Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  But I also knew from experience that as much as Mrs. Langert cared about Yiddish books, she cared even more about the old Yiddish left and was not above a certain well-intentioned duplicity to further her political agenda. Sitting on the hotel bed in Nyack, my head between my hands, I thought about the last “urgent” phone call I had received from Celia Langert, barely a year before. At that time she had called me at home—after 11 P.M., naturally—to tell me she had books that needed to be picked up. As it happened we were planning to be in New York with a truck later that week, and I suggested we stop by on Thursday afternoon.

  “Oh no, not Thursday,” Mrs. Langert replied. “Thursday is too soon.”

  Unsuspecting, I offered to come on Friday instead.

  “No, no, Friday is also no good. Tell me, maybe you young people could come on Sunday?”

  We hadn’t planned to be in the City that Sunday, but Mrs. Langert was insistent. “Please, these books are so important, you simply must come on Sunday. Monday could be too late already. Sunday is the only time, Sunday or never.”

  I reluctantly agreed. “Okay, Mrs. Langert, you win, Sunday it is. We’ll be there at two in the afternoon.”

  “Oh no, two is too late. You must come earlier—more like eleven in the morning. I’ll be waiting for you in the lobby at eleven sharp. Don’t be late.”

  Fran Krasno and I hastily rescheduled the rest of our trip. Early Sunday morning we drove from Massachusetts to the Bronx in my big secondhand station wagon, intending to rent a truck once we got to Manhattan. When we pulled up to the Coops a little before eleven, Mrs. Langert was waiting for us in the lobby. We should have known something was up right then and there, because instead of her usual no-nonsense book-shlepping clothes she was wearing a satin dress, nylons, high-heeled shoes, a long coat, and a hat that had probably been the height of fashion in 1955.

  “Sholem aleykhem!” I greeted her. “Avu zenen di bikher? (Where are the books?)” I expected her to lead us to some recently abandoned, book-filled apartment, as she had done so many times in the past. Instead she pointed to three plastic shopping bags sitting forlornly on the lobby floor. They couldn’t have contained more than twenty volumes between them, mostly commonplace imprints from the linke Yiddish publishing house in New York.

  “Dos iz gor?” I asked, astonished that she, who knew better, had made such a fuss over such slim pickings. “That’s all?”

  “Well, that’s all in terms of books,” Mrs. Langert replied. “But as long as you’re here, there is one other thing you could do for me. Maybe, if it’s not too much trouble, you wouldn’t mind giving an old lady a ride to Manhattan?”

  Aha, azoy kokht men lokshn (so that’s the way you cook the noodles), I thought as we carried the three bags to the station wagon, with Mrs. Langert following close behind. She slid into the front, between me and Fran, and it didn’t take long before the full truth was out. Our zamler’s destination was the Roosevelt Hotel, where, “it just so happens,” they were holding the yerlekher banket, the annual banquet of Jewish Currents, the English-language magazine of the Yiddish left. Mrs. Langert, a loyal subscriber, had never missed a Jewish Currents banquet before, she said, and she was not about to miss this one, either. “The person who usually drives me, he died last year. So I thought, the young people from Massachusetts, they have to come to see me anyway to pick up books. What would be so terrible if they came by on Sunday and gave me a ride?”

  The ends justify the means. Fran and I, her unwitting fellow travelers, knew we had been duped, but Mrs. Langert was in such high, festive spirits, regaling us with stories of strikes and demonstrations and political triumphs, that it was hard to hold a grudge. “A bisele gikher, zay azoy gut! (A little faster, please!)” she cajoled. “Pass that car. No, don’t turn here, the next exit is better!”

  Nature, however, has its own designs. Not a mile from Manhattan the skies opened up. I reached down, turned on the windshield wipers—and nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. With the rain coming in torrents and visibility nil, I barely managed to bring the car to a stop in the breakdown lane. And there we sat: crowded in the front seat of an old station wagon with an iron-willed Yiddish-speaking communist, forty feet above one of the worst neighborhoods in New York, the rain pounding on the roof, the windows steaming up, traffic whizzing by, the roadway shaking under the weight of passing tractor-trailers, and Mrs. Langert oblivious to everything but “the banket—we must get to the banket!”

  As Mrs. Langert continued her exhortations, I scrunched down on the floor, reached under the dashboard, pulled the fuse from the cigarette lighter, and exchanged it with the wipers’. No luck. As I later learned, the wipers’ transmission (I didn’t even know they had a transmission) had given way, and it was impossible to fix without a skilled mechanic and $80 worth of new parts—neither of which was available up there on the Major Degan Expressway. But we did have a coil of manila rope (which we carried to secure loads in the rental trucks). I found a jackknife, cut off a twenty-foot length, opened my window, getting splashed by passing cars in the process, and tied one end with a Boy Scout’s bowline to the metal arm of the left wiper blade. I then passed the other end of the rope over Mrs. Langert and handed it to Fran, who in turn opened her window and tied it to the right wiper. Mrs. Langert marveled at what she called the makherayke, the contraption, and it worked: I pulled one way, Fran the other, and sure enough, the wipers moved back and forth and visibility was restored. The only problem, I realized, was that I couldn’t pull and drive at the same time.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Langert,” I said, “do you think you might be able to hold one end of the rope and pull together with Fran?”

  “Pull together? I’ve been pulling together all my life! Now gey shoyn (go already), onward to the banket!”

  And so we proceeded down the highway, Fran and Mrs. Langert pulling back and forth on the rope like lumberjacks on a cross-cut saw. We made fairly good progress through the downpour until, halfway across a bridge, the rope, which had been chafing against the window frame, suddenly snapped in two. Again I couldn’t see a thing, and in order to avoid the cars in the next lane I allowed myself to drift ever so slightly to starboard. But with zero visibility the distance was difficult to judge, and I ended up brushing the right fender against a concrete abutment, sending what was undoubtedly a superfluous piece of chrome molding plummeting into the abyss. It didn’t matter to Mrs. Langert: By the time I managed to grope my way to a stop at the far end of the bridge she was already cutting a fresh length of rope. We affixed this in turn and resumed our journey, arriving at the Roosevelt just in time for the banquet to begin. The hotel doorman in his caped raincoat barely raised an eyebrow as he glanced at the rope snaking through the window, opened the front door, and watched as Fran stumbled out cradling a sore, soaking-wet right arm, followed by a damp but unflappable Mrs. Langert. She straightened her coat, brushed the water off her hat, and fell in with her comrades, having made it to the banket at last.

  In light of that experience—and the fog of champagne that still suffused my Nyack hotel room—I was understandably reluctant to return Mrs. Langert’s call. But if I had learned anything from collecting books, it was that you never know. So I splashed cold water on my face and dialed her number.

  She answered on the first ring, and even through the champagne I could tell from the sound of her voice that this time the emergency was real. The Coops, she explained, used to have a large cooperative library. Although it hadn’t been used much in recent years, it was there all the same—or at least it had been there until two weeks ago, when a new owner bought the buildings. He came in, saw the library, realized no one was paying rent for the space, and without a word to anyone decided to clear it out and lease it as office space. For an entire week, unbeknown to the residents, workers had been unceremoniously dismantling the Coops library, pulling shelves off the walls and dumping thousands of Yiddish books into a big pile on the floor. Mrs. Langert had just discovered the demol
ition—and what’s worse, she’d found out that a dump truck was scheduled to arrive the very next day to haul all the books to the dump. That’s why she had tracked me down at the wedding in Nyack: to make sure we got there first.

  Suddenly sober, I found my friend Andrea (as a young girl she had studied Yiddish at the Peretz School in Montreal) and then phoned Noah Glick, who together with his friend John Stevenson agreed to take a late-night train and meet us in New York. We also enlisted Josh Stillman, a friend of Andrea’s, and Sidney Berg, our ever-ready board member from Great Neck. Andrea and I rented a large Ryder truck. At 7:30 the next morning, a hot, humid, summer day, we all rendezvoused on the sidewalk in front of the Coops library, where Mrs. Langert and several neighbors were waiting for us. In one of the library’s dusty windows, facing the street, a big printed sign read Office for Rent.

  Not surprisingly, Mrs. Langert took charge, leading us around the side of the building to the library entrance. A faded, hand-lettered Yiddish sign locked in a glass case announced “Aktivitetn fun klub (Activities of the [Yiddish] Club),” followed by a long list of weekly events, including “Tuesday, 3 P.M.: Leyenkrayz (Reading Circle),” “Wednesday, 2 P.M.: Discussion Group,” and “Thursday, 7:30 P.M.: Film,” and at the bottom of the sign, in Yiddish and English: “Library Open Every Day, 8 A.M.–5 P.M.” It was clear that it had been a long time since the Yiddish Club had last met, and longer still since the library had kept anything resembling regular hours. As we pushed open the door we saw the short flight of stairs leading down into the library, cluttered with debris: a snow shovel, a shattered light fixture, children’s toys, and a broken mirror. But that was nothing compared to what awaited us in the library itself. A large, L-shape room, it once held reading tables and chairs surrounded by floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases; now everything lay in ruins. In the center of the room almost ten thousand volumes were buried beneath the rubble of smashed shelves and huge chunks of plaster and laths pulled from the ceiling and walls. We had to keep a sharp lookout to avoid stepping on rusty nails.

  Apparently the wrecking crew hadn’t yet finished, because at the far end of the library, in the short leg of the ell, several thousand additional volumes were still on the walls. We recognized many of the titles: multiple copies of the collected works of Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, and Avrom Reisen; ten copies of Abraham Cahan’s two-volume History of the United States (in Yiddish, of course); immigrant novels by Chaver Paver; Mark Schweid’s Treyst mayn folk (Take Comfort, My People), a biography of Peretz; and Yiddish translations of Zola and Balzac. There was also an unlikely mix of books in Russian, German, and English: Co-op, by Upton Sinclair; Das Kapital, by Marx; The Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson; a paperback edition of Peyton Place; and right next to it The Six-Year Plan for the Reconstruction of Warsaw. On the floor were remnants of fifty years of cultural activity: a dented coffee urn, three big aluminum tea kettles, a broken podium, a coat rack with four wire hangers, a box full of brand new, unsold copies of Yiddish humor books by Sam Liptzin, cans of food, a ripped movie screen, a jimmied strong box (apparently used for ticket sales); framed pictures of Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Moyshe Olgin (the founding editor of the Freiheit), and Abraham Lincoln; a faded reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica; and strewn everywhere, playing pieces from chess, checkers, backgammon, and Chinese checkers.

  We were still reconnoitering when the landlord appeared, demanding to know who we were and what we were up to. I explained that we were from a nonprofit organization and that we had come to retrieve Yiddish books that were the rightful property of Mrs. Langert and other members of the cooperative. The landlord was Jewish. He was also prost un farbisn, coarse and snappish, and he made it clear that he had no sympathy for a Yiddish library, let alone a left-wing Yiddish library that occupied good space and paid no rent. “Anyway, you’re too late,” he said. “I’ve got trucks coming in less than an hour to haul all this junk away. This isn’t a pinko co-op anymore, this is private property and I’m the owner. As far I’m concerned you and your hippie friends are trespassing and I want you out of here now!”

  Thank God for Sidney Berg. A landlord himself, he stepped forward, introduced himself, and offered a deal: If the man let us have the books, we in turn would give him a receipt that he could use to claim a whopping write-off on his taxes. “All right,” the landlord agreed, “I’ll give you till four this afternoon. Whatever you can carry out of here between now and then is yours. Whatever’s left goes to the dump.”

  We sprang into action—but our progress was painfully slow. It took forever to remove the wood and plaster under which the books were buried. The landlord had just had the whole space fumigated, and as the temperature climbed into the nineties we had to tie bandanas around our faces to keep from gagging on the acrid stench. By noontime we had removed fewer than a thousand books, and it was clear that with just the five of us shlepping, we didn’t have a prayer of finishing by four.

  That’s when we realized that a bunch of neighborhood kids had gathered to watch us. When we removed our gloves and masks and stepped outside for a quick lunch in the shade of the truck, an eleven-year-old Puerto Rican boy named Victor came over and asked what we were doing. We explained that the apartment complex had once been a cooperative and that we were saving Jewish books from its former library. Although Victor had come directly from San Juan to the Coops less than two years before, his English was excellent and he responded to this news with greater interest than I would have expected. “Imagine,” he said, “a whole library right here where we live!” When I told him that we were racing to meet a four-o’clock deadline, he looked genuinely surprised. “Do you guys need help here or something?” he asked.

  Did we need help! In a flash Victor was off. Ten minutes later he returned with a dozen more black and Puerto Rican kids his age, whom he proceeded to organize into a brigade snaking from the library to the truck. I think every kid in the neighborhood ended up shlepping books that day—with the exception of Victor himself, who in light of his linguistic and managerial talents appointed himself foreman and stood at the top of the stairs supervising everyone else. Sidney went off twice to buy cold Coca-Cola to fuel the troops; other than that, they worked without stopping. By the time four o’clock rolled around, the job was done. Almost fourteen thousand books lay safely stacked in the back of the truck. For Victor, new to the neighborhood, it was a personal triumph: He had proved himself a leader. For Mrs. Langert it was also a triumph, although of a somewhat more political nature: Despite her sadness at the loss of the library, she was proud to have played such a crucial role in its rescue. Even more, she was proud of the way the library had been saved—all those local boys, black and Puerto Rican, passing Jewish books from hand to hand was, in her eyes, a shining example of working-class solidarity prevailing over racial and ethnic divides. In its final hour, its library in ruins and its books about to be driven off to points unknown, the Coops’ progressive vision had been realized at last.

  16. A Ghost in the Attic

  When we got back to Amherst, our truck groaning under the weight of the Coops’ library, we were greeted by a half-dozen staff members and volunteers and, as fate would have it, by Dr. Elias Shulman, a frequent visitor to the Center, an accomplished historian of Yiddish literature, and editor of Di tsukunft (The Future), the oldest of the Yiddish literary magazines. Dr. Shulman was a farbrenter (passionate) anticommunist, and when he learned where the fourteen thousand books on the truck had come from, he couldn’t help but gloat.

  “So this is what the linke (the leftists, the Jewish communists) have come to,” he tsked. “It just goes to show you. They don’t care about Yiddish and they never did. For them Yiddish was just window dressing. If they really valued their books, they wouldn’t have let them end up this way!”

  As it turned out, the final disposition of the Coops library was not as dire as Dr. Shulman might have imagined. Once we sorted them out, we sent several hundred of the most valuable volume
s to the Bodleian Library, at Oxford University, and most of the remaining books to a handful of other major university and research libraries. But how did Mel Brooks put it? “We mock the thing we are to be.” Deep in his heart Dr. Shulman must have known that the downfall of the Coops library was a result of its demographics, not its ideology, and he must have feared a similar fate for his movement as well.

  Which was sad, because I liked Dr. Shulman. This tall man in a silk ascot possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of Yiddish literature, which he shared unstintingly with me and other members of our staff. He was European born but American educated (apart from two years as an aspirant, a research fellow at the Vilna YIVO), he was married to an American-born woman (an accomplished watercolor artist), and he spoke English with only the slightest trace of a Yiddish accent. For all that, it was no easier for him than for most people in the Yiddish world to communicate with an American-born generation.

  I once invited Dr. Shulman to deliver a public lecture at the Center. I forgot to say that by that time we had moved from our original factory loft into an old redbrick schoolhouse in Amherst, which we rented from the town for a token sum. The only problem was that we couldn’t afford to heat the building, so our few staff members usually worked huddled around a kerosene heater in the middle of a first-floor office. When Dr. Shulman arrived, we decided to fire up the big steam boiler in his honor. That was a mistake, because as the building heated up, several dozen dormant flies felt the warmth and came back to life, dive-bombing the overhead fluorescent lights of our public reading room just as the lecture began. That wasn’t all. Dr. Shulman was of the old school who insisted on reading their lectures verbatim, and he needed a podium, which we didn’t have. Sharon improvised by stacking four boxes of books and covering them with a shmate, a rag, in this case a shabby, red cotton horse blanket. Fifty people crowded into the room, most of them young and all of them enthusiastic. Dr. Shulman was in fine spirits, buoyed by the audience. But the minute he stepped to the makeshift podium he turned stiff and formal and began reading his lecture from a prodigious stack of yellowed three-by-five cards. He mumbled. The radiators hissed. The flies whapped against the lights. At one point he began reading from a book he was discussing, Chaim Grade’s Musernikes (Mussar Students), a thin paperbound volume published in Vilna in 1939. When he turned the brittle pages they literally crumbled in his hands, and as he continued reading, the fragments fell in a steady rain until the red blanket was festooned with crumbs of brown paper. My old teacher Leonard Glick leaned across Sharon to whisper in my ear, “This isn’t a lecture, it’s a metaphor!” The radiators went on hissing and the speaker went on droning, until, on my right, to my horror, I could feel a volcano stirring: Sharon was giggling!