Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  And there they lay. Occasionally a local cantor would hear of the collection and come to Mr. Rimmer in search of a particular piece of liturgical music. For the most part, though, the existence of these folios—the largest single collection of unsold Yiddish and Hebrew sheet music in the world—remained largely unknown.

  When Rabbi Gottlieb explained all this to us, we immediately phoned Mr. Rimmer. He was thrilled to hear from us, eager to have the music returned to active use, and more eager still to get his garage back after all these years. “Come as soon as you can,” he said. “It’s all yours.”

  Two days later, on a hot, muggy morning in late July, two interns, Elliot Glist and Jennifer Luddy, joined me in the cab of a big, yellow rental truck. Mr. Rimmer, who was standing in the middle of the street waiting for us, turned out to be a friendly, clean-shaven, relatively modern man in a short-sleeved shirt and small black yarmulke. He directed us down a narrow alleyway beside his house. The truck was so tall it necessitated the removal of the eruv, the ritual Sabbath boundary wire stretched overhead. When he pulled open the double doors to his detached brick garage, we understood just what a mitzvah he had done.

  We set up a ramp, brought out the hand trucks, and began loading. The day was hot, ninety-two in the shade, and the humidity was palpable. Elliot and I were wearing cut-off shorts and T-shirts; Jennifer had on gauzy pastel shorts and a matching sleeveless top, with a generous display of pupik in between. Although this was not exactly regulation dress for Boro Park, Mr. Rimmer, his wife, and two children could not have been less judgmental. In fact, the only problem came at noon, when it was time to break for lunch.

  “Is there a restaurant nearby?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Rimmer, “but I’m afraid it’s closed. You see, today is the Seventeenth of Tammuz.”

  It took a moment for the significance of the Hebrew date to register. Of course! Sheva-esrey Tammuz was an obscure Jewish fast day . . . obscure for us, that is. We realized with sinking hearts that there’d be no lunch here in Boro Park that day—which was not a great problem, since it was too hot to eat anyway. What was a problem was thirst. We had depleted our own water bottles long since, and we were sweating so profusely that the Rimmers finally concluded it was pikuah nefesh, a matter of life and death—a Jewish legal concept that trumped most other commandments and allowed them to bring us a welcome pitcher of ice water.

  After working all day we spent the night in Great Neck, where Sidney and Ruth Berg treated us to a huge dinner in an air-conditioned restaurant. The next day an excited crew of interns was on hand in Holyoke to help us unload. It took months to sort and catalog all eighty-five thousand folios, which boiled down to roughly eleven hundred discrete titles, most with wonderfully ornate covers. There were old favorites, such as “‘Rumania, Rumania’—The Sensational Song Hit Starring Aaron Lebedeff!” and “That Tremendous Success of the People’s Theater, ‘Der Idisher Yenke Dudl’ (The Jewish Yankee Doodle)!” by Boris Tomashevsky, the grandfather of the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. “Di Yidishe shikse” by Dora Weisman is about the travails of a newly arrived Jewish immigrant. Zionist favorites included “A folk on a heym (A People Without a Home),” “Erets-Yisroel iz undzer land! (The Land of Israel Is Our Home!),” and “Prezident Artur Tsions shif (President Arthur, Zion’s Ship),” a celebration of the S.S. President Arthur of the American Palestine Line, which had delivered Jewish pioneers to “Zion’s Gate.” Of course, there were arrangements by all the great cantors: Moyshe Oysher, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Yossele Rosenblatt. There were many love songs—all of them sad. Thirty or forty titles concerned themselves with immigrant mothers: “A Letter to Mama,” “A Mother’s Heart,” “A Mother Is the Best Friend,” “When There Is No Mother,” “Mamenyu, Buy Me That!” “Can a Mother Be Guilty?” “A Mother’s Nakhes,” and “A Mother’s Tears.”

  Father songs? There were only two: “Narishe tates (Foolish Fathers)” and—though it wasn’t until I had children of my own that I was able to appreciate it—“A tate iz nisht keyn mame (A Father Is Not a Mother).”

  22. The Four Corners of the Earth

  When Merriam-Webster published its dictionary of “the world’s seven most widely spoken languages” in 1966, Yiddish was one of them. That’s not because so many people spoke the language (at its peak, the number never exceeded one half of one percent of the world’s population) but because those who did speak it were so widely scattered. Fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, Yiddish-speaking Jews found refuge in arbe kanfes ha’orets, the four corners of the earth, and wherever they went they brought, bought, or published Yiddish books. When those Jews died or, as sometimes happened, when new political upheaval forced them to flee yet again, it fell to us and our zamlers to track down the books they left behind.

  Not long ago, on a warm spring morning, a tractor-trailer backed up to the loading dock of our Amherst building. On board was a huge wooden crate with the improbable return address of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was once the British colony of Rhodesia, where some five thousand Jews took refuge before World War II. Successful in business, they created Jewish schools, synagogues, and cultural centers, but in the 1970s, as colonialism unraveled, most took flight, abandoning large numbers of Yiddish books. It was a local rabbi named Bryan Opert, our only zamler on the African continent north of Johannesburg, who rounded them up, packed them into this homemade crate, and dispatched them by ship to Amherst, by way of Harare, Capetown, and Boston.

  The crate was so big that it took most of our staff to wrestle it off the truck and two crowbars and a stepladder to open it. Inside were hundreds of volumes, many of them exceedingly rare, such as prewar imprints from Vilna, a Zionist pamphlet published in Tel Aviv in 1938, and various yizkor books and Holocaust memoirs. But most interesting by far were Yiddish books written and published in Africa. One, Unter afrikaner zun (Under the African Sun), sounded like a Jewish version of Hemingway. Another, Udtshorn: Yerushalayim d’Afrike (Oudtshoorn: The Jerusalem of Africa), was the chronicle of a commune of Yiddish-speaking ostrich farmers who, before styles changed, supplied the lucrative market of feathers for women’s hats. Most of these African imprints were titles we’d never seen before, and we immediately set them aside for cataloging and scanning. A short time later, the day before Yom Kippur 2003, we received word that the Bulawayo synagogue had burned to the ground. Had Rabbi Opert not sent us the books when he did, they would surely have been lost.

  I MADE MY first attempt to organize book collection in Israel in the late 1980s, when I accepted an invitation to address the Veltrat, the World Council on Yiddish. A thousand delegates from around the world crowded into the ballroom of a faded beachfront hotel in Tel Aviv for the three-day conference. When they rose to sing the Hatikvah, the national anthem, at the start of the first session, they used the opportunity to get better seats, jostling one another and pushing their metal chairs forward like so many mechanical walkers, so that by the time the anthem was over the neat rows were in shambles and the entire audience was jammed together as close to the stage as they could get. I was seated on the stage, at a long head table with delegates from two dozen countries, each of whom was supposed to speak for five minutes. Instead, they spoke—or rather shouted—for a half hour each, invoking over and over again the familiar refrain, “Vu iz undzer yugnt?—Where are our youth?” Although the chairman pounded away with his heavy rubber mallet (the sort used to bang hubcaps onto a car), some speakers refused to relinquish the microphone, giving rise to several onstage scuffles. My scheduled 3:00 P.M. lecture—an hour-long slide show and appeal for books—finally took place at 7:30 in the evening. It wasn’t enough that I had to address a thousand people in Yiddish; the whole time I spoke, the chairman was whacking me from behind with a rolled-up newspaper, loudly whispering, “Gikher! Gikher! (Quicker! Quicker!)” I spent the next two days hanging out in the back of the hall with the Israeli sound crew (the only other young people I could find), or else lying by the hotel’s empty swimming pool
reading Henry Beston’s The Outermost House—about as far from Yiddish as I could get. This was not the organization that was going to help us collect Yiddish books in Israel.

  Then in 1991, UNESCO passed a resolution—over the objection of its Arab members—declaring Yiddish “an endangered language” and calling for immediate steps to assure its preservation. I was invited to join delegates from Canada, France, Holland, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Poland, and the United States (the Soviet delegates had been denied visas) for three days of intensive deliberations in Israel to decide what the world should do. The scholar Chone Shmeruk presided as chairman, and Avrom Sutzkever, arguably the greatest living Yiddish writer, lent a certain gravity to the proceedings. We labored conscientiously for three days. On the last night I was assigned the task of drafting the final resolutions—in English, since despite UNESCO’s sudden embrace of Yiddish, no one there could actually read it. Working in my Jerusalem hotel room on a then state-of-the-art, fourteen-pound laptop computer, I finished at midnight and, without thinking, plugged in my brand-new portable printer. Kaboom. Apparently the printer wasn’t wired for foreign current, because it blew its main circuit board, along with every light on the floor. Not knowing where else to turn, I phoned a young Yiddish performer named Mendy Cahan, whom I had met earlier that evening. A native Yiddish-speaker from Antwerp, where his Hasidic family worked in the diamond trade, Mendy was now a student of Yiddish literature at Hebrew University. As I suspected, he owned a printer, he and his girlfriend were up late anyway, and they invited me over. The espresso was already steaming when I got there, we talked for hours, and by the time I left, proposal in hand, he’d accepted my invitation to serve as a faculty member and tumler-at-large (a sort of all-purpose emcee and entertainer) at our upcoming “Winter Program in Yiddish Culture” in San Diego.

  Mendy was even younger than I and nothing if not charismatic. What’s more, his Yiddish was perfect. As part of our program we had scheduled a guided tour of the San Diego Zoo, and we enlisted Mendy to offer a simultaneous Yiddish translation. Of course all languages reflect the concerns of those who speak them, and Yiddish is therefore not exactly rife with biological terminology. So before we headed west, we asked Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter, a leading Yiddish linguist and a master of neologisms, to prepare a glossary for us. He accepted the challenge and outdid Adam himself in giving names to all the animals, beginning with aardvark (dos erd-khazerl) and boa constrictor (di boashlang) and continuing through hornbill (der shoyfer-shnobl), koala (dos zekl-berele), panda (der ketsisher ber), porcupine (der shtekhl-khazer), rattlesnake (di klapershlang), rhinoceros (der noz-horn), yak (der yak), and zebra (di zebre).

  Mendy took his place in the front of the bus, ready to render into mame loshn the running commentary of our two young, khaki-clad, English-speaking guides. Microphone in hand, he managed to keep up with them sentence for sentence, vilde khaye for vilde khaye (wild animal for wild animal), adding enough Yiddish commentary of his own to convulse our passengers with laughter, turn the head of more than one startled Jewish pedestrian, and make ours the loudest and most uproarious bus in the zoo. It wasn’t until we got to the snake house that the official guides, who’d been playfully trying to stump Mendy from the outset, were sure they finally had him. “Over there are the boa constrictors,” one guide explained. “We used to feed them live rats. But snakes don’t eat very often, and if they weren’t hungry, then instead of the snakes eating the rats, the rats would eat the snakes. That’s why we now feed them dead rats instead.” She then turned to Mendy and said with a wide smile, “Okay, translate that!”

  Mendy didn’t miss a beat. “Raboysay,” he said in his folksy Yiddish, “vos ken ikh aykh zogn? S’iz geven a gantser ‘Khad Gadyo’do! (Friends, what can I tell you? The feeding practices here were something right out of ‘Chad Gadyah!’)” a familiar Aramaic song about serial death cheerily if uncomprehendingly sung by Jews every year at the Passover seder. Sholem Aleichem himself could not have done better.

  In short, Mendy was a thoroughly modern young man who understood Yiddish culture from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, and I decided then and there to give him a new and even more challenging assignment: to open an office for us in Israel. The truth be told, the Israel office of the National Yiddish Book Center was never quite as grandiose as its name implied. It was located, in fact, in a Jerusalem basement that Mendy and his friends cleared out, painted, and fitted with homemade shelves. But they did collect books. Mendy traveled the country, speaking at Yiddish clubs and cultural centers, appearing on radio and television, even winning an official handshake and congratulations, in Yiddish, from the country’s president—no small feat when you consider how energetically most of the early Zionist pioneers had rejected their native Yiddish. Because Yiddish was no longer a threat (it was now being taught in most Israeli universities and even some high schools), Mendy’s efforts met with more enthusiasm than derision, and before long he was shipping thousands of volumes to Massachusetts.

  Unfortunately, they weren’t exactly the unique titles we were looking for, since most of Israel’s Yiddish readers had arrived straight from the liberated death camps and displaced persons camps of Europe, and they had no books to carry with them to their new home. Virtually all the books Mendy found were new imprints, published in Israel after the war, all of which we had seen before. Eventually we spun off our Israel office into an organization of its own, which Mendy dubbed Yung Yidish, Young Yiddish. The basement storeroom was transformed once again, this time into a Yiddish cabaret and coffeehouse. Mendy did much to make Yiddish fashionable among a certain cadre of young Israelis; but as for one-of-a-kind titles, it was apparent that the Jewish homeland was not the place to find them.

  OUR ZAMLERS HAVE shipped us priceless volumes from Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil. With the help of a professional translator named Jacqueline Tornell, we traveled to Mexico City and returned with several thousand volumes. But nowhere in Latin America did we find more—or more important—Yiddish books than in Argentina, where, despite (or perhaps because of) widespread anti-Semitism, Yiddish flourished among its estimated five hundred thousand Jews to a degree unknown in most other countries.

  As with Mendy Cahan in Israel, in Argentina, too, we had an indomitable ally. Mark Swiatlo was a Polish Jewish refugee who fled to Argentina after the war and lived there for many years before finally resettling in southern Florida. Well past the age when others were content to spend their days golfing in the sun, he set out single-handedly to build one of the world’s great Yiddish research collections at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. It didn’t matter that FAU then had relatively few Jewish students and no courses in Yiddish or modern Jewish studies. If he built it, they would come. With the backing of the library director, Dr. William Miller, Mark began traveling back and forth to Buenos Aires, calling on his many friends and contacts and returning each time with thousands of Yiddish books.

  By the time Mark and I met, in the late 1980s, the situation was out of control. Having opened the flood gates, Mark, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, could hardly be expected to close them, and soon enough FAU’s Yiddish collection had taken over an entire floor of the university’s five-story library. There were thousands upon thousands of duplicates, many of them valuable South American imprints, and there were also lacunae: titles published in Europe and North America that Mark had been unable to find south of the River Platte. So we decided it was time for a shidekh—to exchange his proliferating duplicates, which he didn’t need, for selected titles from our collection that he could find nowhere else.

  Appearances are often deceiving. At first glance Mark looked like someone’s zeyde, a little old Jewish man from the Old Country. But beneath his mild-mannered and disarmingly charming exterior, he was one of the smartest and toughest negotiators I have ever known. At first I thought we had won the better half of the bargain: For every Yiddish or Hebrew title he chose from our collection, he would send us three duplicates fro
m his, including rare imprints from Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. What we underestimated in our negotiations was Mark’s tenacity: For the next ten years he was constantly on the phone with our staff, haking a tshaynik (literally, banging on a tea kettle) to get them to drop everything and scour our warehouse for one or another title. But over the years we developed a strong mutual respect, and eventually he began sending us more titles than we expected: literature, memoirs, essays, and scholarship—an entire Yiddish universe from the far side of the world.

  Without a doubt, Mark’s greatest coup was the discovery of thousands of brand-new, long-lost copies of Dos Poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry): a 175-volume series published in Buenos Aires between 1946 and 1966. Conceived in response to the Holocaust, some of the series’ titles—such as Malka Ovshiani Tells Her Tale, one of the first Holocaust memoirs by a Jewish woman; or works by survivors such as Hillel Seidman, Jonas Turkow, Shlomo Frank, and Szmerke Kaczerginski— were among the most significant first-person accounts published in any language in the years immediately following the catastrophe. Other titles—memoirs, novels, poems, dramas, Hasidic portraits, and ethnographic and historical studies—chronicled not the Holocaust itself, not the process of destruction, but rather the rich, complex, multifaceted tapestry of Polish Jewish life that the Nazis sought to destroy. Many of these are now regarded as classics: Yehoshua Perle’s Yidn fun a gants yor (Everyday Jews); Menachem Kipnis’s One Hundred Folksongs; Chaim Grade’s Pleytim (Refugees) and Shayn fun farloshene shtern (The Glow of Extinguished Stars); Rokhl Korn’s Heym un heymlozikayt (Home and Homelessness); novels by Sholem Asch, Y. Y. Trunk, and Mordkhe Strigler; and Elie Wiesel’s Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Kept Silent), better known through its later incarnation as Night.