by Aaron Lansky
“Often we would stay up till two or three in the morning,” Sam added. “At three-thirty I would go to bed, at five-thirty I had to be up to go to work. But I didn’t mind, because culture, Yiddish culture, for us that was the most important thing in the world.”
Remembering the Ostroffs after all these years, I’m amazed by how much ground we covered—and how much food we ate—in just that first visit. Among the many writers the Ostroffs recalled, perhaps the most memorable was Itzik Manger, author of the Khumesh lider (Bible Poems), a cycle in which the familiar characters of the Bible are transformed into Yiddish-speaking Jews. Abraham, for example, wears a long Hasidic coat and eats gefilte fish, Isaac studies Talmud with his children, and Leah cries her eyes out over silly French novels. The anachronisms are funny, but they also serve to underscore Jews’ seamless sense of history and the evolving nature of Jewish identity—how the rakhmones, the empathy and sensibility gleaned from a few thousand years of exile, can be read back into our own history. Take, for example, one of the more unsettling stories in the Bible, in which, at Sarah’s insistence, Abraham exiles his lover Hagar and their son Ishmael to the desert, knowing they will almost certainly die. As Abraham haggles with a local peasant for their passage, Hagar pours out her heart—in Yiddish—to her son:
Veyn nisht, Yishmeylikl tate,
Azoy iz undz shoyn bashert,
Ot azoy firn zikh di oves
Mit di lange frume berd.
This is our portion, Ishmael;
Darling, dry your tears.
This is the way of the Fathers
With their long and reverend beards.
Manger was brilliant, but he was also rootless, hard-drinking, and self-destructive. Born in rural Romania, he was a literary sensation in Warsaw as a young man, dodged the Holocaust by working on a British ship, lived with a non-Jewish woman in England, moved to France, and in 1951 took passage to America, where, in his own words, “financially, physically and spiritually bankrupt,” he eventually washed up at the Ostroffs’ door.
“For so many years we had read Manger’s work,” Leah Ostroff recounted. “Now here he is, no money, no friends. So Sam and I took care on him.” The Ostroffs organized an evening in his honor and raised $300. Manger called the Ostroffs folksyidn, “my kind of Jews,” and became a regular guest in their home. In later years, when he hit rock bottom, he moved in with them altogether and lived there for two years.
“Of course we loved to have him,” Mrs. Ostroff explained. “But I’ll tell you the truth, sometimes it got a little difficult. Our son Nokhum was still young yet, and when he’d be sitting watching television Manger would come in and change the channel. Nokhum would come running to me, ‘Mama, Mama, Manger changed the channel.’ I’d wipe his tears, but I’d have to explain to him that Manger is a very great writer, if he wants to watch a certain show we have to let him watch. It wasn’t so easy, but what else could we do?”
Another frequent guest at the Ostroffs’ home was Arlo Guthrie. After Woody got sick, Marjorie would take Arlo to spend the day with his grandmother, Aliza Greenblatt, who took him next door to the Ostroffs’. “Arlo used to call me Der Professor,” Mr. Ostroff told us. “‘Oy,’ he would scream, ‘der Professor kitselt, the Professor is tickling me.’”
Now, of course, Arlo was grown up, Aliza Greenblatt was dead, and the Yiddish writers, actors, and intellectuals who frequented the Ostroffs’ home had all passed on. Which may explain why the Ostroffs welcomed us with such open arms. After Fran, Roger, and I had eaten our last spoonful of compote, Mr. Ostroff poured us each a glass of shnaps, wished us L’khayim, and then said, “Okay, now let’s get down to business. In whatever time Leah and I have left, we’re ready to work. We have no more writers to take care on, so we’ve talked it over and now we want to become your biggest zamlers.” All we had to do, they said, was leave it to them, and they would assume sole responsibility for collecting Yiddish books in Sea Gate, Coney Island, and Brighton Beach.
We gladly agreed. During the coming weeks Sam posted hand-painted signs on telephone poles throughout the area: Az ir hot alte yidishe bikher, iz klingt on Ostroff (If You Have Old Yiddish Books, Then Phone Ostroff). Business was good, especially in Brighton Beach, where newly arrived Soviet immigrants were displacing an older Jewish population and everyone, it seemed, had Yiddish books to donate before they moved.
For all his energy, after five heart attacks Mr. Ostroff could not actually carry the books himself. Instead he and Leah acted as the advance team: They’d go to see people in their big, old Pontiac, confirm what was there, and schedule a time for “the young people to come with the truck.” Every two weeks, like clockwork, we’d arrive at the Ostroffs’ door. After feeding us (“You can’t lift boxes on an empty stomach!”) they’d climb into the truck with us and off we’d go. Somehow Mr. Ostroff got the idea that my friend Roger was my valet: He called him “Rogers!” and expected him to do all the shlepping himself. Every time I’d prop a heavy box onto my shoulder he would berate me, “Lahnsky, s’past nisht, you shouldn’t be shlepping yourself, you haven’t got the build for it. Let Rogers take it.”
Mr. Ostroff felt it was not enough that people just give books: They should also become zamlers. Once, he spent fifteen minutes trying to convince a ninety-eight-year-old man to hang posters outside his building. The man kept smiling and nodding his head and Mr. Ostroff kept speaking louder and louder until the man’s wife finally came out of the kitchen and politely informed us that her husband was deaf.
Sometimes Mrs. Ostroff stayed home (“I want to have a meal ready; you’ll be hungry when you get back”). Then all the widows would flirt with Sam. They loved it when we asked them to stand beside him to pose for pictures. “And why not? I’ll take any excuse to hug such a nice man.”
MOST OF OUR encounters with older Jews consisted of a single, oft-times emotional meeting: They’d feed us, tell us their stories, hand us their books, and before we had time to dry our tears or wipe the lipstick off our cheeks, we were already back in the truck, rushing to the next stop to start the process all over again. With the Ostroffs it was different. We spoke regularly by phone, exchanged letters, and spent a full day with them every other week. Sometimes, after collecting books elsewhere in New York, we’d drop by just for a social call. Not only did they feed us, but no matter how blue or discouraged we might be, they were always able to lift our spirits and remind us—just by being themselves—why we were collecting Yiddish books in the first place. Sometimes, after a meal, they would bring out boxes of old photographs and tell us stories. What was most striking was how respectful they were of one another. They held hands, they exchanged smiles, they took turns kvelling, beaming with pride, while the other spoke—except, of course, when they both happened to be speaking at once. “Ir zent undzere kinder. You are our children,” Mrs. Ostroff once said, and month after month she and Sam did their best to bequeath their yerushe, the stories of their lives. For me they represented a civilization—they were as close as I was likely to get to the lost, living world of Yiddish literature. So I often placed a tape recorder on the table, propped between matching bowls of horseradish and sauerkraut, to capture what they had to say. Sam called it der geylem, the golem, the monster. Sometimes, when they came to the juiciest part of a story, they’d say “Now this the geylem can’t hear,” and they’d make me shut it off. But most of the time they forgot it was there. Here, gleaned from those tapes, in their own words, are the broad outlines of their lives, a portrait of what I. J. Singer called “a velt vos iz nishto mer (a world which is no more).”
LEAH BEGINS:
“Me, I come from Vilna. I was born in 1907. Vilna in those days was known as Yerushalayim d’Lite, the Jerusalem of Lithuania. It was a city of scholars, of learning. Believe me, it was some yikhes, it was really something to be born in such a city.
“What went on during the [First World] War don’t ask. I was separated from my mother and my sisters, I lived with a neighbor, we didn’t have w
hat to eat. Before the war I went to Russian school. After the war, when my mother came back, she sent me to Yiddish school. We had to speak only Yiddish; they charged us a penalty if we spoke a word of Russian. We wanted to go to America, but it wasn’t so easy. My father died, and then we couldn’t get a visa. So finally my mother decided we would ganvenen dem grenets, cross the border illegally. My uncle in America wired the money. On the way over, in Antwerp, there was a quarantine, we had to go through an inspection. They took us into a bathhouse, we had showers, then the doctors came and examined us. They looked everywhere, in the hair, even in the underwear, to make sure that you’re clean. So I thought, they go to all this trouble, when I get to America it’s going to be cleaner than what we had in Poland, it’s going to be immaculate.
“But then we got to Ellis Island, we had to wait two days for my uncle to come for us. I never saw a cockroach in my life before I got to Ellis Island—but the cockroaches there! So already I’m a little disappointed. Then my uncle came and we left Ellis Island and we came to the Lower East Side and I saw the big tenement apartments with the lines of clothes, the bloomers, the brassieres, the girdles. And then the streets—azoy shmutsik, so dirty like I never saw in Poland. So my uncle looks at me and he can see that I’m sitting like this and he says, ‘What’s the matter?’
“I didn’t know what to say. I asked him, ‘Is this New York already?’
“He said, ‘Yes, this is New York.’
“I was so disappointed. But I didn’t say anything. I figured look, the man tried so hard, he spent a lot of money to bring over a family of seven, so I didn’t say a thing.”
Eventually Leah and her family found an apartment of their own. She went to school, became active in Yiddish cultural organizations, learned English, and studied dressmaking.
“As hard it was,” she concluded, “my life was easy compared with Sam.”
SAM’S STORY:
Sam was born in Zabludow, a shtetl in White Russia, in 1900. In many ways his story is the story of Jews in the twentieth century, for, perhaps more than most, his life was shaped by the larger historical events that shook the world.
At the age of six he entered kheyder, Jewish religious school, where he learned Hebrew and traditional Jewish texts. Later, at a modern school, he studied Russian and basic German. In 1915, when the Germans invaded White Russia, he was pressed into service on a German road crew.
“I was just fifteen. I said good-bye to my mother, I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again. The Germans paid us ninety pfennigs for a twelve-hour day. A loaf of bread cost a mark. So I did a little business with benzoil [gasoline] on the black market. Two people got arrested, an official shot himself, but me they never caught.
“After we finished building the road near Bialystok they sent us to build roads in the Ukraine. That’s where the front was. One day the medical corps, German doctors, came through to vaccinate us against typhus and cholera. They needed help giving shots to so many people, so they asked, ‘Who can read German?’
“I raised my little finger. The doctor says, ‘I see that little finger there. Come on.’
“They taught me to call out the names, to wash the arms with alcohol, then to cross the names off the list. The doctor liked me and asked me if I wanted to become his assistant. He called me Mr. Shmuel. He said, ‘Mr. Shmuel, it’s going to be dangerous.’
“I told him, ‘Professor, it’s less dangerous than being here. Here you suffer from hunger, you get swollen up, and then you die. From a bullet you just die one-two-three.’ So for four years I was the doctor’s assistant, on the front, in the hospitals. I saw bombings, shrapnel, bullets, terrible things. There was one attack in particular, a medic I worked with was killed, I was hit with shrapnel but I survived.
“After the war I was still with the Germans. The doctor took me to Berlin, he got me into medical school, I should become a doctor. I studied for several months. Then in 1919 the German Revolution broke out. I was walking down a big parkway, under the linden trees, on my way to class, when suddenly a man walks in front of me, pulls out his revolver and shoots another man.
“I thought, that’s nothing new for me. I’ve seen so much killing in my life: on the Russian front, the French front. I lived through the Russian Revolution. Now I have to live through the German Revolution. So I said, ‘Enough. If I’m going to die it’s better I should die among Jews.’ So I left medical school, I left everything, I went back home to Zabludow.”
When Sam returned home he found Zabludow in ruins. The streets were full of orphaned children, and crime and violence were rampant. After four years with the German army Sam had forgotten Yiddish, and he had to work hard to relearn it in order to communicate with his family. He worked part-time at a Yiddish school and helped to open a local Yiddish library, but most of his energy was devoted to reopening the family business, a restaurant. He renovated the building, added hotel rooms, and kept the dining room open twenty-four hours a day. Within two years the business was thriving and he and his mother were making good money for the first time in their lives.
“We worked so hard, but the Poles wouldn’t leave us alone. One day they came, they told us we had to keep the door closed because we were too close to a church. So I had to go to Grodno, the capital, to get papers to keep the door open.
“I took the train. I carried with me a revolver, I was a businessman, I had a permit. There comes into my car an old Jew, a khosid with a long beard and peyes, and he sits down near me. Then a little while later some Polish soldiers come into the car and they say, ‘Where are the Jews?’
“I was sleeping. They woke me up and they said, ‘Are you a Jew?’
“I told them ‘Yes’ and I took out my revolver. Once they saw the gun they got scared and they moved away. It was dark—there were no lights in the car because of the war with the Bolsheviks. Next morning the old Jew creeps out from behind my seat. He tells me, ‘If you didn’t have that revolver they would’ve killed us.’
“When I got back to Zabludow I told my mother, ‘Mama, I don’t care what you’ll do. I will not stay here. I’m going to leave Poland.’
“She said, ‘Look what you’re doing. You’re throwing away gold, you’re going to go look for crumbs.’
“I said, ‘Mama, I’ll beg in America, but I don’t want to be in Poland.’
Sam had a brother in the United States who was able to arrange a visa. He and his mother sold the restaurant and arrived in New York on May 1, 1921.
“I was free, and I was very proud of it. I went to evening school, I should learn English. And I started to learn a trade.
“Then one day I read in the Forverts, the Jewish paper, that there’s going to be a strike in the needle trades. [Many immigrant Jews were employed in the garment industry, usually under deplorable conditions.] I never saw a picket line before and I was interested to go see. So I took a ride to New York [Manhattan], to Broadway. I look—there’s the picket line. And then the police come. What I saw the police do to those girls, with the sticks over the head, the ears, it was terrible. I got so disappointed that time. That night I went to evening school, it was just before graduation and the principal gives us a lecture. He talks about the freedom of the United States, what a beautiful thing we have here.
“So I got up. I said, ‘And what I saw today, for a policeman to take a stick and knock a girl over the head and drop her to the floor and step on her, is that freedom, too?’
“He says to me, ‘You’re a Bolshevik, I’m going to have you deported, I’m going to send you back to Europe.’
“My friends pushed me out the door, they were afraid for me. I had to quit school, and I never got my diploma. So instead I became a plumber. In Germany I was going to be a doctor, here I became a plumber, but I’ll tell you the truth, it’s pretty much the same thing.”
Sam and Leah met at a dance sponsored by their landsmanshaft, an organization of immigrants from the same region in Europe. Leah remembers:
“At first
I looked down on Sam on account of I was from Vilna and he was from a shtetl. But then I said to myself, ‘Look, you’re in America now, you can’t be too fussy.’”
They were married four years later.
Sam mastered his new trade and entered the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, working primarily on new construction. As we traveled together through Brooklyn he would point proudly to various buildings he helped build: the Wabash Houses, Luna Park, the Coney Island Aquarium. During World War II he was the only Jewish member of a construction crew sent to work on government projects in New Mexico.
Sam and Leah shared a passionate commitment to culture and to learning l’shma, for its own sake, for the simple joy and ennoblement of knowledge. Their after-work hours were devoted to literature, theater, music, and ideas. In this sense they represented a tradition common among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe: halb-inteligentn,homegrown intellectuals for whom learning was not the exclusive province of the academy but the fountainhead of the home, the activity that gave dignity and purpose to everyday life. After their son was born, they became active in the Sholem Aleichem Folks-Institute, a network of non-partisan Yiddish afternoon schools for children. Sam still recalls his role with pride:
“I was the volunteer plumber for all the Yiddish schools in New York. I was always on call. Maybe it’s eight o’clock in the evening, we’re all dressed up ready to go to a show. It doesn’t matter. If they called that a toilet is broken at the Sholem Aleichem School in the Bronx, I got on the subway and went to fix the toilet. By me education always came first.”
13. The Great Newark Book Heist
Some wonderful people joined the Center’s staff in those early years. Nansi Glick, the wife of my college teacher, offered to help us run a small printing press scavenged from an old Yiddish school in New York, and she stayed on, as a printer, editor, writer, and administrator, for the next eighteen years.
