Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  There was one other factor. In Eastern Europe many Jews were swept up in the spirit of nationalism, seeking to create a new, modern Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish (or modern Hebrew) instead of religion. In America it was different: Rather than Minority Treaties we had a melting pot. Religious differences were okay; cultural and linguistic differences were not. Upwardly mobile Jews were quick to redefine their identity: not as nationalism, not as culture, but as religion—exactly as assimilating Jews had done in Germany several generations before. It didn’t take long before membership in America’s Reform and Conservative synagogues outnumbered the membership of all Yiddish cultural and political organizations combined. Even those who remained in the Yiddish organizations tacitly acknowledged that America was different. They created many Yiddish afternoon schools in this country but, unlike in Eastern Europe, unlike in Canada, Mexico, and Argentina, not a single Yiddish day school. No matter how rich and varied the Yiddish cultural life they built for themselves, deep in their hearts they must surely have known that their own children wouldn’t or couldn’t follow. To quote Michael Chabon, Yiddish in America became “a tin can with no tin can at the other end of the string.”

  Arriving as I did very late in the game, I felt for these once proud Yiddish organizations. For five decades or more they had watched as their members died and were not replaced. They saw the spotlight of history grow dim, they saw themselves marginalized and then forgotten, until, inevitably, their idealism gave way to disappointment, their disappointment to resentment, their resentment to bitterness. They were mad at their children, mad at America, and—because no one else was listening—they were mad at one another. By the time I came along, anarchists wouldn’t speak to socialists, socialists to communists, communists to Zionists. I marveled that Yiddish still existed at all, since it seemed everyone I met who spoke the language refused to speak with everyone else.

  For my generation the personal was political; for many of the older Yiddishists, the political was intensely, even frighteningly, personal. I once received a call from the widow of a distinguished Yiddish writer. Many years before, her husband had had a political falling out with Sholem Asch, the most widely translated Yiddish writer of his day. Asch had now been dead forty years, her husband nearly ten years, and still the widow couldn’t give it up. “Mr. Lahnsky,” she said on the phone, “I have the most wonderful news. I just read a memoir which I obtained from the Yiddish Book Center, and I want you to hear what the writer had to say. I quote: ‘I used to get up early in the morning to have more hours in the day to hate Sholem Asch.’ I ask you, have you ever heard a more beautiful passage?”

  Wherever I went in the Yiddish world, otherwise rational people continued to fight old battles with a tenacity that left me speechless. One night Roger, Fran, Noah, and I arrived at a high-rise building in Chelsea to pick up books from Diana Sandler, the widow of Philip Sandler, a prominent Yiddish journalist. While Roger and Noah removed hundreds of her late husband’s books from the living room shelves, Fran and I sat with Mrs. Sandler at her kitchen table and talked. She was leaving New York to be near her daughter in Michigan. Given her age she felt too lonely and isolated to remain.

  “Don’t you have any friends in this building?” Fran asked.

  “No,” she said sadly. “Once, many Jewish people lived here, educated people, Yiddish writers and scholars. My husband and I had many good friends. But over the years they either died or moved away.” She sighed and stared into her coffee for a long time. When she looked up again, she shook her head and added softly, “Actually, there is one other person in the building that I know—very well, in fact—but him, him I don’t talk to.”

  The other person was Paul Novik, then more than ninety years old and still the editor-in-chief of the Morning Freiheit, the communist Yiddish newspaper. For many years, Diana Sandler explained, her husband had worked under Novik as the Freiheit’s city editor. Their families were close friends, so close that they took apartments in the same building. Then came 1956, when Khrushchev made his speech to the Party Congress confirming the magnitude of Stalin’s crimes. Deeply shaken, Sandler quit his job and moved to the noncommunist Tog; Novik remained at the Freiheit, and although they continued to live in the same building, the two men and their wives never spoke to one another again.

  Except once, Mrs. Sandler explained. Five years earlier, in the middle of an unexpected blizzard, she went downstairs to get her mail and saw Novik pacing back and forth in the lobby. Usually, she said, Novik was a vigorous man, but that night he looked small and frail, and she knew something was wrong.

  “There were already big drifts outside. I looked at the snow, I looked at Novik—I could see he was worried. I felt terrible, I knew I shouldn’t speak to him, but what could I do, I’m also a mother. ‘Mr. Novik,’ I said, ‘is something the matter?’ It was the first time I had spoken to him in maybe twenty years. ‘Yes,’ he said in a daze, ‘my wife, she went out shopping, she should have been back an hour ago—’ I didn’t let him finish. I said, ‘Mr. Novik, it’s all right, it’s snowing, the buses are running late, she’ll come home soon.’ And then I took him by the hand and we sat down together on a bench in the lobby. We talked quietly for a long time until the door finally opened and his wife, poor thing, came in half frozen, covered with snow. I waited to make sure she was all right. Then Mr. Novik, he turned to me and he said, ‘Thank you.’ Just that, ‘Thank you.’ Me, I didn’t answer him, I went into the elevator and back up to my apartment. That was five years ago. We still see each other from time to time, in the elevator, in the lobby, but we haven’t spoken a word to each other since.”

  The battles still aren’t over. As recently as December of 2002 I received a phone call from a Yiddish editor in New York, asking if the Yiddish Book Center could help underwrite the cost of Der yidisher kemfer (The Jewish Fighter), the hundred-year-old magazine of the Labor Zionist movement. To be honest, I didn’t even know the magazine was still alive. But I wasn’t completely surprised by the call. Three months earlier, I was approached by the ninety-seven-year-old editor of another Yiddish journal, who needed help to keep his faltering publication alive, and I knew of at least two other New York Yiddish journals that were on equally shaky ground. “You all seem to be in the same boat,” I pointed out to the Kemfer editor when he called. “There are four separate Yiddish magazines, all without enough writers or readers or money to survive. Why don’t you just join forces and create one single, viable Yiddish periodical?”

  The editor laughed. “Ummeglekh! (Impossible!)” he said, explaining why the ideologies and personalities of the various publications couldn’t mix. His vivid characterization of the respective editors—all insisting on autonomy, all at odds with one another—was entertaining, but it was also tragic. Even at this very late date, they’d rather die alone than work together. I was reminded of a Yiddish expression: Yeder makht shabes far zikh, Everyone is making Shabbos for himself. Itche Goldberg, the erudite head of the erstwhile communist Yiddish cultural world and himself no stranger to bitter internecine Yiddish polemics, once characterized the present state of Yiddish culture as a conflagration: “The entire edifice of Yiddish culture is on fire,” he told me, “it’s burning out of control. Every once in a while a lone individual or organization comes along with a little bucket of water to throw on the flames. But before he can get close, he has to pass by a committee of representatives of all the other organizations, who check to make sure that his tsitses (the fringes of his ritual garment) are kosher. Never mind that the members of the committee do nothing to extinguish the flames themselves, they still want to make sure that no one with the wrong political credentials should have a chance.”

  I so wanted it to be different. I wanted these old radicals to be feisty and funny, like the geriatric rabble-rousers in John Sayles’s “At the Anarchists’ Convention.” But there was a danger in romanticizing them. My coworker, Sharon Kleinbaum, who was enamored of anarchist theory, once made a pilgrimage to the e
lderly editor of a Yiddish anarchist newspaper. She went expecting to talk about Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Emma Goldman; instead, the editor pinched her on the tukhes and chased her around the living room.

  At least he still had the oomph to chase her; many of the people we met were just plain bitter—characters not from John Sayles but from Cynthia Ozick’s masterful 1969 story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Envious they were—of each other, and even more so of us. They envied us our youth, our optimism, our success. Why should the newspapers publish pictures of us instead of them, who spoke Yiddish so much better and had been championing Yiddish culture since before we were born? Once, when an article about the Center appeared in the New York Times, the board of a major Yiddish organization filed into its public reading room (a friend of mine was sitting at an adjoining table) and convened an emergency meeting, the subject of which was “What to do about Lahnsky.”

  It wasn’t only envy. When all was said and done, they regarded our work in rescuing Yiddish books not as a triumph but as a sign of their own defeat: If they had been doing their jobs, if they had succeeded in conveying Yiddish culture to their children, then Yiddish books wouldn’t need to be rescued. Of course, the historical depredations and upheavals that unseated Yiddish were hardly their fault. But they couldn’t see that, and their myopia only compounded the tragedy. I’d be lying if I said that their barbs didn’t sting. But in the end we, unlike them, could grasp a deeper irony: No matter how harshly they maligned us or how stubbornly they refused to speak with one another, sooner or later they would have to call us to pick up their books, and when they did, we would make no distinctions: Their books and those of their antagonists would end up in the same truck and on the same shelves—side by side, together at last.

  BECAUSE IT’S MY nature, and because I had studied enough history to impart a certain rakhmones for those who suffered the slings and arrows of Yiddish fortune, I tried my best to make peace with the old Yiddish organizations while they were still here. I didn’t take sides (though I was often sorely tempted), and I made a point of speaking to everyone—though I learned soon enough whom not to mention to whom. I visited different organizations and appeared before their eksekutives, their executive committees. I attended and spoke at their banketn, the interminable banquets where their members got together in the gilded ballroom of one or another of New York’s faded grand hotels to congratulate one another, celebrate the past, and mourn the future. The more radical the organization, it seemed, the more bourgeois its events. Whatever the ideology, though, the speeches were always the same: “Vu iz undzer yugnt? (Where are our young people?)” their orators would demand as they pounded the hotel podium. And I’d sit there at the head table, looking at my uneaten chicken swimming in grease (I was a vegetarian), looking at my parve ice cream (it never melted, no matter how long the program lasted), and I’d think, With food and entertainment like this, was it any wonder that their yugnt stayed home?

  Fortunately, not everyone was bitter. Sometimes I connected personally with members of that older generation—and occasionally I even managed to turn them around. Take S. L. Shneiderman, for example. Barely a year after we began collecting books, he wrote a blistering article in the Forward, attacking the Yiddish Book Center for being out of touch with the real (meaning older) institutions of Yiddish culture. Why, he wrote, hadn’t we contacted the Forverts, why had we ignored the Old Yiddish World, and most of all, why had we never taken the trouble to phone him, Mr. Shneiderman, and let him know what we were up to? The best he could conclude from such gross derelictions was that we were not really interested in saving Yiddish culture, but rather in hoarding books so as “tsu mumifirn di yidishe shprakh, to ‘mummify’ the Yiddish language.”

  Since I had never met Mr. Shneiderman, since he had never visited the Center or interviewed me or any other member of our staff before writing his article, I didn’t think his attack was quite fair, and I phoned him at home to tell him so.

  “Shneiderman!” he bellowed by way of greeting, in what I took to be a preemptive strike.

  I introduced myself and explained where I thought his article had gone astray. To my amazement, he listened, and after an hour and a half—marked by frequent interruptions and pontifications—he was genuinely repentant. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “I had no idea. When you started collecting books without getting in touch with me, I naturally assumed you weren’t really interested in der yidisher kultur (the Yiddish culture). Meyle (no matter), it’s never too late. When can I get a train to Am Hoyrst to see for myself?”

  A week later Mr. and Mrs. Shneiderman arrived at the local Amtrak station. He looked like a Jewish Winston Churchill: short but powerful, with broad shoulders and a deep, resonant voice. His wife was considerably quieter and more refined, with a face that revealed both humor and intelligence. In keeping with what I had come to recognize as Yiddish custom, she referred to her husband by his last name alone, as in “Shneiderman was so looking forward to coming here today,” or, “Shneiderman, zay shtil! Keep quiet!”

  I loaded the Shneidermans into the back of a borrowed car and took them to the Center. They were impressed. In fact, the relentlessly voluble Mr. Shneiderman was actually nonplussed for a good twenty seconds. Then he wiped a tear from his eye and boomed out his verdict: “A nes min hashomayim! (A miracle from Heaven!) Such young people, to do so much! What’s happening here is the future of Yiddish culture! Ershtns (first of all), I’m going to donate to you all my own books after I’m gone. And tsveytns (second), I’m going to write a three-part series for the Forverts. The whole world should know what goes on here and not listen to the yentes back in New York who only know to criticize and complain.”

  He was as good as his word. The Forward ran three successive, full-page articles by S. L. Shneiderman, one of which bore the headline AMHOYRST—NAYER PUNKT AF DER MAPE FUN YIDISH (Amherst, the Newest Point on the Yiddish Map). My grandmother couldn’t stop kvelling: It’s one thing, after all, to see your grandson in the Times and quite another in the Forverts! Before long I was receiving handwritten Yiddish letters from scores of older Yiddish organizations, some with checks and others offering to help us collect books in their communities. I responded in kind, accepting invitations to speak at their meetings, attend their banquets, accept their awards, and sometimes even write for their papers. In fact, I’m still waiting for the $25 honorarium I was promised for an article I wrote for the Forverts in 1983.

  I met many people whom I genuinely liked—decent people, activists, visionaries, idealists—and I spent long hours sipping tea at their kitchen tables while they regaled me with recollections of great writers or eyewitness accounts of movements and events I had only read about in books. But even after hundreds of hours together, I think we both knew that on some level we would remain strangers to one another. Born in the shtetl, versed in Talmud, steeped in Marxism, tested on the streets (and sometimes in jail), well read in Hebrew, Yiddish, and the major languages of Europe, they possessed a depth of learning, experience, and Jewish erudition that I could barely apprehend, let alone aspire to. And I, for them, was also a cipher: relatively ignorant of Jewish knowledge, true, but an American through and through, unbent by the past and heir to a new world—sexually, politically, intellectually—that could never be theirs no matter how long they lived in America, no matter how much they read or how earnestly they tried to understand. We were time travelers, inhabitants of different epochs stopping long enough to compare notes before returning whence we came. No matter how respectful I was, no matter how intently I listened, it was never enough. They always wanted me to stay longer, return sooner, understand better or appreciate them more. And why shouldn’t they? They’d been famous long ago, they’d lived front and center on the stage of history, they wrote books, they led, they learned, they taught, they organized, and now, in their old age, all they lacked was a yarshn—someone to whom they could bequeath not only their libraries but the sum total of their lives. God only knows t
hey deserved it. And God only knows I tried. But in the end, what history had stolen from them, no one—not I, not anyone—could restore.

  15. “They’re Tearing Apart the Library”

  I’d been working twelve hours a day, six days a week for many months when I decided to take a rare Sunday off to accompany my friend Andrea Kurtzman to her cousin’s wedding in Nyack, New York. The meal was over and I, woozy from champagne, had just retreated to my hotel room for a much needed nap when I noticed the message light flashing on my phone.

  “Hmmmph?” I muttered into the receiver.

  “Hello, Mr. Lansky?” said the operator. “I have a message for you from a Mrs. Langert in the Bronx. She says it’s urgent. She says, ‘They’re tearing apart the library.’ She wants you to call her right away. She says she’s sitting by the phone. She says she won’t move until she hears from you. Do you want me to give you the number?”

  Under the circumstances, my head spinning already, Celia Langert was the last person I wanted to talk to. A forceful woman in her late seventies, she was our zamler in the Coops, a complex of Gothic red-brick apartment houses at the corner of Bronx Park East and Allerton Avenue. The buildings were built by a cooperative of Yiddish-speaking communists in 1927, and two of my former professors had grown up there: Andy Rabinbach, who taught German intellectual history at Hampshire, and Eugene Orenstein, who taught Yiddish literature and the history of the Jewish labor movement at McGill. The Coops had fallen on hard times in recent years. The cooperative itself went bankrupt, leaving the buildings to a succession of private landlords. What was once a Jewish housing project was now mostly black and Puerto Rican. Almost all the Jews who remained were elderly, and by the early 1980s they were either dying or moving out at an alarming rate— which kept our resident zamler extremely busy. Over the years, Mrs. Langert had summoned us on half a dozen occasions to pick up books from one or another soon-to-be-vacant apartment, and among the thousands of volumes we retrieved were a large number of monographs and periodicals published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s—generally considered to be among the most valuable imprints in all of modern Yiddish literature.