Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  “You know, Mr. Kupferstein,” said the elevator man in a strong Yiddish accent, speaking directly to his compatriot and ignoring us altogether, “it just goes to show you, the young people these days, they’re always in a rush, they push the button, they expect the doors to open right away, they forget maybe the elevator operator is a person, too, maybe he’s busy for a minute somewhere else. No, Mr. Kupferstein, times are changing, nobody has time to wait anymore.”

  Mr. Kupferstein nodded sadly in agreement. After all, his company was going out of business for that very reason, its old letterpresses and hot-lead Linotypes as obsolete as the books they printed.

  “What we had here at Knight Printing was craftsmanship,” said Mr. Kupferstein as he showed us around the floor. “We were a union shop, our workers took pride in their work. Today no one wants craftsmanship, no one wants union. Now all they care about is quick, all they care about is cheap.” Over the last decade, he explained, what little Yiddish publishing remained had shifted to nonunion shops run by Hasidim who used computers to set the type and inexpensive offset presses to print it. With his old presses and union crew, he didn’t have a chance.

  We followed Mr. Kupferstein to the corner of the large loft; there, next to packed crates of metal galley trays, chases, wooden “furniture,” quoins, and other tools of hot-type printing, were wooden dollies loaded high with what appeared to be new Yiddish books. Knight had been a contract printer, manufacturing books for many of the largest Yiddish publishers. Piled on the dollies were several hundred samples: one copy of every Yiddish title they had printed over the past sixty years.

  Mr. Kupferstein deftly secured the books to the dollies with binder’s twine and then, like the warehousemen we’d met near the Fulton Fish Market, grabbed a heavy metal hook and towed them across the room, where the elevator operator, with practiced professionalism, brandished his own hook and pulled them onto the elevator. We and the books rode downstairs together, and then the two older men helped us carry them from inside the building out to the truck. Despite their age, they showed remarkable strength and agility as they ran back and forth through the rain and slush, covering the piles of loose books with their jackets.

  When the job was done we stood together in the entryway to say good-bye. The cold rain pounded against the metal roof of the truck. The elevator operator shook my hand. “Maybe next time you’ll wait for the elevator!” he grumbled. I promised I would do just that. But deep in our hearts all of us—Pat and I, Mr. Kupferstein and the elevator operator—knew that there would be no next time. After six decades and countless thousands of volumes, we had just carried out Knight Printing’s very last load.

  It rained harder as we hopped back in the truck and headed for the South Bronx. The week before, a Jewish Consolidated Edison worker had entered an apartment building to check the meters and stumbled over boxes and piles of what he recognized as Yiddish books. He phoned the Workmen’s Circle, and they in turn phoned us.

  In the early 1980s, the South Bronx was a war zone. Whole blocks were burned out. Buildings with broken windows and charred beams alternated with empty lots of brick and rubble. We could see little children staring out of empty window frames on this raw, bone-chilling February morning, whole families living in gutted buildings without water or heat.

  It took us a long time to find the address the meter reader had supplied. Many street signs were missing and few buildings had legible numbers. After asking directions several times we finally came to a rundown apartment building, the only intact structure on a block of ruins. Acutely aware of the crime rate in the South Bronx, we were at first apprehensive about leaving the safety of the truck, but as we looked about us we realized that despite the devastation the daily lives of decent people still went on. A gray-haired woman, probably a grandmother, was wheeling a baby carriage, covering the child with an umbrella as she herself bent her head into the driving rain. At the corner grocery a delivery man in a Coca-Cola uniform was unloading crates of soda.

  We went up to the apartment building and rang for the super. An elderly black man came to the door. Oh yes, he knew all about the books in the basement. “They belonged to an old Jewish lady, lived in the building since God knows when, died just last month. Far’s I know, she hadn’t kith nor kin, so there was no one to call to come claim her stuff. The landlord told me to clear out her apartment so he could rent it to someone else, so I just took everything and stashed it in the basement. You two can take whatever you want . . . assuming the junkies haven’t beat you to it.”

  The super put on his raincoat and led us around back, past a mountain of garbage, into a dark, dank basement. The smell of urine and excrement was overpowering. Piled in a corner, already ransacked, were the Jewish woman’s worldly goods: a bed and mattress, two stuffed chairs, a broken table, a threadbare carpet, kitchenware, bundles of old clothes, empty pill vials scattered in all directions, and beneath it all, two bookcases lying on their backs, still full of Yiddish books. Pat and I wondered aloud about their owner. As the ethnographer Jack Kugelmass later documented in The Miracle of Intervale Avenue, small numbers of immigrant Jews still lived in the South Bronx in the early 1980s, either unwilling or unable to leave the neighborhood they had called home for so long. We met such people ourselves in the course of our subsequent travels: some too feeble to move, living what was left of their lonely lives behind locked doors; others too stubborn to move; and still others too idealistic, determined to live in peace with their neighbors, whoever they may be.

  We never learned the story—or even the name—of the woman whose books we hauled out of the basement that day. Many of her books were about the Holocaust, including a yizkor bukh, a memorial volume chronicling the destruction of the Jewish community of Kovno, so maybe she was a survivor who had run enough in her life and didn’t want to run again. Whatever the case, Pat and I tied bandanas over our noses, pulled on leather work gloves, and set to work. We were so anxious to get out of there that we didn’t even try to unload the bookcases: We just dragged them onto the handtruck and maneuvered them through the basement and out to the street. We took only the books and bookcases; all the rest of the dead woman’s belongings—clothes, furniture, carpets, curtains, dishes, pots and pans—we left behind, one more pile of refuse amid the wretchedness all around.

  It was already noon before we arrived in Elmhurst, Queens, to retrieve seven thousand books we had collected by van the previous month and temporarily stored in the basement of an apartment building belonging to our board member Sidney Berg. The rain had tapered to a drizzle, and we hauled the boxes in silence for two hours, until the job was done. We picked up cheese and crackers at a corner grocery, then settled into the truck for a long ride to the southern shore of Long Island, where we were to pick up our last load of the day. The truck was now laden with nearly four tons of books, and we could barely hear each other above the rattling of the cab and the roar of the engine. We were both cold and miserable: our muscles ached, our clothes were damp with sweat and rain, and our boots were soaked. Par for the course, the defroster on our rental truck was broken; every few minutes Pat had to reach across the big windshield with a towel so I could see where we were going.

  It was 3:30 when we arrived at the Long Beach home of Mrs. Baram, a widow in her seventies. We must have looked awfully bedraggled as we climbed the stairs to her seaside bungalow, because she took one look at us and immediately sat us down in her well-heated kitchen, plied us with hot tea and kugel, and took what she could of our wet clothes and tossed them in the dryer.

  As we slowly revived, she told us her story. As a young girl she had belonged to a socialist Zionist youth group in Poland. Eventually she made her way to Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel, where she lived as a halutznik, a pioneer farm worker helping to reclaim the soil. She spoke Yiddish and Hebrew fluently, as well as Russian, Polish, and English.

  She asked us about ourselves, and before long Pat and I were pouring out our hearts about the morning’s experi
ences in the South Bronx: the ill-clad children, the broken windows, the unheated buildings, the fetid basement in which a lifetime’s books and belongings had been unceremoniously laid to rest.

  Mrs. Baram let us talk. When we finished it was not we who were consoling her, as was so often the case on our collection trips, but she who was comforting us.

  “M’tor nisht miyaesh zayn (You must never despair),” she said in a voice that bespoke decades of personal and political struggle, in Poland, Israel, and America. “It says in Perek (a two-thousand-year-old Hebrew text): ‘Loy alekho hamelokhe ligmor. . . It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.’”

  In the end it was her example, even more than her words, that lifted our flagging spirits. Here was a woman who had lived her Jewishness. All her life she had marched in demonstrations and raised money for the hungry. Like Sorell Skolnick at the Mohegan Colony, she ran a weekly leyenkrayz, a Yiddish reading circle. For twenty years members of the local Jewish community gathered under her leadership to read and discuss Yiddish literature. When they began there were 150 participants and they met in a rented hall; now they met in her living room. “Every time one of our members dies,” she told us, “we remember them by planting a tree in Israel. Pretty soon we’re going to have a whole forest in Israel and no more members here.” She was a realist, but not a pessimist. Her very next words were to tell us, with great enthusiasm, about the Yiddish novel her small group would be discussing later that week.

  And the books she had for us? There were many. For twenty years, whenever anyone in her circle died, she would drive over to save their Yiddish books. Almost three thousand volumes were waiting for us in the back room of her house.

  “It’s not enough to cry for the past,” she told us after we loaded the last box onto the truck. “It’s more important that we build for the future. You young people are our hemshekh, our continuity. We’ve done the best we could. Now it’s up to you.”

  She hugged and kissed us each in turn, and then gave us a big bag of food for the long drive back to Massachusetts. The rain had stopped, and as we pulled away the setting sun suddenly broke through the scudding clouds in the western sky. Pat and I drove several blocks, pulled into an empty parking lot, and ran down to the beach to watch the sunset. A strong salt breeze was blowing off the ocean and the weather was turning cold, but we took our shoes off anyway and ran barefoot all the way to the water’s edge. Since starting out early that morning, it was the first time we felt warm.

  11. “Love and Peace”

  As Jules Piccus foretold, a grant did somehow appear before the first rent payment on our factory loft came due: Rabbi Harold Kudan of Glencoe, Illinois, the father of a college friend, approached one of his congregants, and we received—in the nick of time—$2,000 from Col. Henry Crown, a prominent Chicago philanthropist. Other checks followed, from book donors and friends, though most of these were of the $18 variety (it is traditional for Jews to give in multiples of 18, the numerical equivalent of chai, life). By November, when the New England wind began whipping through the chinks of our old brick building, our tiny staff—Galina Rothstein, Fran Krasno, and I—were wearing heavy sweaters, wool hats, and lange gatkes, long underwear. We cut the fingers off of old gloves in order to type. Even so, cash was running low and the end seemed near when, one cold morning, an older woman with a bright silk scarf wrapped around her head walked into our workroom, stuck out her hand, and proudly announced, “Sonya Staff, Greenwich Village!”

  Sonya was the daughter of the late Aaron Staff, a Russian-born lace manufacturer and a patron of many Yiddish writers and organizations. In the 1930s Sonya and her husband, Otto, had founded the first multicultural, multiracial camp in western Massachusetts. Back in the area to visit a friend, she had heard reports of “young people in a loft trying to save Yiddish books” and rushed right over to see for herself. It was love at first sight. Within a week she had written a sizeable check and joined our board, and she remained a generous supporter—and a great personal friend—until her death seventeen years later.

  Another break came when an article about us appeared in the New York Times. The paper had just hit the streets when I was awakened by an insistent phone call.

  “Yungerman,” said the good-natured voice at the other end of the line, “where have you been all my life?”

  The caller introduced himself as Sidney Berg, a real estate developer from Great Neck who, like Sonya, had also grown up in a yidishe svive, a world of Yiddish culture. I went to see him the next day and liked him immediately, and he, too, became a major supporter, helping us out during the Dumpster episode in New York and participating in innumerable adventures in the years that followed. Our financial woes were far from over, but thanks to Sonya and Sidney we were at least able to pay the rent, crank the heat up to sixty, satisfy the most insistent of our creditors, and keep our truck on the road.

  Then we met with a yet another bit of good luck. I was sitting at my desk one morning, opening the mail, when I came upon an unusual letter:

  Dear Friends:

  I read of your project and I am writing to inquire if you would be interested in a collection of books which came from my family.

  My mother was a Yiddish poetess named Aliza Greenblatt. She was friends with many outstanding Yiddish writers, who presented her with their own books. I have a collection that includes many copies of my mother’s two books. One is a story of her life, the other a collection of children’s poems.

  Please do let me know more about your project.

  Love and peace!

  Marjorie Guthrie

  I had heard of Aliza Greenblatt. Many of her poems had been set to music, and some, such as “Fort a fisher afn yam (A Fisherman Sails Forth on the Sea),” I could sing by heart. A letter from Aliza Greenblatt’s daughter would have been cause enough for excitement. But then I looked at the signature: “Marjorie Guthrie.” At the upper left-hand corner of the letterhead was a picture of a little man with a guitar, and then there was that sign-off, “Love and peace!”

  “Hey Fran!” I called into the next room. “Do you know the name of Woody Guthrie’s widow?”

  “You mean the one who sits by his bedside in ‘Alice’s Restaurant’? I’m not sure, I think maybe Marjorie.”

  Amazing. Could it be that the daughter of “Fort a fisher” was also the wife of “This Land Is Your Land”—and, come to think of it, the mother of “Alice’s Restaurant”? Well, whoever she was, she had Yiddish books for us. We’d find out soon enough.

  AT THE RISK of namedropping, I have to point out that Yiddish has a certain cachet, and even at this early date in the Center’s history we had met more than our share of famous people—or at least the parents of famous people. For example, we once picked up books in Philadelphia from a highly cultured man named William Uris. We enjoyed several pleasant hours of conversation with him and his wife, and then he handed us most (but not all) of his large Yiddish library, which he lovingly removed from a beautiful glass-fronted bookcase. “The rest of these books you’ll come back for another time,” he said, “iz kenen mir farbrengen a bisl vayter (so we can talk a little more).”

  We were already standing in the hallway, waiting for the elevator, when he began complaining about his son, who had absolutely no interest in Yiddish books or culture. “Efsher hostu gehert fun im? (Maybe you’ve heard of him?)” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, “who’s your son?”

  “Er is epes a shrayber,” he responded, “er heyst Leon Yuris (He’s some sort of writer; his name is Leon Uris).”

  Among other notables were Abbie Hoffman’s mother: “Abbie would really love what you’re doing here!” and Allen Ginsberg’s stepmother: “Allen used to bring all his friends over to the house. Kerouac couldn’t get enough of my flunken (stewed meat)!” And now here was Marjorie Guthrie: the daughter of an important Yiddish writer and, just maybe, the wife and the mother of two pivotal figures in American m
usic. Fran phoned her and arranged to pick up her mother’s books at the family’s old house in Howard Beach, Queens. She would meet us outside her apartment building in Manhattan, next door to the Dakota, and ride out there with us.

  The appointed day dawned brisk and clear, and Roger and I arrived right on schedule in a particularly large and ratty rented truck. We pulled up across the street, and almost immediately a beautiful, spry woman of about sixty came skipping across the street to meet us. Small and neatly dressed in a gray cardigan sweater, a knee-length gray wool skirt and gray wool knee socks, she moved with the grace of a dancer. Without a moment’s hesitation she hopped up onto the running board and leaned in through Roger’s open window.

  “Are you the boys for the Yiddish books?” she asked, brightly.

  We introduced ourselves, Roger stepped out of the truck to let her in, and in a flash Mrs. Guthrie was sitting poised and smiling on the seat between us.

  “I hope you don’t mind riding in the truck with us,” I apologized.

  “Why, don’t be silly!” she shouted back over the roar of the engine, “I’m used to it! I ride in my son Arlo’s truck all the time!”

  That took care of that. I put the truck in gear and we chatted amiably the whole way out to Howard Beach. We plied her with questions about her mother and Woody. She in turn asked a thousand questions about us, our work, our prognosis for Yiddish culture. Her curiosity was genuine, her enthusiasm contagious, and it wasn’t long before we learned she was not only a famous daughter, wife, and mother, but also an accomplished person in her own right. She had been a professional dancer, serving for eighteen years as Martha Graham’s assistant before founding her own dance school in Sheepshead Bay. As Woody slowly succumbed to Huntington’s disease, it was she who cared for him. Later, she founded and ran a nonprofit organization for the support of Huntington’s patients and their families. She still traveled all over the world, lecturing, educating, encouraging research, and working with families. More recently she had begun speaking out in support of other health care issues, including “orphan drugs”: medication for diseases that claim too few victims to make them profitable.