Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  The murder of writers, the burning of books—after decades of such depredations, only scattered pockets of Yiddish culture remained in Russia proper. But the situation was very different in areas that had come under Soviet rule during and after the Second World War: the western Ukraine, Moldavia, and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. There, despite the best efforts of Germans and Soviets both, there were still people alive who had been trained as Jewish teachers before the war, who still spoke Yiddish fluently and remembered its literature clearly, and who were now eager to teach what they knew to a new generation. We headed for the Baltics.

  In Estonia we met Moyshe Michelson, who for twenty years taught Yiddish illegally in the university town of Tartu. Now that his classes were permitted, more than two hundred students had enrolled, and he desperately needed books.

  In Riga, the capital of Latvia, eighty-two-year-old Avrom Barmazl, a professor in that city’s Yiddish Teachers Seminary before the war, had called together all his surviving students. Prohibited for almost half a century from practicing their chosen profession, many had gone on to excel in other fields: one was an engineer, one an actor, one an editor, one the principal of a Russian school. But even after all these years, the moment they had the chance they gave up secure positions elsewhere to return to their old profession as teachers in a new Jewish school. Opened just ten weeks before we arrived, the school they founded already had four hundred students. With the exception of a homemade, handwritten Yiddish primer and exactly one copy of an anthology of Yiddish folk songs printed in New York, there were no Yiddish books.

  In Vilna (now Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania, members of the local community had just reopened the first Jewish school in fifty years. The day we arrived parents and other volunteers were busy removing Soviet propaganda posters from the walls and replacing them with flowered wallpaper and Jewish art. Here, too, we found experienced teachers, eager students, and no books.

  At these and other newly opened schools and libraries, Kenny and I promised to return soon with all the Yiddish books they needed. Each time we made this pronouncement some in the audience would clap, some would cry, but most remained coolly skeptical. When, in Riga, I asked why, a teacher showed me a guest book in which were written the names of a hundred or more representatives of Jewish organizations in the United States, Canada, and Israel who had visited the school in the ten weeks since it opened. “You should excuse me, but you are not our first visitors,” the teacher explained. “They all make promises, but we have yet to receive a single Jewish book.”

  I knew that with an intrepid staff and more than a million books in our warehouse, we had a far better chance than most of making good on our promise, and I vowed to return by spring. But I also harbored no illusions: Important as it was to support these schools, I didn’t believe for a second that many young Jews would remain here once the doors of emigration were opened and they had a chance to leave. The threat of renewed anti-Semitism was never far from anyone’s mind. Already, in Moldavia, a local nationalist movement was organizing with the slogan “We will drown the Russians in the blood of the Jews.” But as Boris Kelman, the forty-two-year-old head of the Jewish community in Leningrad explained, “Even if all the Soviet Union’s one-and-a-half million Jews decide to emigrate, and even if one hundred thousand a year—a figure we’ve yet to attain—can be resettled abroad, full emigration will take at least fifteen years to complete. In the meantime, we must do something for those who remain.”

  How exactly we were going to get thousands of Yiddish books into the country and distribute them from city to city, we weren’t quite sure. But any doubts we may have had that it could be done were quickly allayed once we returned to Moscow and boarded our SAS flight for home. The moment we were airborne the pilot came on the intercome to announce that, while we were in the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall had fallen. If that was true, Kenny and I agreed, all things were possible.

  The plan we hatched was this: We would ship eight thousand books to Sweden, load them on a truck, cross the Baltic by ferry, and deliver them in person to waiting Jews in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But then, in March, just weeks before our scheduled departure, Lithuania formally declared its independence, and all hell broke loose. By late March, Soviet troops were massed at the Lithuanian border and tanks were rolling through the streets of Vilnius. It was definitely not an auspicious moment to be arriving with a truckload of Yiddish books.

  That’s when we set to work on Plan B. Among the various groups seeking Yiddish books was the National Library of Estonia, which was authorized to import Estonian books from abroad. They agreed to serve as a go-between for our Yiddish shipments as well. In late spring we sent an urgent appeal to our members, who responded with unprecedented generosity. In May and June we pulled books from the shelves, affixed commemorative Yiddish-and-Russian book plates, and carefully packed the books into coded boxes, each labeled on the outside “Estonian Books.” We then delivered them to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, where they were loaded into a watertight container and hoisted aboard a freighter bound for Helsinki, whence they would be transported by a Finnish trucking company to Estonia.

  It was not until July 12 that we finally received a telex from Tallinn informing us that the books had arrived. Two days later, at five in the morning, I was standing in Stockholm-Arlanda International Airport, waiting to rendezvous with Kenny Turan and Janice Rubin, an old friend and freelance photojournalist from Houston, Texas. The two would be covering the trip for Smithsonian magazine. It was almost fifty years to the day since the Soviet occupation of the Baltics, forty-nine years since the Nazi invasion, and eighteen months since we had received the first letters from Soviet Jews requesting Yiddish books.

  Thanks to advance work by leaders of the Stockholm Jewish community, we had no difficulty renting a van and booking passage on the Nord Estonia, a trans-Baltic car-passenger ferry that had begun regular service to Tallinn just six weeks before. The sea voyage lasted sixteen hours. After a good night’s sleep we awoke in time to see a weatherbeaten pilot boat with a faded hammer and sickle on its stack plowing through the waves to meet us. An hour later, standing on the windy deck of the Nord Estonia, we caught our first glimpse of the medieval spires of Tallinn rising in the distance.

  Due to mechanical problems, once we had docked it took more than an hour to open the main door to the car deck. (The successor to the Nord Estonia had similar problems: Not long after our voyage, the ferry’s door accidentally opened in stormy seas. The ship sank with all nine hundred people aboard.) Customs was harrowing. Armed soldiers in blue coveralls swarmed over each car in turn, pulling up carpets and removing door panels in an energetic search for contraband—though what it was they were looking for was not entirely clear. Although we had sent most of our books ahead, we were carrying one large box of late arrivals: newly commissioned reprints of Dubnow’s Idishe geshikhte far shul un heym (Jewish History for School and Home), a Jewish history text for children, originally published in Riga in 1937.

  “What is in box?” asked the chief customs officer.

  I swallowed hard and answered as matter-of-factly as I could, “Jewish books.”

  “Religious books?” he asked.

  I thought for a second. The books were, of course, social history, written by a secular historian. But guessing that the Soviets might be eager to demonstrate their newfound embrace of religious tolerance, I decided to respond in the affirmative. It was the right answer. The officer turned to his men and said something in Russian, which sent them to the next car in line. After they were gone he turned back to us and asked, “So tell me, are they in Yiddish or Ivrit?”

  His use of the word “Ivrit,” the modern Hebrew word for “Hebrew,” was clearly intentional. Surprised, I looked up at him, and under his official visor I suddenly recognized an unmistakable yidishe ponim, a Jewish face. Our eyes met and his stern expression softened into a warm smile. We smiled back, he nodded, closed the back of the van,
stamped our papers, kissed each of us on both cheeks, and signaled to a soldier to open the gate. We restarted the engine and, with a friendly wave, made our triumphant entry into the USSR.

  Waiting for us on the other side of customs was Moyshe Michelson, the indomitable seventy-year-old Yiddish teacher from Tartu. He hopped into the truck, directed us to the hotel, stopped traffic so we could back into a parking space, and then showed us how to remove the van’s windshield wipers (a necessity in the Soviet Union, where rubber was in short supply and windshield wipers a favorite target of thieves). He stayed with us illegally that night in our hotel (a pack of Marlboro cigarettes—brought for just such an occasion—was enough to persuade the floor monitor to look the other way). I gave Mr. Michelson a new Yiddish Book Center T-shirt to sleep in, but he declined to put it on. “Aza min hemdl trogt men nor af yontef! (A shirt like this one should wear only on holidays!)” he explained.

  The return of Yiddish books to Tartu was one of the greatest moments in Mr. Michelson’s life, he said, and he had persuaded the Tartu Public Library to designate a special room just for them. He had already transported many of the boxes himself, traveling back and forth to Tallinn by train. He was a strong man, a veteran of World War II with shrapnel still lodged in his leg; but as he showed us the familiar books, which had been sitting in our Holyoke warehouse just a few months before, tears began flowing down his cheeks. “When you count the books you’ll find that several volumes are missing,” he hastened to explain. “My friends and I have already checked them out—we couldn’t wait to read them.”

  IN MIDSUMMER THE sun in the Baltics rises at four o’clock and doesn’t set until just before midnight; our own working day was almost as long. After a brief night’s stay in Tallinn we got up at dawn, reloaded the van, met our volunteer guide, a Jewish university student named Lena Beckergoun, and shoved off for Riga, three hundred kilometers to the south. The day was beautiful, and we sang and talked as we rolled past fields of beets and rye. At lunchtime we stopped in Pärnu, an old Jewish resort town, where we ate rich, creamy ice cream and drank kvass, a fermented grain drink dispensed from a tank-trailer and served in dirty glasses by a twelve-year-old street vendor. The scene could have been straight from Sholem Aleichem’s Motl the Cantor’s Son, the story of an exuberant orphan boy who, among other misadventures, peddles diluted kvass on the streets of his shtetl—except there were so few Jews around. “Most have left for Israel already,” Lena explained.

  I’m not sure anyone in Riga really believed us when we announced in December that we’d be back with enough Yiddish books for all the students in the school, but here we were, barely seven months later, pulling into the courtyard with a truckload of three thousand school texts and a complete five-hundred-volume reference collection for the school library. The first job was to get the boxes out of the truck and into the third-floor auditorium, where the books could be unpacked, sorted, and shelved. Luckily we had plenty of volunteers. Although most of the students were away for the summer (some were at Jewish camps in the countryside, others in Israel), some thirty young people, most of them members of a Jewish chorus, showed up to help. The excitement was palpable. In a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, with frequent translation into Russian by the teachers, we organized the students into a bucket brigade that wended its way up three circular flights of stairs. It took less than half an hour to unload the truck, and then the real excitement began. Wielding knives and scissors, some students began cutting open the boxes, while others pulled out the books and stacked them by title on long tables set up all around the room. Professor Barmazl and the other teachers were beside themselves, examining every volume. “Even in the best of times we didn’t have such books here,” Professor Barmazl told us. Sema Gassel, a teacher who had studied under Professor Barmazl fifty years before, came over and kissed my cheeks. “My eyes want to cry in happiness,” she said. “Perhaps you don’t understand, we are hungry in our hearts for this. Seeing all this reminds us of our childhood, our Jewish teachers, our Jewish homes.”

  The young students, of course, had no such memories—most had never seen Yiddish books before—but they were no less enthusiastic. They crowded around as I went from pile to pile, introducing each title in turn. Many of the books came from the former Sholem Aleichem Schools, the only politically independent Yiddish schools in America; we had retrieved them, in brand new condition, from the basement of a Queens apartment building several years before. There were also new Yiddish primers and song books donated by the Workmen’s Circle, and dictionaries and reference works donated by the YIVO. But the books that made the biggest impression were the reprints we had carried with us across the border: Dubnow’s Jewish History for School and Home, originally published right there in Riga. The author, Simon Dubnow, was murdered in the city in 1941, and as far as anyone knew, no copies of his book had been seen there since. For the teachers the title’s return to Riga was a vindication; for the students it was history come alive.

  By now we were all happily conversing in a mélange of languages. I told the students about Yiddish literature and the history of Jews in their own city, and they reciprocated with an impromptu concert of Yiddish and Hebrew songs. When our work was finally done, the students celebrated by taking handfuls of Styrofoam packing bubbles, an American novelty that they had never seen before, and throwing them into the air as confetti. They made a big mess, but even the teachers agreed it was worth it.

  OUR LAST STOP was supposed to be Vilna. Although tensions had eased somewhat since the declaration of independence in March, gasoline was still embargoed and entry by foreigners forbidden. Our applications for special visas, submitted to the Soviet Embassy in Washington before we left, had been rejected, and now here we were, stuck in Riga with twelve hundred Yiddish books bound for new Jewish schools in Vilna and Kovno (Kaunas) and no way to enter Lithuania to deliver them.

  Our contact in Lithuania, Emanuel Zingeris, was, at thirty-two, the chairman of the Jewish Cultural Association, a member of the newly formed Lithuanian parliament, and the head of the nascent government’s Foreign Affairs Committee. “Zay ruik, zay ruik, Lahnsky (Calm down, calm down, Lansky),” he repeatedly admonished me during 2 A.M. phone calls in advance of our trip, “Alts iz in ordnung (Everything is under control).” Sure enough, just hours before we were scheduled to leave Riga for Vilna, his personal courier showed up with an official letter of passage written on the letterhead of the as yet unrecognized Lithuanian Parliament, and signed and sealed by none other than Zingeris himself. I placed a hasty call to Vilna.

  “ Fraynt Zingeris,” I began, “what are we supposed to do with this letter?”

  “Zay ruik, Lahnsky,” he replied. “Just show it to any Lithuanian policeman who stops you. They will respect the authority of the Lithuanian Parliament.”

  “And what if the policeman is not Lithuanian? What if we get stopped by the Red Army or the KGB?”

  To this Zingeris had no answer. Fortunately Kenny Turan, who as a reporter was more experienced in such matters than I, insisted we check with the U.S. Consulate in Leningrad before trusting ourselves to Zingeris’s safe conduct. By the time Kenny got off the phone he was shaking his head.

  “What did they say, what did they say?” I asked.

  “They said that Zingeris’s letter is a one-way ticket to the gulag,” he replied.

  Salvation comes from unexpected quarters. Our phone calls and subsequent conversation took place in the office of the head of the Riga Jewish community, an elderly woman named Esther Rapina. We had assumed she couldn’t understand us, but after Kenny spoke she stepped forward and said in perfect English, “I think perhaps I could be of assistance.” She explained that there were sometimes ethnic Latvians working in the local office of the Soviet Interior Ministry. “They hate the Russians so much they might be willing to help.”

  With that Mrs. Rapina picked up her cane and led us to an impressive government building, past a prominent sign that said Closed (“Blote!
Mud!” she opined as she pushed her way inside), and proceeded straight to the office of a high Latvian official she thought might be sympathetic to our plight. She guessed right. “I do not have the authority to give you a visa to Vilna,” the official explained, “but I can issue a visa to Minsk in Belarus, which will grant you a one-day transit through Lithuania. As long as you can deliver your books and be out in twenty-four hours, you will not be arrested.”

  We phoned Zingeris to make the final arrangements. He promised to have forty liters of bootleg gasoline waiting for us, so that “ir vet nisht darfn blaybn in Vilne af eybik (you won’t have to remain in Vilna for eternity).” He also agreed to dispatch two shtarkers, tough Jewish bodyguards, on the overnight train to Riga, who would meet up with us first thing in the morning and return with us by truck.

  We left on schedule, the shtarkers asleep in the back of the van. Shortly after noon, ready for lunch, we pulled off the road into a small Lithuanian city called Ukmerge, seventy kilometers north of Vilna. Our shtarkers were awake by now, and the larger of the two, Sasha, who spoke halting English (but no Yiddish), explained that before the war Ukmerge was a shtetl called Vilkomir, which was home to more than seven thousand Jews. The birthplace of M. L. Lilienblum, an important nineteenth-century Hebrew writer, the town once boasted a well-known yeshiva, secular Hebrew and Yiddish high schools, a Jewish trade school, numerous synagogues, study houses, and a full complement of Jewish social and religious institutions. The rabbi, who was born in Palestine, was considered one of the leading Jewish scholars in Lithuania. Driving down the main street, it was possible even now to imagine that nothing had changed: tin-roofed houses, goats tethered in the yards, chickens underfoot, women washing their laundry by the river, and horse-drawn wagons passing us on the street. Yet as much as we wanted to think otherwise, Ukmerge was not the town that time forgot: Though the streets were full of people, no matter how hard we looked there was not a single Jewish face to be seen.