Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  There’s a Yiddish expression for uncontrollable laughter: “Der nar shtupt mikh (the fool is pushing me).” It was contagious: crowded pulke to pulke, thigh to thigh, I could feel Sharon’s shaking, and before long the nar was shtupping me as well. I clapped my red bandana over my mouth, but I too started shaking, tears rolling down my face, which only got Sharon going more. Hiss! Whap! Drone! Sharon had her bandana out too: two paroxysmal cowboys at the front of the room for all to see. We were seconds from disaster when suddenly, deus ex machina, Dr. Shulman dropped his cards. Talk about fifty-two-card pickup— three hundred yellowed index cards went cascading down the horse blanket and onto the floor! Dr. Shulman was on his hands and knees, members of the audience jumped up to help—and in the confusion Sharon and I made a mad dash for the door, pppffft, hands over our mouths, just one step ahead of the explosion.

  I don’t remember exactly what happened next. We took refuge in the bathroom, splashed cold water on our faces, and somehow managed to compose ourselves. After five more minutes of chaos Dr. Shulman reshuffled the cards as best he could and continued reading as before, although his lecture had now turned kaleidoscopic, the paragraphs hopelessly out of order. By that point it didn’t really matter, most people having lost track of the lecture long since. Even when language was no barrier, communication between the old Yiddish world and the new wasn’t easy.

  Although we booked no further lectures for Dr. Shulman, he and I remained good friends. I went often to his apartment in Greenwich Village to discuss Yiddish literature. He suggested books to read, and we discussed them the next time I came. For me our private tutorials were a gift of knowledge to be found nowhere else; and for him, I think, they offered a glimmer of continuity—the hope that at least an echo of his vast learning would live on after he was gone. But even he could not refrain entirely from the dark humor of the Yiddish world. When, in the face of dwindling readership, the Forward switched from daily to weekly publication, he told me that Yiddish writers were now trying to figure out a way to die on a Thursday “so they can make the weekly deadline and someone will show up for their funeral.” And though he ridiculed the communist Coops for losing their library, I think he was not all that surprised when, a year later, his magazine and a host of other like-minded, anticommunist, socialist Yiddish organizations were forced to give up the building where they had been housed for decades and leave many of their own treasured Yiddish books behind.

  Here’s how it happened. For many years, the Atran House, a large, comfortable building at East Seventy-eighth Street, had been home to many socialist Yiddish groups, including the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Bund Archives, CYCO (the Central Yiddish Cultural Organization), and Di Zukunft (The Future), Dr. Shulman’s magazine. There was only one problem: The building was owned by the Atran Foundation, whose bitterly divided board was now dominated by third-generation family members who did not share their late grandfathers’ interest in Yiddish culture. When real estate prices went through the roof and they were offered a substantial sum for the Atran property, they decided to sell. Their plan was to relocate the Yiddish groups to smaller, cheaper space elsewhere in New York, and then use the difference in cost to help fund Jewish nursing homes in Florida.

  Rumors of the imminent demise of the Atran House had been circulating for several years, but whenever we checked with the tenant organizations they steadfastly denied it. Proud, defensive, suspicious of everyone, they insisted that their ailing organizations were as healthy as ever, their space was as secure as ever, and there was therefore absolutely no need for them to jettison their Yiddish books. We tried to be as deferential as possible—we respected their past accomplishments and didn’t think it our place to shatter the illusions of their declining years—and so we kept our distance, reminding them only that we were there if and when they needed us. Unfortunately, by the time they were finally willing to admit what was happening to call for help (it turned out that they had known the sale date for almost a year and had been packing for months), it was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and the building had to be completely vacated by Wednesday afternoon. That left us exactly two days to remove almost fifteen thousand Yiddish books that, for lack of space in their new quarters, they could not take with them.

  Sharon was off speaking in Cleveland the day the call came in. I tracked her down by phone, and she was able to rebook her return flight so as to rendezvous with us the next morning in New York. Noah, who had just returned home from college for his Thanksgiving vacation, agreed to drive down with me that night. I phoned the Ryder office in Manhattan and arranged for the one-way rental of a large truck. That evening, at about seven o’clock, Noah and I loaded handtrucks and dollies into the back of my big Ford station wagon, stopped to pick up juice and sandwiches, and then set out for New York.

  Noah was at the wheel and I was in the passenger seat eating an avocado and cheese sandwich when, cresting a bridge over the Connecticut River at thirty-five miles an hour, we watched in sudden horror as the headlights of an oncoming car turned directly into our path. What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion: the moment of impact, breaking glass, crumpled metal, the seat belt forcing the air from my chest, and then, ever so slowly, the realization that I was still alive. Noah was slumped over the twisted wheel. “I never saw him coming,” he sobbed. I assured him it wasn’t his fault, and then, because his right hand was hurt and because his own door was crushed, I helped him out through the passenger-side window. Together we ran over to the other driver, who was still sitting at the wheel of what little remained of his late-model sports car. His nose was bleeding and he seemed to have lost several front teeth. “It’s my father-in-law’s car,” he moaned, his mouth foaming with blood. “I got no insurance, man. I got no insurance.”

  The police and ambulances arrived almost immediately. A friend happened to be driving by, and I vaguely remember asking her to help me remove the Book Center’s handtrucks from the back of the station wagon. Both cars were a total loss. At the hospital the other driver was treated for a broken nose, two missing teeth, and a mild concussion. Noah had a badly sprained right hand, and I had five bruised ribs. Other than that, we had been very lucky. The doctor bandaged my ribs, gave me a prescription for painkillers, and told me to lie in bed for the next three days. Under the circumstances, that was hardly an option. A board member, Rich Alpert, came to the hospital and drove me to a friend’s house. I managed to catch Sharon in Cleveland (she had just finished her lecture) and we agreed to postpone the pickup until Wednesday. I phoned Ryder to change the reservation, then took a good shot of shnaps, climbed upstairs, and fell into bed.

  I slept fitfully, waking again and again with the thought that somehow it was all a bad dream. When I awoke a little before noon my ribs ached mercilessly, but my head was clear and the events of the night before did not seem quite so cataclysmic. I tucked a bottle of aspirin into my rucksack, took a bus to Springfield, and boarded the train for New York.

  When I awoke on Wednesday morning in Roger’s apartment I was, to my dismay, even more stiff and sore than the day before. The slightest movement sent streaks of pain shooting through my sides, and I was pretty doubtful as to whether I could handle a truck. Fortunately Sharon had greater foresight than I: She had arranged for several friends to help with the shlepping and enlisted her brother Aaron to drive. (An ardent feminist, Sharon was furious with herself for having to resort to male assistance, let alone her older brother, and she vowed on the spot to learn to drive big trucks herself. Within three months, after a series of nerve-racking lessons, she was a full-fledged balegole (teamster), piloting heavy truckloads of Yiddish books all by herself.)

  The scene at the Atran House was predictably chaotic. It was the building’s last day, and professional movers—big, strapping, tattooed men in sleeveless T-shirts and broad leather weightlifter’s belts—were rushing to remove the last of the furniture. Books, papers, and junk were scattered everywhere. “All the boo
ks that are left are yours,” we were told. So we began in the subbasement and systematically made our way up through the building, one floor at a time. In addition to thousands of abandoned Yiddish books we found boxes of periodicals, props and costumes from old Yiddish plays, vintage metal signs with old-fashioned painted hands pointing to things like Kafeterye (Cafeteria) and Vashtsimer (Wash Room), and a half-dozen sheet Royal and Underwood manual Yiddish typewriters. As sometimes happens when there’s work to be done, my pain somehow, miraculously, eased for the day, and I was able to hold my own with the heavy lifting—although I paid the price for weeks to come.

  Our truck was almost full and the sun beginning to set when we finally reached the top floor. I was alone, deeply absorbed in my work, collecting what books and papers I could find, when suddenly I came upon a large rolltop desk that had not yet been removed and, seated behind it, a very old man reading a newspaper. He looked up and we stared at each other for a long time. Here was I, a young man with a beard, long hair, jeans, and a dirty sweatshirt carrying an armful of Yiddish books, and there was he, a small man at a big desk in an otherwise empty building, silhouetted against a small, arched window, looking as though he had stepped straight from the pages of a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

  It was he who broke the silence.

  “Ver zayt ir? (Who are you?)” he gruffly demanded.

  I told him.

  “And who are you?” I asked in return.

  “Yud Shin Hertz.”

  Yud Shin Hertz? If this really were a Bashevis novel I would have sworn I was talking to a ghost. Yud Shin Hertz was a preeminent historian of the Jewish labor movement in Europe. His four-volume Di geshikhte fun Bund (The History of the Jewish Labor Bund) had been standard reading in graduate school, and I had read other books and articles by him as well, including his moving memoir of Jewish life in Poland, Geshikhte fun a yugnt (The Story of a Young Generation). For me Yud Shin Hertz was a legend from another world. I’d assumed he had died many years before.

  Suspicious at first, Mr. Hertz was astonished and then clearly pleased when I told him his books were still being read. He was ninety-two years old, he told me, and at his age it was too late for change: Although he knew the building was being emptied, he had decided to remain at his desk until the movers or whoever was in charge actually looked him in the eye and ordered him out.

  I left him there, alone at his desk, leaving it to someone with a less acute sense of history to persuade him to leave. Although I was often exasperated by what I perceived as the stubbornness and intransigence of the old Yiddish world, I found myself rooting for Mr. Hertz in his lonely vigil in that darkling room. His determination struck me not so much as obstinacy as nobility: the Don Quixote of the Atran House attic resolute against the inexorability of change, the last defender of a world that was literally being pulled out from under him. But even before I passed the burly movers on their way up the stairs, I knew that Mr. Hertz’s cause was lost: for as he sat at his rolltop desk, digging in his heels and waiting to do battle with history, the newspaper he was reading was not the Yiddish-language Forverts; it was the English New York Times.

  17. “If Not Higher”

  In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel Enemies: A Love Story, the owner of a Yiddish bookshop is asked whether he is afraid of thieves.

  “No,” replies the bookseller. “My only fear is that some Yiddish author might break in at night and put in some more books.”

  Our own collection was growing by leaps and bounds. On average, we collected four hundred volumes a day, two thousand a week, a hundred thousand a year. Just finding space to store them all had become a major problem. Our new home in an Amherst schoolhouse proved a godsend, but we weren’t there a year before the piles of incoming books grew so high that we had to park a borrowed tractor-trailer out back for the overflow. When that, too, was full we went looking for warehouse space, first in a defunct roller-skating rink, then in the attic of a spice merchant, where the air was so redolent it made us dizzy and the ancient wooden floor literally sagged beneath the weight of our overladen carts. It was only when those spaces, too, were full that our no-nonsense board chair, Joe Marcus, decided enough was enough. The dean of engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Joe prevailed on a former student to lease us two floors in a renovated nineteenth-century mill building in nearby Holyoke, at the rock-bottom price of one dollar per square foot per year, utilities included, with no increase for the next twenty-five years. Each floor was the size of a football field. We managed to shnor $125,000 worth of surplus steel library shelving—but not before the mountain of unopened boxes had grown high enough to crack a three-foot beam on the floor below.

  Of course, our warehouse was never intended as genizah, a mausoleum for superannuated volumes, but rather as a clearinghouse through which we could place old books in the hands of new readers. We issued regular catalogs offering duplicate copies at reasonable cost, and it wasn’t long before orders arrived. To the bewilderment of those who insisted that Yiddish was dead, our customer list eventually included four thousand individuals and more than five hundred national and university libraries in twenty-six countries!

  How can we account for such a groundswell? Why, at the precise moment when older Yiddish organizations were waning, were younger Jews flocking to Yiddish like never before? Part of the reason, as I’ve already suggested, was academic: for a thousand years, Jews in central and eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, and Yiddish sources had therefore become essential for serious research in the emerging fields of Jewish social history and cultural studies. But when all was said and done, the number of scholars remained small, while interest in Yiddish continued to grow. Surely there were other factors to explain the mounting pull of this fading language on a new generation.

  One answer, I believe, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, was political: not because of the role of Yiddish in proletarian struggle, as championed by many of the older Yiddish organizations, but because of its potential for cultural struggle, as championed by my generation since the Vietnam War. Consider, for example, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, the 1980 memoir by Abbie Hoffman, perhaps the best known of the self-described “cultural revolutionaries.” It is, on the whole, a surprisingly Jewish book, but nowhere more so than in Abbie’s account of the trial of the Chicago Seven, who were charged in federal court with conspiracy to incite riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Half the defendants, both defense lawyers, and the judge were Jewish, and, according to Abbie, it didn’t take long for the trial to develop into a confrontation between two competing American Jewish possibilities: specifically, himself, Abbie, the unabashedly Jewish, Yiddish-quipping, curly-haired activist from Worcester, Massachusetts, and the judge, Julius Hoffman, a highly assimilated German Jew. “We fashioned our own little battle,” Abbie recalls, “the war of the two Hoffmans.”

  The contest came to a head in the final days of the trial, when the judge sent one of the defendants, David Dellinger, a pacifist, behind bars on contempt charges.

  I really exploded. “You’re a disgrace to the Jews. You would have served Hitler better,” I screamed [at the judge], “you shtunk!” And then, in the sharpest thrust of all, I called him “a shande fur de goyim,” which roughly translated is a Yiddish expression meaning “a front man for the gentiles.”

  I don’t want to overstate the case. Abbie was no Yiddish scholar. His translation of “a shande far di goyim”—literally, “an embarrassment in the eyes of non-Jews”—was inaccurate, although whether he was mistranslating or intentionally reinterpreting is not clear. What is clear is that he saw Yiddish as a counterculture, and he didn’t hesitate to use it to challenge the mainstream culture from which, in his eyes, the war derived.

  Of course, what Abbie didn’t know—what few Jews his age or younger could have known—was that Yiddish had been pressed into service to challenge mainstream values since at least 1878, when Mendele Moykher Seforim published a short novel entitled The Travels and
Adventures of Benjamin the Third. Loosely modeled on Don Quixote, the book tells the story of two small-town Jews, Benjamin and his side-kick Senderl, who leave their wives and set off in search of the lost ten tribes of Israel. The book is openly satiric of its heroes’ narrow horizons and kleynshtetldik (small-town) ways. When, just a few days’ walk from home, they come to Teterevke, a provincial town with sidewalks and two-story buildings, they mistake it for Constantinople and stand philosophizing in the middle of a busy street until they’re almost run over by a passing wagon. Some pages later Benjamin and Senderl are kidnapped from a shvitz, a communal steam bath, and sold into service in the tsar’s army. For the first time in Yiddish literature, Jews come face-to-face with the non-Jewish world—with predictable results: