Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  When they first appeared, the successive titles of Polish Jewry were instant best-sellers, both in Argentina and abroad. Avrom Novershtern, who grew up in Argentina and is now professor of Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, recalls that “in hundreds of Jewish homes throughout Argentina one could immediately recognize the shelves of volumes standing back-to-back in their distinctive black bindings—a modern type of Zeykher Likhurbm (Holocaust Memorial).” The books proved so popular that, as early as 1950, a list printed in the front of each volume indicated that many of the titles were already oysfarkoyft, sold out. It wasn’t until Mark Swiatlo smoked them out in 1991 that the world learned of the existence of thousands of brand-new copies—including every one of the purportedly sold-out titles—that had been misplaced and forgotten in a Buenos Aires warehouse since the late 1940s!

  We raised the money for shipping, and in the spring of 1991 Mark packed the lost copies of the Polish Jewry series into big waxed cardboard boxes, tied them with manila rope, and shipped them by sea to Amherst by way of Boston. Forty-five years after the first titles appeared, we are finally able to distribute them to eager readers and libraries around the world.

  Over the years we’ve heard rumors of other Yiddish treasures in Argentina—in remote parts of the country, far from Buenos Aires, beyond even the long reach of Mark Swiatlo. The reports are credible. Beginning with an experimental Jewish agricultural colony in Tierra del Fuego—the last, windswept stop before Antarctica—Yiddish-speaking refugees from Eastern Europe eventually settled throughout Patagonia and across the pampas. There were Jewish gauchos and Jewish farmers who founded rural utopian communities. Here, as everywhere, they read Yiddish books, and when they died or when they or their children finally forsook those distant climes for the cities, as they inevitably did, they often left their books behind. Undoubtedly yet another adventure awaits—but first we had to finish saving other endangered books a good deal closer to home.

  IF EUROPEAN-BORN, Yiddish-speaking Jews were gradually fading from view in the United States, they were still surprisingly active just north of the border. Canada, a bilingual country, prided itself on being a “mosaic” rather than a melting pot, which meant the Jewish community felt no need to limit itself to religion alone, as it had in the States. Here my colleagues and I were mavericks; in Canada we coordinated our efforts through the Canadian Jewish Congress, the country’s most important national Jewish organization.

  Our liaison at the congress was Sara Rosenfeld, head of its National Committee on Yiddish. A teenage firebrand in pre–World War II Warsaw, Sara had fled to no-man’s land on the Soviet frontier, eluded the border guards, suffered in Siberia, escaped to Kazakhstan, and after the war, made her way to Canada by way of Sweden. When I arrived as a graduate student in Montreal in 1977, she immediately recruited me as a teacher at a local Jewish high school. In 1980, when I founded the National Yiddish Book Center, she became one of our first board members and most energetic volunteers. Unlike most zamlers, who organize a building, a neighborhood, or at best a small city, Sara mobilized a country. She signed up zamlers in Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, and Vancouver; she prevailed on the Jewish owner of a trucking company to transport collected books for free as far as Montreal; and she persuaded her employers at the Canadian Jewish Congress to allocate temporary storage space in their basement parking garage. Every six months, when the pile in the garage grew high enough, Sara would phone us in Massachusetts to schedule a pickup.

  Despite the obvious difficulties—snow, cold, language—our door-to-door collection trips in Montreal yielded a disproportionately large number of treasures. Many of the people we met were intellectuals who, having arrived after the war, kept abreast of the latest Yiddish literature. Along with copies of Sholem Aleichem, Morris Rosenfeld, Avrom Reisen, and other writers popular in the early decades of the century, they also donated works by more contemporary authors, such as Chaim Grade, Avrom Sutzkever, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. We were thrilled to meet the surviving spouses and children of some of the major figures of modern Yiddish literature, including the widow of Melekh Ravitch and the daughters of Rokhl Korn and I.M. Weissenberg. We even helped distribute the latest works by contemporary Canadian Yiddish writers, such as Yoysef Heilbloom and Yehudah Elberg.

  One day Sarah sent me to the home of a ninety-year-old widow who wanted to give us ten boxes of books that had belonged to her late husband. Born in London, England, the woman confided that she had always been somewhat contemptuous of her husband, a Yiddish-speaking refugee from Poland. Still, when he died, she felt she owed it to him to see that his books were cared for. “I’m curious,” she said in her proper British accent as we carried his library out to a waiting truck; “I’ve always assumed my husband was an unsophisticated man. Just what was it he was reading all these years?”

  I opened one of the boxes, expecting the usual authors. Instead what I found were dozens of hand-bound volumes, each of which contained ten to twenty pamphlets published in London and Geneva in 1905 by the Press Abroad of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland. Most of the pamphlets were printed on tissue paper in crowded six-point type, and it took me a moment before I realized what I was looking at: compact political tracts designed to be smuggled into Russia to fan the flames of the 1905 Revolution. How her husband had come into possession of these treasures his widow couldn’t say, but even she was impressed. Many of the pamphlets proved to be the only surviving copies, and they are now in the permanent collections of the YIVO and the Library of Congress.

  In all the years I knew Sara Rosenfeld, I don’t think I ever saw her sitting still. She was the only person I ever met who could speak on the phone, dictate English letters to her secretary, type Yiddish letters herself, read mail, and greet visitors, all at the same time. When she was seriously injured in a car accident in Florida several years ago, the doctor ordered her to stay in bed for three months; she was back at work in three weeks. Her disregard for her own health was evident in her eating habits. Being a bit self-righteous about my own commitment to organic food, I once chided her about a jar of instant chicken soup mix on her desk, the first four ingredients of which were sugar, starch, salt, and MSG. “Akh,” she replied, “who has time to cook when there’s so much work to be done?”

  In 1982, at Sara’s invitation, three thousand delegates from two dozen countries descended on Montreal for the Veltrat, the World Council on Yiddish and Yiddish Culture. This was the Yiddish equivalent of the Olympics, and the logistics were enough to flummox a general—but not Sara. She reserved the biggest hall at the biggest shul in town for the opening session, and persuaded Elie Wiesel to deliver the keynote address—in Yiddish, no less. Sara was not one to look for koved, for recognition, or to stand on ceremony. The next day, when the Veltrat reconvened at the congress’s headquarters and the speakers, as usual, pounded the podium and bellowed, “Vu iz undzer yugnt?” we, the elusive yugnt, were in the basement with Sara, on our hands and knees, sorting her latest haul of Yiddish books.

  As the years passed, the Canadian Jewish Congress began to drift closer to the model of the American Jewish establishment, eschewing culture in favor of a narrower agenda—and trying to cut Sara’s budget in the process. She fought back every step of the way. I was once in her office when she was approached by a particularly pompous executive in a three-piece suit.

  “Sara, Sara,” he said condescendingly, “why do you spend so much time worrying about a dying language?”

  “Nu, and you’re not going to die someday?” she shot back. “I don’t see how that stops you from worrying about yourself!”

  If the Jewish establishment failed to appreciate Sara’s contribution, the government of Canada did not. In Ottawa she was hailed as a national hero for her role in preserving the country’s multicultural heritage. In the summer of 2002, barely eighteen months before her death, she was appointed to the Order of Canada—making her the closest thing to a Yiddish knight the worl
d has ever seen.

  For all Sara’s efforts, there was one problem she could not solve: helping us transport the books we collected in Canada across the U.S. border. Historically speaking, Jews have had little use for national boundaries. Countless Jewish refugees made their way to the United States and Canada by hiring smugglers to lead them across the frontiers of Europe. Their historical disregard for borders was not their fault. There were, after all, Jewish families on both sides of the frontiers— prompting a World War I cartoon of Russian and Austrian soldiers in opposing trenches: “Reb Yid,” shouts one soldier to another, “how about joining us in our trench—we need a tenth man for the minyan!” Even when Jews stayed put, the borders themselves kept changing. Between the two world wars there were Jews who never left their shtetlekh yet found themselves living in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, all in quick succession. Not surprisingly, then, the most common way of saying “crossing the border” in Yiddish is “ganvenen dem grenets,” which translates literally as “stealing the border.”

  Of course, most law-abiding people do not need to ganvenen dem grenets when crossing between the United States and Canada. The border is relatively open, and before September 11 at least, one could generally cross with little more than a driver’s license and a smile. But not us. After days of book pick-ups in Montreal, we would invariably arrive at the American border with our clothes grungy from attics and basements, our eyes bloodshot from days of insufficient sleep, our rented trucks the cheapest we could find, and our cargo a disordered heap of hundreds of torn and dusty cardboard boxes. In the early days, when we were still in our twenties, the customs agents mistook us for drug smugglers: They’d make us pull over, get out of the truck, and stand against the wall while their German shepherd sniffed around in the back of the truck, presumably in search of a stray joint stashed inside a volume of Sholem Aleichem. All the dogs ever got was a snoutful of dust.

  As we got older and began arriving in a more respectable truck of our own, the agents backed off on the drug searches. But now they had a new demand: They wanted to charge us duty on the books we were transporting. The first time it happened they made us pull up to a low cinderblock building and report to a gray-haired officer standing behind a gray metal counter.

  “Manifest?” he asked, perfunctorily, fitting a form onto his clipboard.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Manifest. Where’s the warehouse ticket for your load, the bill of lading?”

  “Well, sir, we don’t have a warehouse ticket. You see, we didn’t go to a warehouse, we collected these books door-to-door and loaded the truck ourselves.”

  This was apparently highly unorthodox, and it took a good fifteen minutes before we could make the customs man understand that the load came not from a warehouse but from the basement of the Canadian Jewish Congress building and dozens of individual homes.

  “Yiddish books, you say?”

  “Yes, sir, Yiddish books” I repeated.

  “Hmmm,” said the customs man, “we don’t see many Yiddish books coming through here. What’s the commercial value?”

  “There is no commercial value,” I replied. “You see, we’re a nonprofit organization; our job is to rescue old Yiddish books and—”

  “Look, son, don’t give me a lot of malarkey, you’ve got to have a value, any value, it doesn’t matter what it is, otherwise I can’t let you across.”

  In the end we settled on a token $100, which was low enough to exempt us from duty altogether. Before we left, the customs agent made it clear that next time he wouldn’t be so lenient—either we came with a proper manifest and a confirmed valuation or else our cargo stayed in Canada.

  Next time came sooner than we thought. While still in Montreal I had recorded a national radio interview with one of Sara’s many friends at the CBC. Now, just two months later, Sara was back on the phone: The broadcast had done its job, and boxes of Yiddish books were pouring in from Halifax to Vancouver.

  This time I took no chances. I phoned our congressman, Sylvio Conte, and asked for advice about crossing the border with used Yiddish books. Conte’s office checked with the customs service in Washington and got back to us the same day. Under customs law, all books are exempt from duty. Nonetheless, there was no way to avoid the complicated process of manifests and bonded brokers unless we could show that the books we were carrying were “American Goods Returning”—items manufactured in the United States that, by law, could be brought back into the country without duty or undue delay.

  That seemed fair enough. After all, about two-thirds of all Yiddish books were published in New York City. The only problem was the remaining third, most of which were printed in Warsaw, Vilna, and the other great Jewish cultural centers of eastern Europe. Meyle, no matter. They were all in Yiddish anyway—written in a Hebrew alphabet—and the next time I arrived at the border I proceeded with confidence.

  “No sweat,” I told the customs man as he hoisted himself onto the running board and peered into the cab, one hand resting on the .45 on his hip. “Just a load of American books, sir, printed in the USA, bringing them all back home.”

  The customs man was not impressed.

  “Okay, buddy, pull it over.”

  I pulled up to the same cinderblock customs shed, and this time another, younger agent came out to meet me.

  “You say all these books were printed in the United States?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to perform a spot check to confirm that.”

  He opened the back of the truck, rummaged through the boxes, and pulled out three books at random. The first two were safe; both were published in New York and had English copyright information on the verso of the title page. The third volume had no such English information. Peering over the customs man’s shoulder I saw to my horror that it was published by Farlag Emes, the Yiddish state publisher in Moscow.

  “All right, where’s it say here this book was published in the United States?” the officer demanded, carefully scrutinizing the volume. He was holding it upside down.

  I took the book, turned it right-side up, and opened to the title page, where it said in kidish-levone-oysyes, big Hebrew letters: Aroysgegebn in Moskve, meaning “Published in Moscow.”

  I swallowed hard, pointed to the Yiddish letters, and affecting my best Borscht Belt accent, pretended to read the Yiddish word for word: “Look, it says right here: ‘Pooblished in Nyu Yoorrk.’”

  The customs man sagely nodded his head. “All right,” he said, “in that case, you can take ‘em across.”

  The strategy worked, and we’ve been ganvenen dem grenets ever since.

  IT TOOK TWENTY years to arrange a collection trip to Cuba— and a twenty-minute flight from Miami to actually get there. Of the fifteen thousand Jews who lived on the island before the revolution, all but a handful had left. As in Zimbabwe, they departed so quickly that many left their Yiddish books behind. We first tried to retrieve them in 1985, but between the U.S. embargo and Cuban intransigence, we made little headway. The situation looked more promising in 1999, when Bob Schwartz, a political activist who regularly delivered medical supplies to the island, led a celebrity delegation that included Ed Asner and Mohammed Ali. Cut off from American television, few Cubans recognized the actor; but no one failed to cheer Ali. One government minister was so grateful for the boxer’s appearance that he asked Bob what he could do in return. “Let us have the Yiddish books,” Bob replied. The minister agreed on the spot, and I was already packing my bags when the head of Cuba’s Jewish community, a retired oral surgeon, intervened at the last minute and said no. True, the books had lain untouched and unread for decades; but for the Jewish leader, it was a matter of pride: “As long as a communist Jew remains in Cuba,” he decreed, “the books will, too.”

  So again we bided our time until, in the winter of 2002, I received a phone call from Stephen Rivers, a publicist who had just returned from Cuba with California’s congressional delegation. “S
ince September 11,” Stephen explained, “Castro has been bending over backward to accommodate Americans and distance himself from terrorism. If you still want the books, now’s the time.”

  Although the embargo was still in place, pressure was clearly easing, and thanks to a special exemption for scholars, it took just two weeks to obtain permission from the U.S. government to travel there. Three days later I flew to Miami with Gabriel Hamilton, the twenty-seven-year-old director of our Steven Spielberg Digital Library. We proceeded to the airport’s lower level, past the last baggage carousel, around a No Admittance sign, under a rope, and down a corridor, until—like Harry Potter arriving at Platform 93/4 —we found the unmarked gate for the charter flight to Havana.

  An American diplomat wrote of Cuba in 1888: “You are only ninety miles from the winking lighthouses and sandy shore of Florida, but you have entered dominions as foreign, as different, as full of strangeness, as though you had sailed around the world to find them.” His observation was doubly true now. Isolated from the States for forty-three years, Cuba was bursting with contradictions: green cane fields, white sand beaches, good-natured people, and lovingly maintained vintage American cars (where else can you hail a Desoto taxi?), alongside crumbling, overcrowded houses, renovated Mafia-built hotels (for foreigners only), pulsing music, ubiquitous sensuality, and rationed food. In the words of one guidebook, “Sex, music and dancing are Cubans’ greatest pleasures, since none is rationed and all are free.”

  Our mission in the country seemed straightforward enough: Track down the surviving Yiddish books, identify important titles, and secure permission from the head of the Jewish community to bring them back and digitize them. But no sooner had we landed than we realized the job would be anything but straightforward. Despite the six e-mails and twenty-three faxes we sent to the Cuban Jewish community before we left, there was no one at the airport to meet us and no message waiting for us at our hotel in downtown Havana. Gabe and I were on our own until the next morning, when we went looking for La Gran Synagoga, the Ashkenazic shul that serves as headquarters and library for Cuba’s roughly five hundred remaining Jewish families.