by Aaron Lansky
And then there was Sharon Kleinbaum: a smart, feisty, and acutely political young woman whom I happened to pick up hitchhiking one day outside of Amherst.
“Excuse me,” she said as she hopped into the van and noticed the open boxes of books in the back, “but aren’t these Yiddish books?”
“You read Yiddish?” I replied, raising an eyebrow in the rearview mirror.
“A bisl. A little. I studied at Columbia for two years while I was a student at Barnard.”
I took her to the Center and we continued talking the whole afternoon. Her father was the head of the Jewish federation in Bergen County, New Jersey, where she had attended a modern orthodox high school. She had just left a job at the War Resisters League and was looking for a new position—“a new cause” is the way she phrased it—where she could direct her considerable energy. I offered her a job and she immediately accepted, with one proviso:
“I’d love to start working tomorrow, but there’s a problem.”
“Really, what’s that?”
“Well, I won’t be available for another six months. First I have to serve.”
“Serve?” I thought maybe she had taken a summer job as a waitress on the Cape.
“No, no,” she corrected me, “I mean serve, as in federal prison.”
Two days later she reported to Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women, in West Virginia, where she spent the next six months repaying her debt to society for having tried, together with several thousand other women, to wrap the Pentagon in yarn. When she got out she joined the staff of the Yiddish Book Center, well rested and ready to fight.
Which was a good thing, because by that point there was plenty of fighting to do. Not two weeks after Sharon’s arrival, I received a call from a young staff member at the Newark Public Library, in New Jersey. The library had been in disarray since 1969, when, in the aftermath of the Newark riots, a newly elected administration targeted it as an elitist white institution and tried to shut it down. Philip Roth, who had spent much of his childhood in the Newark Library, wrote a powerful defense in the New York Times:
When I was growing up in Newark we assumed that the books in the public library belonged to the public. . . . In the forties, when the city was still largely white, it was simply an unassailable fact of life that the books were “ours” and that the public library had much to teach us about the rules of civilized life, as well as civilized pleasures to offer. It is strange (to put it politely) that now, when Newark is mostly black, the City Council (for fiscal reasons, we are told) has reached a decision that suggests that the books don’t really belong to the public after all, and that what a library provides for the young is no longer essential to an education. In a city seething with social grievances there is, in fact, probably little that could be more essential to the development and sanity of the thoughtful and ambitious young than access to those books. For the moment the Newark City Council may have solved its fiscal problem; it is too bad, however, that the councilmen are unable to calculate the frustration, cynicism, and rage that this insult must inevitably generate, and to imagine what shutting down its libraries may cost the community in the end.
In the face of scathing criticism from both blacks and whites, the city council relented. But only barely. By the early 1980s chronic under-funding, long-standing hostility from local officials, and the Reagan budget cuts all conspired to bring the orderly operation of the library—such as it was—to an end. Experienced librarians were laid off, professionals who resigned or retired were not replaced, and the institution was reduced to a skeletal staff, with front-line tasks handled largely by sullen teenagers who were given little adult supervision. According to our informant, these young people often discarded returned books rather than reshelve them, and when shelf space was needed, they just cleared off whole collections and wheeled them to the Dump-ster. The library’s excellent foreign-language collections had been especially hard hit. He believed its three thousand Yiddish books, many of them extremely rare, were in immediate danger, and he urged us to get to Newark as soon as we could.
Sharon and I arrived two days later. The rest of the city looked like a third world country, but the Newark Public Library and its neighbor, the Newark Museum, stood like Greek temples commanding a broad boulevard. The person who summoned us was well prepared. He directed us to a service entrance around back, where we were greeted by one of the library’s senior administrators and the chief custodian, an elderly black man. The administrator, a white-haired woman, confirmed everything we’d been told. All public libraries periodically cull their collections, she explained, but in this case unsupervised workers were indiscriminately discarding as many as two thousand books a day. The most valuable books—the oldest and rarest—were often the first to go. Nearly one third of the Yiddish collection had been lost already, and those books that remained would soon be discarded unless we could remove them first. “There are few Jews left in Newark,” she explained, “and the Yiddish books are rarely read. That’s why we phoned you. We have to work quickly and quietly. We have a very big job ahead of us.”
We followed the administrator up a maze of cast-iron stairways, along heavy glass floors, until we reached a mezzanine section where the foreign-language books were stored. The Yiddish collection was the largest, occupying an entire wall. We had been given Yiddish books by public libraries before, mostly in small New England factory towns such as Lowell and Fall River, but they were usually limited to literature popular among Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century: proletarian poetry, inexpensive pirate editions, and Yiddish translations of world literature, including Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dickens. Such books were represented here as well, many in sturdy library bindings with romanized titles on their spines. But there were also more recent and more sophisticated titles I wouldn’t have expected in a public library: fiction from interwar Warsaw and Vilna, and more recent titles by Chaim Grade, Avrom Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and others. What really caught my eye, though, were several hundred prewar imprints from the Soviet Union, scholarly studies in history, folklore, linguistics, and literary criticism published by research academies in Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa, which were among the rarest books in all of modern Yiddish literature. Most of them, the staff member explained, had come from a single donor, a prominent Newark intellectual who had made several trips to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and brought these rare books and brochures back with him specifically for the Newark Library. It was heartbreaking to note that at least two shelves of these Soviet treasures were empty, their contents already trundled off to the Dumpster.
Alongside the Yiddish books was an equally dismaying sight: an extraordinary collection of books in Esperanto, the “universal language” invented in Warsaw in 1887 by a Yiddish-speaking Jew named L. L. Zamenhof. It is said that at the international Esperanto conferences held each year in Warsaw before the Second World War, papers were delivered in Esperanto but conversation in the halls took place in Yiddish—the only truly international language the delegates shared in common. From these shelves, too, books were missing, as though to mock the enlightened dream that had created them.
The administrator assured us that she was making arrangements for someone else to save the Esperanto collection; our job was to clear the shelves of books in Yiddish. We set to work, and as we did, a half dozen library workers, including several teenagers, came over to help. We finally left with almost twenty-five hundred volumes. Sharon and I were pleased that our guerilla operation had gone off so smoothly. But we were also indignant and sad: sad for the residents of Newark, whose crown jewel, this wonderful library, was being so diminished; and sad, too, for all those great books, in English, Esperanto, and a dozen other languages, that we left behind to an uncertain fate.
PART THREE
“Him I Don’t Talk To!”
14. “You’re a Liar!”
Early in 1985 I was invited to speak at the Yablon Center, a formerly communist (they
now called themselves linke, leftist) Jewish culture club that met in a modest storefront directly across the street from the gleaming-white colossus of NBC’s “Television City” in Los Angeles. Seventy-five people were waiting for me, seated on folding metal chairs. There was only one other young person in the room: a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who was writing a story about the Yiddish Book Center and the “Yiddish revival.”
I began my talk with a quick overview in which I mentioned, more or less in passing, that Yiddish had not died a natural death, that one out of every two Yiddish-speaking Jews was murdered in the Holocaust, and that increasing persecution in the Soviet Union had culminated on August 12, 1952, when Stalin ordered all of his country’s leading Yiddish writers shot on a single night. No sooner was this last statement out of my mouth than an old man in the back of the room jumped to his feet, waved his fist in the air, and shouted at me in a heavy Yiddish accent, “You’re a liar!”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I said you’re a liar!” repeated the old man, more vehemently than before.
I glanced at the reporter. “Um, I’ll be happy to take questions after the lecture.”
“It’s not a question, it’s a fect!” thundered the old man. “It never happened what you said, Stalin never killed those writers.”
The audience was growing restless.
“Sha!”
“Sit down, better!”
“We came to listen to the yungerman, not to you!”
The old man faced off against the crowd. “Ikh vel nisht zayn keyn Bontsha Shvayg! (I won’t be a Bontsha the Silent!)” he screamed, invoking the name of the long-suffering title character of a story by I. L. Peretz. “The yungerman is a liar. It never heppened, it’s all propaganda, Stalin never did it.”
A woman in the front row turned around to face him. “Okay,” she demanded, “if it never happened, then where are all the Soviet Yiddish writers today?”
“Where are they? They’re all hiding, to embarrass Stalin!”
Pandemonium ensued. Only the reporter was still in his seat; the others were on their feet—some were actually standing on their chairs— and everyone was yelling at once. Arguments, accusations, and epithets flew through the air. The old man gave as good as he got, holding his ground for ten minutes or more until, his face red and his body trembling with rage, he invoked several unprintable Yiddish curses on his erstwhile comrades and stormed out of the building, slamming the door behind him.
I tried my best to restore order and resume my lecture. I was concerned, naturally, lest the incident color the Times’s coverage, but I needn’t have worried: Much of the uproar had been in Yiddish, a language the young reporter didn’t understand. And even if he had understood, he wasn’t the least bit interested: He was there, he told me afterward, to write an “upbeat” article about the joys of Yiddish, and bitter political debate was simply not part of the story.
Except, of course, that it was part of the story, and a central part at that. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, reactionary decrees forced large numbers of Jews out of the countryside and into the cities, where they found work in factories: sewing clothes, tanning leather, or rolling cigarettes. They were not exactly the sort of proletariat Marx had dreamed of. A typical Jewish factory might consist of two workers and an owner, all three working side by side, bent over their machines sixteen hours a day. Class conflict in the Pale, according to one observer, meant the struggle of kaptsn kegn dalfn, the pauper versus the destitute. Still, in a country as overwhelmingly agrarian as Russia, Jews comprised a significant percentage of the urban population in the Pale and were pretty much the only urban proletariat there was. By the early 1890s young Marxist revolutionaries seeking to organize the workers (as opposed to the peasantry) had no choice but to turn to these poor Jews as the vanguard of the revolution.
At first their organizing efforts were comical. The early revolutionaries were mostly intellectuals from wealthy, highly assimilated Jewish families, and their idea of agitation was to teach the workers gramota, Russian grammar. The few workers who, after a long day at work, managed to stay awake quickly put their newfound knowledge to good use, leaving the factories altogether. Eventually the revolutionaries realized—just as Hebrew writers had realized a few decades before— that the only way to reach the Jewish masses was to speak to them in Yiddish, the only language they understood.
Since many of the revolutionaries didn’t speak Yiddish themselves, they mobilized a homegrown cadre of what they called halb-inteligentn, “half-intellectuals,” who in turn organized Zhargon Komitetn, Jargon Committees, making use of the nascent Yiddish literature to spread revolutionary consciousness among their fellow workers. The Jewish poor, schooled in the tradition of social justice espoused by the Hebrew prophets, oppressed both as workers and as Jews, rallied to the cry. The Jewish Workers’ Bund of Russia and Poland, founded in 1897, quickly became one of the most powerful forces in East European Jewish life. It played a key role in launching the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1898, in precipitating the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903, and in fighting the Revolution of 1905. After that revolution failed, the tsarist authorities sought to redirect popular discontent by unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish violence. The Bund responded with armed resistance, and then, as reaction and disillusionment took hold, by turning inward, transforming what until then had been a utilitarian expedient—the use of Yiddish to reach the Jewish masses—into a far-reaching cultural program rooted in Yiddish language and literature.
And the Bund was not alone. Ber Borochov, a professional Yiddish linguist, synthesized Marxism and Zionism, giving rise to an influential Labor Zionist movement. Territorialists championed Yiddish-speaking Jewish settlements outside of Palestine. Jewish Communists threw in their lot with the new Soviet Union, while other Jews allied themselves with Polish socialist movements. Together, these groups challenged the political status quo, reshaped Jewish culture—and expended considerable energy fighting among themselves.
When all was said and done, however, the most powerful social movement of all was emigration. Between 1881 and 1924, when the United States effectively closed its doors, some 2 million East European Jews packed up their meager possessions and made the long journey across the sea to di goldene medine, the Golden Land, seeking economic opportunity and an escape from violence and oppression. Like Mrs. Ostroff, many of those immigrants were, at least at first, bitterly disappointed. Population density on the Lower East Side of New York exceeded that of the worst slums of Bombay. Living conditions in the dark, airless tenements almost defied description, and working conditions in the sweatshops were even worse. In 1911 fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, at the edge of Washington Square. “In the eighteen minutes it took to bring the fire under control, one hundred and forty-six workers, most of them Jewish and Italian girls, were burned to death,” Irving Howe recounts in World of Our Fathers. The factory owners had locked the doors to keep out union organizers, and the only way the girls could escape the flames was to jump nine floors to the street below. The Lower East Side was plunged into mourning—a mood captured in a Yiddish poem by Morris Rosenfeld that appeared on the front page of the Forward:
Over whom shall we weep first?
Over the burned ones?
Over those beyond recognition?
Over those who have been crippled?
Or driven senseless?
Or smashed?
I weep for them all.
Now let us light the holy candles
And mark the sorrow
Of Jewish masses in darkness and poverty.
This is our funeral,
These our graves,
Our children, . . .
For many Jews, there was nothing left to do but organize. They joined unions, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. They struck for better wages and shorter hours, they walked the pick
et lines and stood up to the thugs, they suffered setbacks, went hungry, and through victories large and small, they changed the face of the American labor movement forever. In 1914 the Lower East Side elected Meyer London, a Yiddish-speaking socialist and trade union lawyer, to the United States Congress.
If in Europe many Jews still clung to tradition, in America the flood of change was unstoppable. When my sixteen-year-old grandmother arrived in America, she took a job sewing muffs in a sweatshop. “We worked fourteen hours a day, Saturday included,” she remembered. “The first time I had to work on Shabbos I cried so hard I soaked every muff I sewed.”
Torn from their traditional moorings, Jews turned to new, secular Jewish institutions. Landsmanshaftn were mutual aid societies for immigrants from the same city or town. The Workmen’s Circle provided everything from health insurance to burial plots. The old political movements staked out new ground on American soil—socialists, communists, anarchists, Zionists—each with its own Yiddish newspapers, radio stations, publishing houses, libraries, lecture halls, musical groups, schools, and summer camps. They skirmished constantly with one another, and held only two things in common: Yiddish and the dream of a besere un shenere velt—a better and more beautiful world for their children.
It is impossible, today, to understand how important these old Yiddish organizations once were. They attracted hundreds of thousands of members, shaped American Jewish culture, and exercised enormous political influence. Yet they were not to last. For all their proletarian solidarity, Jewish workers couldn’t wait to escape the sweatshops and move their families away from the stifling streets of the Lower East Side. They scrimped, they saved, they took in boarders, they did whatever they had to until they had enough money to move uptown, to Harlem or the Bronx. Many went into business. If they did remain factory workers, it was almost certain that their children would not. And why should they? After all, they were Americans, they spoke English without an accent, they were educated, they became professionals, they moved to the suburbs. What need did they have for unions or radical Yiddish organizations?
