Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  There was a bonus prize, too. Even though we had decided not to locate at Mount Holyoke, the college graciously provided us with a twenty-room mansion, free of charge, until our own building was complete.

  We had less luck, at first, in finding the right architect. Myra and I interviewed a dozen firms. We spent a year working with one of the leading architects in Boston, to no avail. We were getting ready to launch a national competition, a costly proposition, when board member Hillel Levine gave us the name of Allen Moore. Unlike most of the architects we interviewed, Allen was not Jewish. In fact, he was very not Jewish. He fished. He hunted. As a young man he had opted out of the family business, the Stanley Tool Company in New Britain, Connecticut. Instead he studied architecture at Yale and went on to a singularly public-minded career, building imaginative cultural and educational buildings in the U.S. and Europe, planning a yet-to-be-built biblical study center in Israel (a collaboration with Hillel Levine), and teaching local craftspeople in the West Indies to build innovative workers’ housing. Although he once ran a large architectural firm in Cambridge, he was now sixty years old and working largely on his own out of a small storefront office in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The first time we met he arrived in a secondhand Ford Taurus station wagon, wearing a waxed-cotton jacket, a wool sweater, a flannel shirt, and khaki pants. His architectural vocabulary was unlike any I had heard before: it included words like “honesty,” “courtesy,” and “respect.” We hadn’t spoken five minutes before I knew he was the one.

  Myra was a bit more cautious: She liked him, too, but first she wanted to see something he had built. So in the middle of a wild snowstorm she, Gail, and I bundled into her private plane and flew to Martha’s Vineyard to see a summer house Allen had just completed. Unlike most of the island’s newer homes, it was neither palatial nor ostentatious. Rather, it was just right. Both Myra and Gail were ready to move in on the spot, and Allen got the job.

  His first stop was Harvard’s Widener Library, where he researched Jewish architecture of East Europe. He was particularly taken with photos of the old wooden synagogues of Russia and Poland, virtually all of which were destroyed in the Holocaust. “It’s going to be a tough challenge,” he told me. “On the one hand we want to evoke historical recall. On the other hand we don’t want to create a Yiddish Disneyland. We’ll have to walk a very fine line.”

  Next he spent a snowy weekend meeting with our advisory board, a group of national museum directors and other special friends. Early Wednesday morning he came bounding into my office. “I’ve been up for three days and three nights,” he declared. “I think I’ve designed your building.”

  And so he had. Scrunched down on his hands and knees on my office floor, he rolled out a simple, elegant plan that integrated a core book collection, extensive exhibits, a hundred-seat theater, and a resource center, reading library, English-language bookstore, offices, and kosher kitchen. The 27,000-square-foot structure would be built of wood and what Allen called “other honest materials” and would be thoroughly modern, bright and airy, with state-of-the-art climate control, fire protection, and security. Yet, remarkably, it still conveyed the impression of a traditional shtetl, albeit a decidedly whimsical one. Although it would take Allen another four years of full-time effort to perfect the details, the basic plan he presented that day never changed. It was truly a work of genius.

  Which left only money to go. The price tag for the entire project— land, design, construction, and exhibits—was $7 million. Until then, with one exception, our largest single gift was $10,000. Most contributions averaged between $18 and $36 a year.

  We consulted experts, who said it couldn’t be done. They said we’d have to raise 90 percent of the goal from 10 percent of the donors. They said we’d need 40 percent in hand before we could announce the campaign to the public.

  We took exactly the opposite approach. I wrote a letter to our members, and the response was overwhelming. Several donors who had been sending us $18 a year mailed checks for $50,000. The phones rang from morning to night. Within two months, through direct mail alone, 4,481 members had contributed $2,625,260!

  The race was on. During the ensuing years, I traveled hundreds of thousands of miles to visit hundreds of individuals and foundations. Some turned me away empty-handed; many more contributed. We received $250,000 from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, and $600,000 from the Kresge Foundation (though only after they inquired about “minority representation” on our board; Jews, at 1.7% of the nation’s population, didn’t count). The National Endowment for the Humanities helped with exhibit development. There were major gifts from some remarkable people: David and Barbara Hirschhorn (Baltimore philanthropists), Max Palevsky (technology pioneer, philosopher, and polymath), Marty Peretz (editor of The New Republic), Robert Price (assistant mayor under John Lindsay), Marion Brechner (an intrepid, now nonagenarian, Orlando-based television broadcaster), and Joe Jacobs (civil-rights pioneer and one of the leading labor lawyers in the South). A former Rhodes Scholar named Lief Rosenblatt—then managing director of Soros Fund Management— made a substantial gift in memory of his late wife, Melinda. Not much older than I, brilliant, principled, and a natural leader, he eventually became the chairman of our board.

  But we were still several million dollars shy of our goal, with few prospects remaining, when a call came one day from Bernie Siegel, director of the Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Foundation in Baltimore. He had read one of our direct mail letters and wanted to know more. Fortunately someone recognized the name. The Weinberg Foundation had assets of over $1 billion and accepted proposals by invitation only. When he learned about the building campaign, Mr. Siegel agreed to read “just one piece” of information. A month later he called back to request a formal proposal. Two months after that he called again: “I was intrigued by your proposal,” he said. “Tell me, do you ever get to Baltimore?”

  This was a question? As it happened, I was leaving that night for Los Angeles, but the second I returned I was on the Amtrak for Baltimore.

  “Don’t worry,” my wife said. “It will all be personal. If you like each other, you’ll get the grant.”

  I liked Bernie Siegel the moment I met him. He was kind and heymish, and he had a warm spot for Yiddish. We spoke for two hours in the living room of the late Weinbergs’ apartment (which was surprisingly modest). I told him all about the new building. And then I took a deep breath and went for broke.

  “What we’re looking for,” I said, “is a gift of $2 million to complete the campaign.”

  Bernie leaned back in his chair. “I’m afraid you’re whistling at the moon,” he said. “A project like this, there’s no way we could commit more than $1 million.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or turn a cartwheel. I could barely focus as Bernie explained that the gift would be a challenge grant: We had one year to raise the remaining $1 million on our own.

  I prevailed on our board, revisited donors, wrote to our members. Within eight months we had met the challenge. Yiddish would have a home at last.

  BUT LIKE MOSES, I almost didn’t live to see it. In the midst of the campaign, after a particularly grueling stretch of travel, I was out walking our dog, Sadie, one cold Monday night when I was stopped in my tracks by a ferocious pain in the back of my head. The next day the doctor diagnosed it as flu and I returned to work. But all week long the pain grew worse, until by Friday night it hurt so bad I was vomiting. Gail called the doctor. “That’s good,” he said, “the vomiting proves it’s the flu.” The next day, Shabbos, brought the worst blizzard in twenty years. I drifted in and out of consciousness as the snow lashed against our bedroom window. Again Gail called the doctor; again he said it was just the flu. By evening Gail had had enough. “I don’t care what the doctor says,” she announced, “I’m taking you to the hospital.” A neighbor came over to take care of our one-year-old daughter, Sasha. Gail was three months pregnant with our second. She phoned the ambulance: The drifts wer
e too deep, they said, they’d have to send a civil defense truck instead.

  The emergency room doctor took one look at me and knew something was dreadfully wrong. A CAT scan revealed blood on the brain. The neurosurgeon, who arrived the next morning, diagnosed it as an AVM, a rare, congenital vascular malformation in the brain. The only recourse was surgery. The odds weren’t good.

  They wanted to operate locally, but Gail wouldn’t hear of it. She took me to Mass General, where, thanks to a call from Allen Moore (he was friends with the head of the department), I was seen by a gifted young neurosurgeon named Chris Ogilvey. He took my MRIs home, studied them late that night, and perceived a complication no one else had seen. His conscientiousness literally saved my life. The surgery lasted thirteen hours; I went into it knowing that even if I lived, there was a very real possibility of permanent neurological impairment. I of course was under anesthesia; how Gail lived through that day I’ll never know. When I came to in the recovery room hers was the first face I saw. From her eyes I knew: The operation was a success. There was no neurological damage. I was going to be okay.

  ADDITIONAL FUND-RAISING, PLANNING, and construction took several more years. Despite innumerable problems with weather, contractors, suppliers, unions, and town officials, the completed building was everything we hoped it would be: warm, welcoming, bright, sunny, safe, and secure. Our children, Sasha, then six, and Chava, four, spent hours rolling down the long ramp to the book repository. They never wanted to leave, which Gail and I took as a very good sign, about both our children and the building. In March of 1997 we installed more than three miles of donated steel library shelving and moved in the books; they looked right at home. In April we began installing commemorative plaques for each of our ten thousand donors (it took us more than three years to complete the job!). And on a picture-postcard day in June, we opened the building to the public. More than three thousand invited guests gathered under a huge white tent for the khanukes habayis, the official housewarming and dedication. Reporters were there from most of the country’s major papers. A front-page headline in the English Forward called the building “A Post-Modern Shtetl.” In a moving speech, Kenny Turan told the story about Max Weinreich with which I began this book, and referred to the building as “a Yiddish Atlantis, a lost continent of Jewish culture.” I called it a lebedike velt, a lively world, and fighting back tears, acknowledged how gratifying it was finally to make good on the faith of all those who trusted us with their books.

  But how did Delmore Schwartz put it? “In dreams begin responsibilities.” Once the building opened, our small, hardscrabble organization suddenly found itself on center stage, transformed almost overnight into one of most visited and talked-about Jewish tourist destinations in America. Ten thousand visitors a year streamed through our doors, our mail tubs were overflowing, our twelve phone lines were lit from morning to night, our conferences, courses, and public programs were oversubscribed—and our budget was, as ever, stretched to the breaking point. “Either find a way to cut costs or you’ll be broke in a year,” our board finance committee warned me. Ken Coplon put it more plainly. “It’s time to tell your staff that this isn’t the food co-op anymore.”

  I did. It was a painful time. When the dust finally settled, a sprawling homegrown staff of thirty-two had been reduced to eighteen seasoned professionals—smart, well trained, hard-working, friendly, flexible, and resourceful. We’ve managed to balance our budget ever since.

  Not everyone cheered our success, or if they did, their praise was not always unequivocal. Not long after our new building opened, my former teacher, Ruth Wisse, published an article in Commentary entitled “Yiddish: Past, Present, Imperfect,” in which she contrasted two recent events: the opening of the new home of the Yiddish Book Center, and, three weeks later, in Poland, the death of Chone Shmeruk, one of the world’s greatest Yiddish scholars:

  At the opening of the Center there were mistakes in a Yiddish sign and in the few Yiddish phrases with which some participants sprinkled their speeches. Mistakes are surely correctable, and any non-native speaker is likely to make them, but they signify that not even the champions of Yiddish culture in America are truly at home in the language, and this in a civilization that has historically prided itself on literary and intellectual achievement.

  For the record, the single misspelled Yiddish sign to which Ruth referred, one among dozens of correct ones on display that day, had to do with parking, not literature, the mistake was typographical, not grammatical, and the young man who made it—at the last minute, after working most of the night—was Catholic, not Jewish. But in a broader sense Ruth was right: We could spend the rest of our lives studying Yiddish literature and never know a fraction of what Chone Shmeruk knew. I’m the head of a major Yiddish organization, yet my Yiddish is still not half as fluent as that of my grandfather, and he was a junkman. Which makes it hard not to worry about cultural continuity.

  In her celebrated short story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Cynthia Ozick captures the disdain of a Yiddish writer toward those who write Jewish books in English:

  He found them puerile, pitiable, ignorant, contemptible, above all stupid. In judging them he dug for his deepest vituperation— they were, he said, ‘Amerikaner geboren.’ Spawned in America, pogroms a rumor, mama-loshen a stranger, history a vacuum.

  Well, I, too, am Amerikaner geboren, American born and raised. Like most of my generation, I didn’t speak Yiddish at home, I didn’t study Torah and Talmud in my youth, I didn’t attend Yiddish schools or belong to a Jewish youth movement or grow up with a life-or-death awareness of Jewish identity, and as a result I will never match the native Yiddish fluency or the depth and breadth of Jewish learning of Chone Shmeruk or Ruth Wisse—or of my friend Sam Kassow. Not ten years older than I, Sam is a Russian, German, and Jewish historian who was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany shortly after the war. His mother was a partisan. He knows seven languages, including Yiddish and Hebrew, and is well read in all of them. Our wives are close friends, our children are roughly the same age, and when we get together for yonteyvim, Jewish holidays, the kids play while Sam and I drink shnaps and talk about Jews. It’s an inexhaustible subject, and what I always realize is that Sam, who is not Amerikaner geboren, has more Jewish knowledge in his smallest fingertip than I can hope to acquire in a lifetime of study.

  That incontrovertible fact is not necessarily cause for despair, though; it does not necessarily mean that we’ve reached the end of the road, that Jewish knowledge is condemned to dilution with each passing generation, or that America—a land where mame loshn really is a stranger and history a vacuum—does not, perhaps for that very reason, possess certain mayles, certain virtues of its own. No one is more aware of America’s promise than Ruth Wisse (born in Romania, raised in Canada, now at Harvard), as she makes clear in her impressions of our dedication:

  The new building, architecturally evocative of the wooden synagogues in Eastern Europe, is the most beautiful and certainly the most carefully designed dwelling place that Yiddish has ever had. . . . The Yiddish Book Center has enlisted the American spirit to help save the Yiddish heritage. . . . I have learned a lot from this young man about the potential of good ideas joined to an entrepreneurial imagination. . . . Jews are never more American than when they show initiative on their own behalf. All that Aaron was able to accomplish for the Yiddish Book Center derives from his pride and pleasure in growing up Jewish in New England.

  Hineini—of the hundreds of journalists and scholars who have written about the Center, Ruth was the most perceptive. Despite our abiding commitment to history, my colleagues and I at the Yiddish Book Center do not pine for the Old Country or for the past. We are who we are, where we are, when we are. And in that sense I prefer to compare us not to Chone Shmeruk, a twentieth-century Yiddish scholar, but to Zushya, a nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbi. “When I die,” Zushya foretold, “God will not ask me, ‘Zushya, why weren’t you more like Moses?’ God will ask
, ‘Zushya, why were you not more like Zushya?’” We American Jews are often ignorant of history, but we are shaped and challenged by it all the same. Here on the free soil of New England, where our permanent home now stands, we have as good a chance as any to outwit it still.

  26. Immortality

  Everybody’s mad at us!” Abra Greenberg, the stalwart director of our Yiddish book repository, informed me one hot day in September 1997. Until our new building opened three months before, most of the books we collected had been stored in our Holyoke warehouse, where the public rarely got to see them. Unless we had at least five copies of a given title, they were reserved for major libraries and never listed in our published catalogs. As a result, visitors never knew what they were missing. But now, in the new building, our stacks were open, visitors were welcome, and they were invariably incensed when Abra refused to sell them the particular book they wanted, especially when they could see extra copies sitting right there on the shelf. “What am I supposed to do?” Abra asked me. “Our customers won’t take no for an answer.”

  It might seem strange, after collecting more than a million Yiddish books, that we didn’t have enough to go around, especially when the ranks of many authors—Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Guy de Maupassant—were full to overflowing. But when it came to other great writers, such as I. J. Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hirsch Dovid Nomberg, Moyshe Kulbak, Alter Kacyzne, Dovid Bergelson, and hundreds more, for whatever reason—whether too few copies were printed or the editions were too flimsy, whether they weren’t read enough or they were read too much—our stocks were woefully inadequate. Even if we did have sufficient numbers, all it took was one professor in one university to assign such a book to her class, and poof, our entire supply would be instantly depleted. Keep in mind that we are the only comprehensive supplier of Yiddish books on the planet, and then imagine an analogous situation in any other literature: Say, for example, that in all the bookstores in all the world there were only five extant copies of Don Quixote, Great Expectations, War and Peace, or Moby-Dick. We’d be signing petitions, convening commissions, appealing to publishers, universities, governments, the United Nations, somebody, anybody, until the missing titles were back in print. Why should Yiddish be any different?