, when we entered Sorell’s house at the end of a beautiful country lane and inhaled the aroma of simmering chickpea soup! The meal she served us was an organic feast, with homemade bread, and herbs and vegetables picked fresh from her own garden.

  Sorell and her husband, Nathan, had been living at Mohegan since the 1920s, shortly after they arrived in this country from their native Russia. Nathan was a garment worker who commuted each day to New York; Sorell was a dressmaker who worked at home. There, amid the pines, they and their neighbors had fashioned a rich Jewish cultural life with weekly study groups in Russian and Yiddish literature, a communal Passover seder, and an annual event to raise scholarship money for young people to study Yiddish each summer at Columbia. (I myself had been a recipient, the summer before I headed off for grad school.)

  Sorell proved an amazingly energetic zamler. She had an old Dodge Dart, which she drove to pick up books all over Westchester County. She’d take them back to her house, and we’d come with a truck every three thousand volumes or so to transport them to Massachusetts. We became close friends in the course of these frequent visits. When we launched our annual summer program in Yiddish culture in 1984, we enlisted Sorell as one of our teachers, a position she held with distinction until she was in her late eighties. Her husband died shortly after our first meeting; she herself had a stroke several years back and is now confined to a wheelchair, living in her own apartment near her daughter on Long Island. But she retains every bit of her dignity and determination. As I write she is almost a hundred years old, and though her zamler days are behind her, she still keeps in touch with a loyal following of students, some of whom, themselves in their eighties, travel sixty miles each way for a weekly Yiddish reading circle in her home.

  The prize for the most ambitious zamler has to go to Jacob Schaefer of Los Angeles. A survivor who lost his wife and three daughters at Auschwitz, after the war he made his way to New York, where he worked as a tailor, a trade he learned as an apprentice in his native Kovno, Lithuania. It was only after he retired and moved to L.A. that he became a zamler. “I’ll tell you the truth,” Jacob told us one day in his crowded Fairfax apartment. “I never wanted to be a tailor. All my life what I really wanted to do was work with books, but my father wouldn’t let me, he wanted better I should earn a living. So I sewed. Now that I’m retired, I can do what I want. Every morning I get up early and go out with the car. I drive to Venice, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, I talk with people and they give me their Yiddish books. This is the kind of work I’ve always wanted to do; for the first time in my life I’m really and truly happy.”

  With assistance from David and Sylvia Davidson and their fellow volunteers at the L.A. chapter of the Workmen’s Circle, Jacob shipped us more than 45,000 volumes—an all-time record.

  Meanwhile, back in New York, Mr. and Mrs. Field, elderly zamlers living on an upper floor of a Co-op City high-rise, used to summon us every six weeks. Each time we came they would have several hundred books waiting for us, all carefully tied with string in neat little bundles of three or four books each.

  “You know, Mr. Field,” I told him one day, “you don’t have to tie the books in separate bundles. We’re young, we have handtrucks, we can carry the books loose or pack them into boxes. . . .”

  “Oh no,” Mr. Field explained, “ir farshteyt nisht (you don’t understand). Mir hobn nisht keyn machine, darfn mir forn mitn bus kidey oyftsuzamlen di ale bikher (We have no automobile; we have to travel by bus in order to collect all these books).”

  A frail couple in their eighties, they regarded the rescue of Yiddish books as a matter of self-preservation: They had helped build this culture, and they were not about to see it abandoned. With halting steps but an unshakable sense of purpose, they set out every day on the city bus, traveling all over the Bronx, ringing doorbells and carrying donated books back to their apartment, two small bundles at a time.

  10
. “Pretty Soon We’ll Have a Whole Forest in Israel and No More Members Here”

  It was a gray, wet morning, the streets clogged with slush, when Pat Myerson and I arrived in New York City with a twenty-two-foot diesel truck. On our clipboard that day were four special pickups, each of which promised to yield more books than could fit into a single van.

  The first was Knight Printing, a venerable Yiddish firm that was going out of business. We double-parked the truck on Lafayette and entered the dim lobby of an old industrial building. Knight Printing was on the eighth floor. We rang for the elevator, waited what seemed like ten minutes, and finally started up on foot. The stairs were caked in dust, and in front of some doors several years’ accumulation of phone books lay unclaimed. At the eighth floor we knocked on an unmarked steel door and were greeted by Mr. Kupferstein, a small, wiry man who, we soon learned, had owned Knight Printing for the past twenty-two years.

  “What are you doing on the stairs?” he wanted to know. “Why didn’t you take the elevator like a mentsh?”

  We explained that we had pushed the elevator button in the lobby, but it was apparently out of order.

  “Out of order? What out of order? Where out of order? The elevator operator has been sitting right here talking with me all morning. When you rang he finished his tea and went downstairs but no one was there—you must have started hiking already—so of course he came back up.”

  We stepped inside and sure enough, there was the elevator operator, sitting on a well-worn oak swivel chair inside his elevator, which opened directly onto Mr. Kupferstein’s loft. He wore an English driving cap pulled low over his eyes, and his elevator was decorated with calendar pictures of mountains and beaches. An antique parabolic electric heater whirred at his feet.