Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  It’s funny. In America people sometimes think I’m Irish; in Eastern Europe they could tell from a hundred yards away that Kenny, Janice, and I were Jews, and as a result no one in Ukmerge wanted to talk to us. They were afraid, Sasha explained, that we were descendants of the town’s earlier inhabitants, come to reclaim the empty homes their neighbors had expropriated after the war.

  And where were the Jews of Vilkomir? Dead, dead, every man, woman, and child, rounded up and shot by German soldiers on a single summer day in 1941. The only remnant of Jewish life we could find was the old cemetery, an empty field on the outskirts of town, overgrown with weeds, with a children’s playground at the far end. Strange, but there was only one metseyve, one tombstone, marking the graves of the tens of thousands of Jews who must have lain buried there. It bothered us, and we asked about the missing grave markers later that afternoon, when we arrived in Vilna.

  “Until last month there were no metseyves at all in Vilkomir,” our host told us. “The one you saw, we put it there as a memorial.”

  “And what happened to the rest?”

  “Kumt mit mir (come with me),” said our host, and he drove us to the base of a monumental stone staircase leading to an imposing Soviet building called the Palace of Trade Unions. Looking closely at the stairs, we could just discern carved Hebrew letters. The entire staircase—like retaining walls, streets, and other staircases throughout the Soviet Union—had been made of Jewish metseyves. Not enough that the Nazis murdered the Jews of Europe; after the war, the Soviets were determined to eradicate the memory that they had ever lived.

  But that was later in the day, in Vilna. We were still in Ukmerge, in Vilkomir, and next to that lone metseyve, the Jews of Vilna had placed a boulder on which they carved a Jewish star and below that a simple inscription in Lithuanian and Yiddish: “The Old Jewish Cemetery: Hallowed Is the Memory of Those Who Died.” I tried to read the Yiddish out loud, but my voice choked with tears before I could finish. Kenny put down his notebook, Janice her camera, and for the only time during all our travels, the three of us stood there and wept. We wept, of course, for the forgotten dead—Jews no different than ourselves except that our grandparents had had the prescience or the mazl, the blind luck, to leave when they did, and theirs did not. But even more, I think, we wept out of futility, for the lost illusion that the Yiddish books in our little van, parked at the curb, could somehow make amends for Vilkomir and a thousand other cities and shtetlekh like it, where, like memory itself, even the metseyves are no more.

  Humbled, we delivered our books in Vilna. Zingeris did not have the gasoline he promised, and, at two A.M., with no other choice, we turned to the head of the Vilna underworld for help. Not much older than I, he spoke fluent Yiddish, and eight hours later, just as he said he would, he showed up in the parking lot of our hotel with three jerry cans of purloined fuel. When I asked, not without some trepidation, how much we owed him, he waved his hand with all the noblesse oblige of Isaac Babel’s Benya Krik. “Gornisht, nothing,” he said. “Consider it my small contribution to the cause.”

  Two days and eleven hundred kilometers later we were back in Tallinn, where we reboarded the Nord Estonia for the start of our long journey home. The ship’s whistle sounded, and the tugboats, puffing great black clouds of smoke, pushed us into open water. I stood on deck for a long time, reflecting on all we had seen and done. Hundreds of eager Jewish students now had Yiddish books, and I’ll never forget the wonder and delight with which they received them. Still, it was only a matter of time before most of those students left for Israel or the States, where for better or worse they would have new languages to learn and new books to read. As long as Yiddish books were needed in the Soviet Union, we would continue to send them (with Communism gone, we now do so via UPS). But that night, standing alone at the taffrail as the Old Country dropped astern, it was as achingly clear to me as it had been to my grandparents eighty years before that the future waited across the sea.

  PART FIVE

  Bringing It All Back Home

  24. Der Oylem Redt —The World Takes Notice

  It was a ramshackle life I was living: half my time on the road and the rest at the Center, working fourteen hours a day, eating leftover rice and beans, sleeping on a cold futon, and waking early each morning to start again. True, there was Shabbos off, friends, and sometimes girlfriends, but working for peanuts, I was too broke even to think of settling down.

  Then late one day in 1989, while fund-raising in New York, I stopped at a pay phone to check in with my office and learned that Adele Simmons, the outgoing president of Hampshire College, soon to be installed as the new president of the MacArthur Foundation, wanted to see me in Amherst first thing the next morning. “She says she wants to introduce you to a big donor,” my assistant, Maria Magliochetti, explained.

  So at the end of the day I raced back to New England, arrived home at midnight, slept as long as I dared, skipped breakfast, and had time to iron just the two front panels of my Oxford shirt; I’d be okay as long as I kept my jacket on. I then sped up the highway in my sorry Civic wagon, grabbed a handful of brochures from a stash in back, and, right on time, rang the doorbell of President Simmons’s gracious country home.

  “Do come in,” she said, leading me to the living room. “I’m so glad you could make it on such short notice. The person I’d like you to meet will be with us shortly. But first there’s another matter I’d like to discuss. The board of the MacArthur Foundation met yesterday, and they’ve asked me to inform you that you have been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.”

  My jaw dropped. The MacArthur—commonly known as a “genius grant”—is awarded to fewer than thirty people a year, President Simmons explained. You can’t apply for it. The nominators are anonymous. And although the amount of the grant is (or at least was) determined by age—and I would be one of the youngest recipients— I would still receive almost $250,000, payable over the next five years.

  My head was spinning. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then a dozen of my closest friends and colleagues, summoned under the strictest secrecy by our former board chair, Penina Glazer, came streaming in from a side room, along with a public relations officer from Hampshire College, who stood there, pen at the ready, to record my reaction. I’m afraid I disappointed her: My mouth remained open, but not a single sound came out.

  Oh, what a difference that grant made! It bestowed much needed credibility on the nascent Yiddish Book Center—and on Yiddish itself. It opened closed doors. It paid off a mountain of personal debt accumulated during the nine years I had worked for next to nothing. And, slowly, it made settling down seem not quite so inconceivable after all.

  I think it was two months later that my former teacher, Leonard Glick, handed me a small sheet of paper with a handwritten name and phone number. “I met this young woman at a book group at her parents’ house,” he explained. “I think you know them: Arnold and Anita Sharpe, lovely people. Their daughter Gail was home for the weekend. She’s pretty, she’s fun, she’s single, she’s Jewish, what more do you need? So I asked her parents if I could give you her number, and they said it would be okay.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She?” Len stammered, “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure. ‘Yes,’ I think she said ‘yes.’ And I almost forgot—she’s about to move to California, so you’d better call her right away.”

  The match hardly seemed auspicious. I crumpled the paper and stuck it in the pocket of my jeans. Eventually it ended up in a basket on top of my bureau, and I didn’t give it a second thought until six weeks later when, on a bleak November night, I returned from a long trip to a stone-cold house where the wood stove was out, not a single light was burning, and the few edible items in the fridge were covered with mold. “This is no life,” I remember thinking as I dragged my suitcase upstairs and wriggled out of my traveling clothes. And there it was, on top of my bureau, that crumpled piece of paper with Gail Sharpe’s phone numb
er. So I called her in Boston and explained who I was (she had completely forgotten about Len’s intervention). She was different from other women I had gone out with: not political, but forthright and funny, and after twenty minutes of conversation we agreed to get together in Boston on Saturday night. The day arrived cold and rainy. She met me at the door of her apartment with permed hair, red fingernails, and a short skirt. I was momentarily encouraged by a framed Diego Rivera print on the wall behind her, until I learned that it belonged to her roommate. I, for my part, was admittedly no paragon of sartorial splendor: an army surplus parka (still sporting a hole from the battery acid spilled the day we saved the books from the Dumpster in New York), a well-worn Harris Tweed sport jacket sticking out below the parka, corduroy pants smooth in the knee, and a visored wool stocking hat (left over from the Korean War) that barely contained my untamed hair. Standing there, facing each other across the threshold, neither of us could keep from staring. “Oh my God,” we each thought, “I’m about to spend the evening with a date from another planet.”

  If Gail was put off by the hefkeyres, the chaos, of my car—books, papers, brochures, empty juice bottles, beach rocks and shells—she was too polite to say. She chose a funky Italian restaurant in the North End. Unpretentious—I liked that. She ate more than I did—I liked that, too. We sipped Chianti and talked and talked and talked, until halfway through the spumoni I was thinking, This woman is great! and then, So how come I never meet women like this in my world?

  We went back to her apartment and talked till two. For people from different planets, we seemed to have an awful lot in common. I floated the hundred miles back to Holyoke. The next morning I split a cord of firewood, then sat down and wrote Gail a letter, inviting her to join me for Thanksgiving weekend. She did, and we had a great time. Okay, we had a GREAT time. My mother once told me that the reason I should marry a Jewish girl was so she would get Jewish jokes. I told Gail a Jewish joke and she laughed and laughed, all the way from her sparkling blue eyes to her glossy red toes.

  But to what avail? I was leaving in two days for my first, month-long trip to the Soviet Union, and Gail was already packed, set to depart in ten days for Marina del Rey. Bashert iz bashert, the saying goes: what is meant to be is meant to be. The night before I left for Russia I phoned her and, on the basis of an Italian meal and a single weekend, asked her to postpone her move out West until I returned. She agreed. I wrote her a half dozen very long letters from Russia. On Christmas eve I returned. The airport was empty—except for Gail, who, to my delight, had come out to meet me. She later told me that she probably wouldn’t have recognized me were it not for the fur hat and balalaika. A friend had given her a key to my house, and when we got home there was a fire in the woodstove and a festive meal on the table. That was Christmas eve. We were engaged on New Year’s eve and got married three months later. Smart, spirited, resourceful, Gail was immediately swept up in the swirl of Yiddish books, and in that and so much more we’ve been partners ever since.

  IT WASN’T BY choice that the Yiddish Book Center became, in the words of Esquire magazine, “the most grassroots Jewish organization in America.” We were too young, and Yiddish was perceived as too marginal, to raise money any other way.

  I tried the conventional route first. Shortly after starting the Center I went to Brooks Brothers, bought a suit on credit, and took the train to Chicago to meet with a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce who had grown up in a Yiddish-speaking home. Maybe it was my vegetarian canvas boots or my bandana handkerchief that gave me away, or maybe it was his own ambivalence about his Yiddish past. Whatever the case, the first words out of his mouth were, “You dress like my son.” Apparently it was not a compliment, because I left empty-handed. In that and so many other encounters, I was reminded of the eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who characterized his native Yiddish as “a wild and barbarous tongue that contributes not a little to the impropriety of the common Jew.” For many Jewish philanthropists, Yiddish was worse than dead; it was a specter, an unwelcome reminder of the immigrant culture they had worked so hard to forget.

  Fortunately there were other donors who enjoyed Yiddish precisely because it did foster impropriety, because it stood outside both the Jewish and non-Jewish mainstream. Arnold Picker, for example, was the former head of United Artists and number one on Nixon’s “enemies list.” When I went to see him and his wife, Ruth, in Florida, they greeted me with open arms, invited me to dinner, assured me they never spoke anything but Yiddish with their friends in Hollywood (“Take Edward G. Robinson—oy, could he speak a good Jewish!”), regaled me with Yiddish jokes, and offered to help in any way they could.

  “Don’t you want to visit first so you can see the books for yourself?” I asked.

  “Why do I need to shlep to Massachusetts to see the books?” Arnold answered, “I can see them right here in your eyes!”

  There were other major donors in those early years: Joe Newman was a real estate developer in New York who loved to read Yiddish poetry. Harris Rosen was an ex-Marine who grew up on the Lower East Side and became one of the most successful hotel owners in Orlando, Florida. Working out of a modest office and driving an old Ford Taurus, he funded innovative educational programs for the poor and helped support student interns at the Book Center.

  These were people who “got” Yiddish, who understood in their bones what we were trying to do. Others took a bit more persuading. I once paid a cold call on a Florida businessman who promptly informed me that he wasn’t going to give me a penny. “This isn’t the time to save Jewish books,” he insisted. “Whatever money I have I send to Israel for guns and bombs. Let’s take care of survival first. Then we can worry about books.”

  I responded by telling him a story I’d read about a prominent physicist who testified before Congress in support of a new particle accelerator. A sympathetic senator asked about its defense application. “It has nothing to do directly with defending our country,” the scientist replied, “except to make it worth defending.”

  The donor was amused but unmoved. But I didn’t give up. When I returned home I sent him a note quoting a passage from a two-thousand-year-old Hebrew text called The Ethics of the Fathers: “‘Im eyn kemekh eyn toyre,’ the rabbis taught, ‘Where there is no bread there is no learning.’ But then they continued, ‘Im eyn toyre, eyn kemekh. Where there is no learning, there is no bread.’” His response came by return mail: “You win. I surrender. My check for $500 is enclosed.”

  The trouble was that large donations were few and far between, while our expenses—staff, truck, rent, heat, phones, computers— were growing fast: $50,000 in 1980, $500,000 in 1985, $1 million in 1990, $3 million today. I tried public speaking to drum up support, hitchhiking from city to city and speaking at every synagogue that would have me. I lectured in old urban shuls that looked like Moorish temples and new suburban ones that looked more like spaceships. In one synagogue the rabbi pushed a button on the bimah and the doors of the ark slid open with a soft whoosh, as surely as if we’d been standing on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. At another, in front of eight hundred people, the rabbi’s podium was so imposing I had to stand on the stool usually used by bar mitzvah boys just to see over the top. Once, during a lecture in Sarasota, Florida, the electricity went out; I kept on speaking while the congregants surrounded me with every menorah and candelabrum they could find, until I finally had to say, “Genug—enough, I’m starting to feel like Liberace up here.” In the course of twenty-four years I delivered well over a thousand lectures, sometimes (especially in Florida) speaking as many as four times in a single day. I became a popular speaker, I took standing ovations in stride, but only rarely did applause translate into significant financial support.

  “How about direct mail?” asked my coworker Sharon Kleinbaum. “You know, write a letter, mail it to all the Jews in the country, tell them what we’re doing. They won’t be able to send their checks fast enough!”

  Mayb
e, but how? In the early 1980s we were a small staff, still typing and stuffing our envelopes by hand. There was no way we could produce and mail hundreds of thousands of appeal letters on our own. A professional direct mail company offered to help, but they wanted $100,000 up front plus a hefty monthly retainer. That’s when we met Ken Coplon. Then in his mid-thirties and living in Santa Monica, California, Ken jokingly referred to himself as “the direct mailer of the fringe Left.” Smart, forceful, funny, honest, and utterly unpretentious, he had, at the time, no particular interest in Jewish culture or Yiddish books—but he did have two adopted children living in our area and he was looking for a local client so he could deduct the airfare when he came out to see them. In short, it was strictly a marriage of convenience.

  But it took. The first time we met, in 1983, Ken confirmed what the other company had told us: Returns on “prospect mail,” the mass appeals that most of us know as junk mail, are usually less than 1 percent, which is why it typically takes three years just to recoup costs. But Ken is a gambler by nature, and there was something about the Book Center that he found promising. “The mantra of direct mail is ‘Life-Death-Urgent,’” he explained. “You’ve got all three, except that instead of saving people you’re saving books. If you can make your case you’ve got a good chance of cracking one-and-a-half percent, and if you do that you’ll actually make money on the prospecting, which will give you a large membership that you can rely on for ongoing support. If you’re willing to take a chance, so am I.” Naturally we had no upfront money of our own, so Ken raided his kids’ college fund and put his own $30,000 on the line, then persuaded an elderly non-Jewish couple he knew to lend us another $5,000. Our old friend from Greenwich Village, Sonya Staff, always the visionary, gladly wrote a check for the rest.