Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  At six foot three, Doug towered over these elderly Jews, but that didn’t stop them from addressing him in the diminutive: “Nu tatele (So, little father),” they’d say, “maybe just one more piece of kugl?”

  Presumption knew no bounds. “McGill, McGill,” mused one old man when they met, “there used to be a writer for the New Masses, A. B. Magill, maybe you’re related?”

  At the next apartment Doug took out his notebook. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions?” he politely inquired.

  “You want to ask me questions?” the hostess replied. “First I have to ask you a question: Do you want your cake with ice cream or with whipped cream from the can?”

  “Neither, please,” said Doug, “you see, we just ate—”

  “Nonsense,” the woman interrupted, “a big boy like you, you need to eat! Now zets zikh, sit!”

  Doug remained standing. The woman, who barely came up to his waist, grabbed his belt and pulled him down hard onto a dining room chair. “Such a big boy, kaynehore (no evil eye), for you I’ll give both: the ice cream and the whipped cream!”

  At the next apartment, in a high-rise building on Coney Island, our hostess greeted us not only with food but with song. As soon as we walked in the door she dropped the tone arm on her record player, launching a full-blast rendition of “Di grine kuzine (My Greenhorn Cousin)” by the Barry Sisters:

  “S’IZ BAY MIR GEKUMEN A KUZINE . . .”

  The sound was deafening.

  “EXCUSE ME,” Sharon shouted over the music, “But it’s a little LOUD! Maybe you could turn it down so we can talk?”

  “OH NO,” the woman shouted back, “a reporter from the New York TIMES is here, it’s important he should listen to our Yiddishe music, he’ll write about it in the paper, everyone should know how GOOD it sounds!”

  Doug didn’t need to write about it in the paper—the music was so loud they could hear it in Manhattan.

  Only one woman was unprepared for our arrival.

  “GEY AVEK! (GO AWAY!)” she yelled.

  “I think you don’t understand,” I politely explained to the closed door. “We’re here for the books, the Yiddish books.”

  “Vos? Vos vilstu fun mir? Ganovim! Gazlonim! Gey avek fun danet! (What? What do you want from me? Thieves! Robbers! Get out of here!)”

  “Yiddish books!” I repeated, more loudly this time.

  “Gey shoyn avek! Loz mikh tsuru! (Go away! Leave me alone!)”

  “Maybe she doesn’t speak English,” Sharon suggested.

  “Let me try,” said Sam, whereupon he began pounding on the door and yelling at the top of his lungs, “Bikher! Mir kumen far di bikher! YIDISH-E BI-KHERRR!”

  Up and down the hall people were peering out through the chained doors of their apartments. Suddenly the door before us swung open.

  “Yidishe bikher?” said a frail-looking woman in a quiet voice. “So why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  Doug remained patient and good-natured through it all. He listened respectfully, looked at albums of family photographs, and even helped carry books. When Sam invited him and his girlfriend to return a week later for dinner, he accepted on the spot. Sam asked his girlfriend’s name, so he could make her a pin of her English name in Hebrew letters, cut from an old silver spoon.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Doug confided at the end of a long day of shlepping. “I’m a young reporter, I usually get the worst assignments. They send me to New Jersey because someone’s dumping toxic waste, and when I get there no one wants to talk to me. But today . . . today every person I interviewed fed me first and kissed me afterward. It’s an experience I’ll never forget.”

  IT WAS MIDWINTER when Sam summoned us to the Beth Am building, an old Labor Zionist center in Brighton Beach. The organization had fallen on hard times in recent years and was forced to sublet its space to an ultraorthodox yeshiva. When the yeshiva moved in, the first thing the teachers did was to remove every last one of the eighteen thousand Yiddish books in the Beth Am library and throw them down the cellar stairs, locking the door behind them! No doubt they thought they were doing a mitzvah, a good deed, protecting their students from the corruption of modern literature. Luckily the building’s custodian, a recent Soviet Jewish immigrant, did not share their sentiments: Having tipped us off, he was now on hand to let us in and help us remove the discarded books.

  The basement was filled with huge, untidy piles of books, like coal heaps in a bunker. Many had landed with their covers bent backward. We borrowed a shopping cart from a nearby grocery store and set to work. When the rosh yeshiva, the principal, and his teachers arrived, they didn’t apologize for what they had done; instead, they stood at the top of the stairs and glowered at us: “Apikorsim! (Heretics!)” they muttered as we passed, “Shkotsim! (Non-Jews!)”

  Apikorsim? Shkotsim? Considering that they had just given the heave-ho to thousands of Jewish books that didn’t even belong to them, and considering that they were now standing there with their arms crossed, not so much as raising a finger to help, while Sam Ostroff, at eighty-three and with a bad heart, puffed up and down the stairs, their epithets struck me as a bit thick. And misdirected. While it’s true that some modern Jews turned to Yiddish as a substitute for religion, Sam, as it happened, was far more inclusive. He kept kosher, observed Shabbos, and went to shul, and unlike the black-hat crowd, he did so without forswearing the outside world in the process.

  I had learned just how worldly Sam and Leah could be when Doug McGill asked them about their favorite writers:

  “Do you like Sholem Aleichem or I. L. Peretz?” he inquired.

  “Well, yes, I like Peretz and Sholem Aleichem,” Leah answered, “but I’ll tell you the truth, I also like Meller.”

  “Meller?” asked Doug, figuring his background research had failed to turn up this important Yiddish writer. “Meller? I’m not sure I’ve heard of him.”

  “Oh, of course, Meller, he’s a very big writer,” said Mrs. Ostroff. “Wait, I think I have one of his books here.” With that she walked into her bedroom and returned with a dog-eared paperback of The Naked and the Dead. “You see,” she said triumphantly, “here he is: Meller, Norman Meller.”

  For Sam and Leah, tradition wasn’t ossified, a brittle relic that had to be guarded behind yeshiva walls; rather, it was alive, organic, resilient, the warp and woof of daily life. Their daily conversation was full of traditional references brought back down to earth. The summer before, when we all came for breakfast and Doug asked Sam why he kept kosher, he had a ready answer: “So when Meshiekh (the Messiah) comes he’ll have where to eat.” When I suggested that Sam stop serving long enough to sit down and join us, he said, “Today I don’t have to sit down, it’s not Pesakh.” (On Pesakh, or Passover, Jews are commanded to sit casually at the festive table, to show that they are no longer slaves.) When Leah brought out one course too many, Sam said, “It’s only July, and already she thinks it’s time for bdikes khumets” (the ritual removal of the last crumb of leavened food before the spring festival of Passover). When, in the back of the van, Sharon began speaking to Doug about modern Yiddish literature, Sam leaned over to inform me that “Shurn lernt im a kapitl tilim (Sharon is teaching him a chapter of Psalms).”

  But unlike the ultra-orthodox, the Ostroffs were not fundamentalists, they were not focused on the pitshevkes, the minutiae, of religious observance, and they preferred to adapt Jewish law as events warranted. Reasonably observant ourselves, we usually avoided travel on Friday, when Shabbos, the Jewish Sabbath, begins at sunset. But one day there was an urgent pick-up in New York that left us no choice. We set out before dawn that Friday morning, but there were more books than we expected and we fell further and further behind, until we were afraid we wouldn’t make it back to Amherst in time. Leah offered to put us up for the night, but we had to get back. “It’s all right,” she said, “I have a better idea: I won’t bentsh likht (light the Shabbos candles) until you get home; that way Shabbos won’t be able to s
tart, and you won’t be mekhalel Shabbos (in violation of the Sabbath).” We arrived home well after dark; when we called the Ostroffs to tell them we were safe, Sam breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad you’re home,” he said. “We couldn’t eat until Leah bentshed likht, and to tell the truth we were starting to get a little hungry.”

  Sea Gate was changing in the early 1980s: As older, modern Jews died, young Hasidic families moved in. “Is that your shul?” Roger asked Sam one day as we walked together past a large synagogue. “God forbid,” said Sam, “that’s the khsidishe shul, the Hasidic shul. We go to the Mentshishe Shul.” The Mentshishe Shul—I think Sam coined the phrase— means literally, the “human” shul: not “humanist,” as in Ethical Culture, but “human,” as in the kind of old-fashioned orthodox synagogue where tradition was important but people still came first.

  Sam’s version of orthodoxy was not without precedent. In his memoir, the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz recalls how he grew up in Zamość in a home that had no running water: Every drop they used had to be carried from the well by a poor water carrier named Ayzikl. A particular guest used to come to their home who, to show how religious he was, performed the ritual handwashing before meals with far more water than was necessary. “Frum af Ayzikls kheshbn,” Peretz’s mother observed. “Pious at Ayzikl’s expense.”

  My friend Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, tells a similar story from his own childhood. One time a guest inadvertently mixed up a milkhig (dairy) fork with a fleyshike, one used for meat. “It’s all right,” his mother said. “God is too big a person to worry about things like that.”

  So there we were at the Beth Am Center in Brighton Beach, carrying load after load of books up from the basement while the rosh yeshiva and his minions looked at us with contempt, certain that they were the better Jews. By day’s end our diesel truck—at Sam’s insistence, we had rented the biggest one on the Ryder lot—was loaded floor to ceiling and stem to stern with nine tons of neatly stacked Yiddish books. I’m no mechanic, but I do know that we had far exceeded the truck’s weight limit. We pulled away from the Beth Am with a shudder and trailed smoke down Mermaid Avenue until, not two blocks from the Sea Gate entrance, the truck broke down.

  The mechanic at a nearby garage, a friend of Sam’s, came to the rescue, but not before he made us promise, for safety’s sake, to offload half the books in New York before heading back to Massachusetts. Leah walked over to meet us, and we all stood kibbitzing on the street while the mechanic did his work. Two hours later we were ready to go.

  “Good,” Sam said to us, “now you’ll come to our house for dinner.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we’re already hours behind schedule, it’s getting dark, and we’ve still got to unload half the books—there’s no way we have time for dinner.”

  “You must come to dinner!”

  “We can’t come to dinner!”

  “You must!”

  “We can’t!”

  It was Leah who broke the impasse.

  “Sam, don’t make a big deal. Kinder, children, if you don’t have time, it’s okay, you’ll come to my house, I’ll peck you a sneck.”

  It’s a forty-minute drive from Sea Gate to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where we were staying; with her “snack” we could have made it to California. Among the highlights I remember were challah and cream cheese, gefilte fish and khreyn (grated horseradish) wrapped in tin foil, egg salad sandwiches, three cans of sardines, marble cake, and halvah. There were also two tea bags and a plastic spoon, though what we were supposed to do with them in a moving truck was never quite clear.

  Offloading half the books took a lot longer than we expected, and by the time we were through we had actually managed to eat most of Leah’s snack. It was midnight before we pulled up in front of my friend Roger’s apartment, padlocked the back of the truck, trudged upstairs, opened a few bottles of beer, and collapsed at the kitchen table. Then the phone rang!

  “Aaron, I think it must be for you,” said Roger, “because he’s not speaking English.”

  I picked up the receiver with understandable trepidation.

  “Hello?”

  “Lahnsky? Ostroff! Sea Gate!”

  “Khaver Ostroff,” I said, “s’iz a bisl shpet (Mr. Ostroff, it’s a little late) . . .”

  “Never mind,” said Sam, “we’ve been worried sick ever since you left our house!”

  “What are you worried about?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, “after you left we realized az mir hobn fargesn ayntsupakn dos lokshn kugl, hobn mir gehat moyre, ir zolt nisht zayn hungerik! (we realized that we forgot to pack the lokshn kugl, and we were afraid you might be hungry!)”

  ALTHOUGH THE Ostroffs’ health was never great, they didn’t let it stop them. When Sam went to the hospital for cataract surgery, he told me that he felt “azoy vi a bild (like a painting).”

  “Like a painting?” I asked.

  “Yo, ikh bin gevorn an eyn-eygiker, un ikh fil azoy vi a bild fun Picasso! (I’ve become a one-eyed person, and I feel like a painting by Picasso!)”

  Even with a patch over one eye he kept on working: hanging posters, answering phone calls, scheduling pickups, and hopping in and out of our truck. Then one day in the fall of 1984 Leah spoke to me in confidence. “Don’t tell Sam,” she whispered, “but I think his health is not so good anymore. Maybe we should move to the Arbeter Ring Home, where they can take better care of him.”

  A month later it was Sam who pulled me aside. “I love it here in Sea Gate,” he confided, “but you can see what’s doing with Leah: She’s becoming sometimes a little oyverbotl a bit senile. Maybe it will be better for her in the nursing home.”

  So I wasn’t altogether surprised when, in January of 1985, Sam called to say he had “one more bit of business” for us:

  “We’ve picked up everyone else’s books,” he said. “Itst zolstu kumen nemen mayne bikher (Now it’s time for you to come pick up my books).”

  We agreed not only to pick up their books but to help them move out of their apartment and into the Workmen’s Circle Home in the Bronx. And so the ritual Sam and Leah had helped us perform countless times—the passing of a yerushe from one generation to the next—now took place in their own apartment. We arrived on a slushy winter morning with a crew of five, the Center’s van, and a rented diesel truck. Sam insisted that the Center take not only the books but their artwork and furniture. “Don’t worry, whatever you don’t need you’ll sell, you’ll use the money to save someone else’s books.”

  They began, naturally, with their books, handing them to us like fine china, one volume at a time. Because they’d been friends with so many Yiddish writers, many of their books were personally inscribed. When their bookcases were empty they led us to an overflowing closet and pulled down a battered, black leather case. Inside was an antique, portable Yiddish typewriter, its platen and paper support folded neatly atop the keys. According to Sam, the machine had belonged to Lamed Shapiro, a writer whose stories of pogrom violence in the Ukraine in 1919 are among the most shockingly realistic in all of Yiddish literature.

  “How did you get Lamed Shapiro’s typewriter?” I asked in amazement.

  “Vu den? He was a friend. For years, after the First World War, he lived in Hollywood, trying to invent some process for color film. It never worked. When he got older he went to Israel, it was a long trip in those days, so he left his typewriter with us, we should take care of it for him. What more can I tell you? He died and the typewriter’s still here. He’d want better that you should have it now.”

  For us it was as though we had just been handed Shakespeare’s pen.

  And so the morning continued: books, magazines, artwork, original photographs of Yiddish writers—one treasure after another, each with a story all its own. My young colleagues and I listened attentively, acolytes at the Ostroffs’ feet, until suddenly the spell was broken by a loud knock at the door, followed by the entrance of their forty-s
ix-year-old son, his wife, and their teenage son. I’d never met the Ostroffs’ son before. All I knew was that he had a Ph.D. in engineering, worked for a large corporation, and lived in the Connecticut suburbs with his wife and four children. But it didn’t take long to see that he harbored little affection for his parents’ world.

  Which, to be fair, should not have been all that surprising. Inter-generational conflict is, after all, nothing new; I for one am not exactly a paragon of equanimity in my own parents’ home, and neither was the younger Ostroff that day. He chose a few pieces of furniture (which he asked us to truck to Connecticut), bundled his parents into the backseat of his car, drove away, and did not look back. Sam and Leah, who had lived in the same community for sixty years, would never see Sea Gate again.

  Without Sam and Leah, the apartment, which just that morning had been an oasis of culture and learning, was reduced to a few small, shabby rooms with sooty ceilings and faded walls. We loaded the van and the diesel truck, and four hours later arrived at the Workmen’s Circle Home, a massive, yellow brick building that occupied almost a whole block in the Bronx. Sam had prevailed on the director, an eighty-year-old landsman from Zabludow, to let him take his tools and art supplies to the communal crafts room. But there was so much more than the director had bargained for that when we actually started unloading, he had to open an empty patient room for the overflow.

  When we finished we found our way down a wide corridor to the Ostroffs’ room. Like the rest of the building, it was immaculately clean, the tile floor polished to a high sheen. The single window looked out over a low roof to an inside courtyard; it was clear that the sun would never shine here. In one corner was a chrome-framed chair upholstered in baby blue Naugahyde that looked as if it had come from a doctor’s waiting room. The only other furniture consisted of two metal hospital beds (each with its own commemorative plaque), two metal nightstands, and two brown metal bureaus. Having been delivered there by their son, the Ostroffs were sitting tentatively on the edge of their respective beds, looking older and more forlorn than I had ever seen them before.