by Aaron Lansky
Ken hired a professional writer living on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay, to write the initial appeal. I had assumed the letter would be signed by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was then the honorary chairman of our board. Instead, it began, “My name is Aaron Lansky. I’m 29 years old, and I urgently need your help.” When I protested, Ken quickly put me in my place. “Relax,” he said, “you’ve got a good story, so the writer decided to use you. It’s nothing personal—for him you’re just another can of soup.”
Flattering. Meanwhile Ken was busy tracking down lists: Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Publication Society and Moment magazine, along with lists of donors to liberal causes (back then, one could still assume that most Jews were liberals). Ken ran these against a “Jewish dictionary,” a computer program that identified Jewish-sounding names. Our first test consisted of 108,000 pieces, and I was alone in the office when the first returns arrived. I opened the envelopes and s’iz mir gevorn finster far di oygn (the world went dark). Instead of checks, they were stuffed with hate mail: anti-Semitic tracts and handwritten diatribes, festooned with swastikas and crosses. My hands shaking, I dialed Ken in California.
“Don’t worry,” he assured me, “sometimes the Jewish Dictionary has a hard time distinguishing between Jewish names and German ones. The anti-Semites have nothing else to do, so they’re always the first to respond. Give it another day or two, you’ll start seeing checks.”
He was right. By the second day the checks and the hate mail were running neck and neck. By the third day the checks were in the lead, and by the fourth the anti-Semites were through and the post office was delivering our mail in trays. By the time the first test was complete we had received almost two thousand contributions, more than doubling our existing membership. More important, we had reached an astonishing 1.8 percent return—thereby turning a profit on our prospecting, just as Ken had wagered. We identified the lists that had performed best and continued mailing. Those who responded stuck with us. Unlike most organizations, which hire professional letter writers to compose their routine “house” appeals, I insisted on writing subsequent letters myself, breaking every rule of direct mail fund-raising in the process. Who was it that said “Forgive me for writing such a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one”? Instead of short, punchy letters with loads of underlining, indentions, and bullets, mine generally ran four to six pages, single spaced. I spoke to our members as friends, letting them know what we were doing and why. In addition to an annual renewal letter there were frequent emergencies: to recover those eighty-five thousand folios of forgotten sheet music, to preserve the world’s last Yiddish Linotype, to hire interns, or to rescue the latest treasure trove of Yiddish books in the Soviet Union, Argentina, Mexico, or Cuba. Our members broke every record in the generosity of their response. Along with their contributions they’d send personal notes about their children or their health; Nansi Glick and I would try to answer every one personally.
It’s now twenty-one years since Ken and I met. He’s become one of my closest friends, and the Center’s membership has reached 35,000. Not long ago, in New Bedford, a friend approached my father at shul. “You know, Sid,” he said, “when most kids need money, they write home to their parents. When your kid needs money, he writes to everyone!”
STOPPING OFF IN Stockholm in the winter of 1989 to plan our return to the Soviet Union, we were surprised by how helpful everyone was—so much so that I commented on it to our liaison, an official of the Swedish Parliament. “Well, of course we’re helpful,” she said. “After all, haven’t we just read about you in this week’s issue of Time magazine?” That evening, at a Stockholm newsstand, Kenny Turan managed to track down a copy. On the cover was a photo of Tom Cruise, whom, with my imperfect grasp of popular culture, I failed to recognize. “Don’t worry,” said Kenny, “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know who you are either.”
For all that, there were, over the years, many press stories about our work. A young radio reporter named Doug Berman won the AP Broadcasters Award for his coverage of our fifth-anniversary celebration—before going on to greater fame as the producer of NPR’s Car Talk. But the only medium I could not seem to master was television. Maybe, since I didn’t own a TV myself, I didn’t understand its pacing. Maybe the medium and the message, TV and books, are intrinsically incompatible. Whatever the case, I just couldn’t figure out how to tell the Center’s story, explain its historical context, issue a call for Yiddish books, and appeal for financial support—all in twenty seconds or less. The best I learned to do was to be unresponsive. If a reporter asked me “How old is Yiddish?” I had two choices: I could say, “Yiddish is a thousand years old,” and cut, that would be my sound bite on the evening news; or I could ignore the question, point to the books behind me, and say, “As you can see, we here at the National Yiddish Book Center have already rescued one million endangered Yiddish books. Now we’re looking for help to save the rest.”
On average, an article about the Center in the New York Times would bring two hundred letters, an NPR piece three hundred. Television appearances brought none. But that didn’t mean TV viewers weren’t watching. Not long after the Center opened, a local television station came to cover our first big public event. We rented a coat rack for the occasion, and when I went to return it the next day, I realized I was already several hours late, and I was afraid they’d charge me for an extra day. Instead, when I dragged the coat rack through the door, I was immediately surrounded by the smiling owner and his crew. “I saw it!” the owner shouted. “Last night I’m lying in bed watching the news and all of a sudden I says to the Missus, ‘That’s our coat rack!’ Our coat rack is famous. Don’t worry, son, you don’t owe me an extra penny, it’s on the house.”
Which is the only way to explain why, when I was invited in 1991 to appear on a network television show with Leo Rosten, author of The Joys of Yiddish, I readily agreed.
“What’s the show?” my wife asked when I told her about it over dinner that evening.
“Nightwatch,” I informed her. “I think it’s a big deal.”
“Are you sure you don’t mean Nightline?”
The next day I phoned the network to find out.
Nightline, the producer sniffed, was a late-night news show on ABC. Nightwatch aired on CBS, from two to four in the morning.
“Who watches television at two o’clock in the morning?” I asked, incredulous.
“Who? Two million insomniacs, that’s who!” the producer replied.
Several days later I flew to Washington and, at the network’s expense, checked into a hotel room so luxurious it would have made an ambassador blush. The next morning I walked the short distance to the CBS studio, where I was taken directly to makeup. A young woman scoured my face with witch hazel and then labored over me for ten minutes with various goops and powders. “What would happen if I didn’t wear all this makeup?” I asked. “Then you’d look like Richard Nixon,” she replied.
The studio itself was less grand than I expected. On one wall was a composite of the Washington skyline: Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, Washington Monument. On another was a bookcase filled with a dozen random books. The floor was of painted plywood, covered by a small oriental rug. The guests sat on a couch; the NPR journalist John Hockenberry was the host. “How long have you been on television?” I asked him when we met. “Do you want that in hours or minutes?” he replied. It was his first week on the job.
And Leo Rosten? He was there, too, albeit in an incorporeal sort of way. Elderly, in imperfect health, he had decided not to travel to D. C. and was sitting instead in the CBS studio in New York. I could observe him on a large television monitor off camera to my right. “Just look at the TV when you speak to him,” the engineer instructed me; “we’ll mix in the feed from New York, and the audience will never know the difference.”
The audience will never know the difference. It seemed a fitting tag line for the exchange that followed. Rosten’s magnum
opus, The Joys of Yiddish, is a compendium of several hundred colorful Yiddish words and expressions, defined by anecdotes and jokes. First published in 1968, the book sold 500,000 copies and was still the first title most journalists turned to when they needed to translate a Yiddish word. “According to Leo Rosten . . . ,” they’d write. Not that other, more definitive dictionaries weren’t available. Since the 1950s, for example, a small but committed group of scholars had been painstakingly compiling one of the most ambitious works of Jewish lexicography ever conceived: the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, the Yiddish equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. After decades of Herculean effort and the publication of four massive volumes, the Great Dictionary had finally reached beys, the second letter of the alphabet. In fairness, those two letters account for roughly one-third of the language, since so many compound words begin with alef. Be that as it may, day after day these scholars continued to pore over citations and debate definitions, and meanwhile the rest of the world was praising—and what’s worse, quoting—Rosten’s “dictionary.” In the eyes of Yiddish scholars, The Joys of Yiddish was a travesty, a trivialization of a vast lexical universe that Rosten, who himself was largely unread in Yiddish literature, could not begin to comprehend.
Me, I’m not such a faynshmeker (stickler). I remember laughing aloud when I read The Joys of Yiddish in junior high. I believe that popularization has its place. If Rosten didn’t know much about Yiddish literature, he did know how to tell a story, and what’s more, he knew what stories American Jews wanted to hear. So my intention in appearing with him on national television was not to argue with him, but rather to accomplish something a good deal more practical: to use his populist approach as a starting point, a way to whet viewers’ appetites for the great literature that lay beyond. The message I intended to convey was, “If you liked The Joys of Yiddish you’ll love Yiddish literature, and if you love Yiddish literature, you’ll want to sign up right now as a member of the National Yiddish Book Center.”
The show was loosely structured. “You’ve got a half hour,” the producer told me before I left for Washington. “Let Mr. Rosten hold forth first, and then you come in halfway through with stories about Yiddish books and what you’re doing to save them.”
Fair enough. I watched the big clock on the wall as Leo Rosten leaned back in his chair and poured on the shmaltz, all in an affected English accent. He told cute jokes and anecdotes. At one point he actually referred to Yiddish as “a darling little language.” Darling? The language spoken by some of the most intensely literate people the world had ever known was darling? The language in which millions of Jews lived and died and affirmed their dignity in the face of cataclysmic violence and oppression, the language in which they cried out to God and man for justice, was darling? I had to remind myself that this was television. I bided my time, eyes on the clock. Fifteen minutes past the hour and I made my move, changing the subject from nostalgia to books. Rosten didn’t like being upstaged, but Hockenberry was intrigued. I launched into my first story, and I could see on the monitor that even Rosten looked interested. I was rolling now, picking up steam, pacing myself by the clock, when suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I could see lights flashing, the engineer waving, and then John Hockenberry was smiling, interrupting, saying, “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that’s all we have time for tonight.” And “Cut!”
“What happened?” I asked, “I thought we had half an hour?”
“We did,” Hockenberry explained. “In television a half hour means twenty-two minutes. The rest is for commercials.”
If fame eluded me, famous people—a surprising number of whom were enamored of Yiddish—did not. In the mid-1990s the Yiddish Book Center teamed up with KCRW in Santa Monica to produce a thirteen-part series for National Public Radio called “Jewish Short Stories from Eastern Europe and Beyond.” My partner, KCRW’s station manager, Ruth Seymour, once studied Yiddish literature with Max Weinreich (it was to her that Weinreich made his prediction that Yiddish would outwit history). Together, we were determined not to “ghettoize” Yiddish literature, not to present it in isolation, and we therefore chose thirty-two Jewish stories from Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and English, all of which would be read aloud in English translation. Our director, Joan Micklin Silver (whose feature-film credits included Hester Street and Crossing Delancey), and our two producers, Lori McGlinchey (the Center’s twenty-five-year-old program director) and Johanna Cooper (a Los Angeles radio producer), approached a veritable who’s who of famous actors, virtually all of whom readily signed on as readers: Alan Alda, Lauren Bacall, Jeff Goldblum, Elliott Gould, Leonard Nimoy, Walter Matthau, Rhea Perlman, and Jerry Stiller.
My grandmother never used to tire of enlightening me as to which Hollywood stars were Jewish. What she didn’t know was how many of them grew up speaking Yiddish or had strong Yiddish roots. Walter Matthau, for example, who told us so many stories about his Jewish up-bringing that it took him six hours to record a forty-minute story, actually began his professional career in a Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. “I wasn’t an actor back then,” he remembered. “I was a teenage kid peddling ice cream during intermission. I had a loud voice, and I’d walk up and down the aisles yelling, ‘Get your Federal Ice Cream here!’ One day one of the actors took sick and they didn’t have an understudy, so someone says, ‘What about that tall kid with the loud voice who sells the ice cream?’ They sent for me, stuck a beard on my face, gave me three lines in Yiddish, and pushed me out on stage. I liked it so much I decided then and there to become an actor.”
Leonard Nimoy, the series’ host, grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home in Boston, left for California, and began his career under none other than Maurice Schwarz, the legendary Yiddish actor and director who was then making his first forays onto the English stage. “My parents were worried about me,” Nimoy recalled, “a Jewish boy alone in Los Angeles. So every week Schwarz would write them a long letter in Yiddish. That’s how they knew I was all right.”
Even Alan Alda, a non-Jew, had Yiddish roots. “As a young man, I landed a part in an English-language production of Yoshe Kalb by I. J. Singer,” he told me. “The director was Maurice Schwarz, who also played the role of a Hasidic rabbi. He was always telling the actors to speak louder. When his character died early in the second act, he stayed on stage covered by a sheet. If you looked closely, you could see the sheet over his face rising and falling. ‘Hekher! Hekher!’ he was yelling, ‘Louder! Louder!’”
The Jewish Short Stories series was a huge hit. It aired in every major market in the country and went into three rounds of reruns. Tape sales brought in almost a half-million dollars, enough to keep our operating budget afloat while we were out raising money for our new building. We learned an important lesson: Yiddish was famous already; all we had to do was make it accessible and the world was ready to listen.
25. A Home of Our Own
It was a beautiful spring day in 1991 when the sky came crashing down: The town of Amherst, faced with a growing school-age population, announced plans to reopen the redbrick schoolhouse that had been our home for the past eleven years. The Yiddish Book Center would soon be homeless.
I’ll admit, for the first few minutes our predicament seemed hopeless. But then I got to thinking: Maybe it wasn’t so much a calamity as an opportunity, a chance to build a permanent home of our own, a modern, state-of-the-art, fire-protected, climate-controlled building where, for the first time, we could consolidate our books and a growing agenda of cultural and educational programs under a single roof. What’s more, it was a chance to give to Yiddish what Yiddish so urgently needed: an adres, an address, a physical presence, a destination where people from around the world could come to see the books they’d helped us save and celebrate the culture they contained. Within hours of the town’s announcement I was already drafting a plan. As I saw it, all we needed were an architect, land, and money. Whether or not we could actually find them was not yet clear, so our board chair, Myra Fein
, and I decided to find out.
We began with land. Unfortunately for us, a local real estate boom was in full swing, and the only acreage we could find in reasonable proximity to the area’s colleges was in a cornfield or a strip mall, neither of which possessed quite the dignity we were looking for. “Maybe,” Myra mused, “instead of building near one of the college campuses, we could build on one.” It seemed unlikely, but Myra was determined, so we went to see the presidents of several of the local schools. To my amazement, they all wanted us. Mount Holyoke made an outright offer of an eighteenth-century house; all we had to do was restore it. In the end it was Hampshire College, my alma mater, that carried the day. The president, Gregory Prince, was looking to develop what he called a cultural village. The idea was to ring the campus with interesting nonprofit organizations. They would benefit from the infrastructure of the college, and the college in turn would gain unique resources for its self-directed students. He invited us to come in as the “anchor” institution.
It seemed like a shidekh, a good match. The only problem was that Greg wanted to lease us land for a dollar a year for the next ninety-nine years, and we didn’t think that was nearly long enough. “Colleges never sell land,” Greg informed us. “That may be true,” I answered, “but Yiddish has known enough impermanence as it is; we have no choice but to own.” Greg was nothing if not persevering. That summer he and his wife, Toni, traveled four hundred miles to visit me and Gail at our summer house, a tumbledown fisherman’s cottage perched above a salt-marsh in an Acadian fishing village in Nova Scotia. For two days Greg and I tromped the beach. He explained the subtleties of academic politics, and I explained the vagaries of Jewish history and our consequent need for permanence. Greg understood. It took another three years before he was able to bring his board around, but in the end they relented, and we became the proud owners of the most magnificent piece of land that Yiddish has ever known: a ten-acre apple orchard at the southeast corner of a New England campus, with its own woodland pond and an open view of the Holyoke Range.
