A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Singer’s eloquence notwithstanding, the reality is that few writers outside of Israel still use the language as their principal medium of expression. About one hundred new works of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction are published each year in Yiddish, most of them in Israel, according to Zachary M. Baker, librarian of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. During the period between World War I and World War II, new releases averaged about a thousand titles a year. “There were eleven million people who spoke Yiddish in 1939, and by 1945 one out of every two had been murdered,” Lansky explained. “So there was this culture that literally was ripped out of its roots in Europe. That is why I say the last thousand years of Jewish history resides in those books. They are the repository of the whole culture.”

  Benjamin Harshav, Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale University, is equally blunt in his study, The Meaning of Yiddish. “It is true that Hitler and Stalin destroyed Yiddish culture in its European stronghold. The Jewish people lost a third of their numbers but nonetheless survived; the destruction of Yiddish, however, was total. Stalin killed the Yiddish writers, Hitler killed the writers and their readers alike. The Yiddish-speaking masses are no more.” Yet even before the Holocaust, Harshav acknowledged, the trend of assimilation was “overpowering everywhere.” In North America, for the children of immigrants, English was the language of choice. During the 1920s, an attempt to teach Yiddish in New York public schools was a dismal failure. Later, in Israel, Hebrew emerged as the official tongue, while Yiddish, “with its mass newspapers and millions of readers,” began to disappear. “The attempt to create a modern, cosmopolitan culture in a separate Jewish language, culturally autonomous and steeped in historical values and associations, was doomed to failure. For the writers sensing the loss of their readership, this was an indescribable tragedy.”

  Lansky’s mission, then, went far beyond saving books to preserving a record of the way of life that they documented. Because most of his activities would be in the United States, he decided not to establish his organization in Montreal. “I decided against New York as well, because there were a lot of old Jewish organizations there, and a lot of politics that I wanted to avoid. I did not want to fight any of the old battles. It was essential that there be something grand about what we were about to do. My goal was to deliver books to the next generation.”

  With encouragement from Hampshire College, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts—five schools within a twenty-mile radius of Amherst that allowed him to use their names for the project—Lansky established the National Yiddish Book Exchange in 1979, which was incorporated as the National Yiddish Book Center the following year. Getting three months deferred rent, Lansky set up shop in the loft of an old factory two miles from the Smith College campus in Northampton in June 1980. Office furniture consisted of a picnic table and two jury-rigged bookcases, and to defray costs, he shared space with a weaver, a potter, and a woman who sold goat’s milk.

  Working at a government-surplus typewriter, the twenty-four-year-old executive director issued a spate of press releases. In July, a letter arrived from the eighty-six-year-old father of the novelist Leon Uris. “I have three hundred Yiddish books,” William Uris wrote. “These volumes are not yet scattered in attics and cellars, but are well preserved in my home. My question is, how do I get them to you?” Two months later, a letter came in from Marjorie Guthrie, widow of the folksinger Woody Guthrie. “I am writing to inquire if you would be interested in a collection of books which came from my family. My mother was a Yiddish poet, Aliza Greenblatt, who was friends with many outstanding Yiddish writers.”

  From the beginning, Lansky established several rules, foremost among them that anything printed in Yiddish was welcome. “It is too early in the history of the literature to judge what is important and what is not,” Lansky explained. “Another policy is that we only accept contributions. We have never bought a book.” For the first five years, primary emphasis was placed on collecting, Lansky often going out on solitary runs in vans he rented or was able to borrow from the neighboring colleges. “Someone would tell me there were books outside in the garbage, and I would find a way to go and get them,” he said. “In 1981, I got a call from a friend in New York who had learned that some workers fixing up a building on Sixteenth Street had come across a library of eight thousand Yiddish books. They were all outside in a Dumpster, and it was the middle of winter.” Rushing to New York, Lansky and some hastily enlisted helpers worked through the night in sleet and freezing rain to load a rented truck with the discarded books and bring them back to Massachusetts.

  As books piled up, word began to spread, and in February 1981 the New York Times published a brief feature that prompted several hundred inquiries. More people gave books, others offered money, some came forward as volunteers. Three months later, the town of Amherst allowed the National Yiddish Book Center free use of the Old East Street School. By the end of 1983, that building was crammed with 300,000 books, while others continued to arrive. An urgent appeal for funds for further storage facilities was issued in 1984, and contributions came in from around the world, enabling Lansky to lease the fourth floor of an enormous old paper factory in downtown Holyoke, an aging industrial city on the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. Called the Yiddish Book Annex, the facility is about as long as a football field and has 25,000 square feet of space available, enough to house the whole collection. When the center celebrated its tenth birthday in 1990, the repository held a million volumes.

  Obviously, Lansky was not able to gather all those books by himself; he needed help, and for that he recruited a band of volunteers called zamlers, Yiddish for collectors. He was inspired by the example of Simon Dubnow, a twentieth-century Jewish historian who had used similar methods to acquire primary material for his research. “When I started the book center, Dubnow was my intellectual mentor, and I figured we could revive his concept of the zamler, which was to find people who were willing to go out and preserve these documents. In Dubnow’s case the material was archival. Here, it was books we were after. But what I did was re-create Dubnow’s zamler network in North America.”

  Within a decade, Lansky had more than two hundred zamlers working for him throughout the United States and Canada, many of them older people who shared his sense of urgency. For example, Sorell and Nathan Skolnik, who lived about an hour’s drive north of New York City, began gathering books while in their late seventies, and continued actively into their eighties. Lansky credited Sorell Skolnik—a social activist during the 1920s who once explained that she “didn’t want to be a part [of any] melting pot if it meant losing my language”—with locating more than five thousand volumes by herself. Jacob Schaefer of Los Angeles, a survivor of Auschwitz, “ranks as our most active zamler ever,” Lansky said. “He is tireless. He drives around in an old Chevy Nova and he will go anywhere in California to get books. We figure he has rounded up about forty thousand books for us.” Morris and Sarah Willdorf of Brooklyn were equally committed. Lansky said that every time someone from the center went to New York, there were books to pick up in the Willdorfs’ garage.

  Lansky estimated that only about one half of one percent of all Yiddish books have been translated into English, and for most works, the first edition is the only edition. Because Yiddish flourished as a literary language for less than a century, it is possible to estimate how many titles were printed. As more and more older Jews die or move into nursing homes, the dramatic scenes of the early years, in which extensive libraries were discovered, become fewer and fewer. “But it’s still a steady fifty thousand books a year, about a thousand books a week, that we have coming in,” he said.

  Meanwhile, the center has begun a program of transferring books to other institutions. “The best part is that we now have ten thousand books going out, and each year we place twice as many as we did the year before,” Lansky said. Before books can be placed, of
course, somebody has to want them, so creating a demand became Lansky’s second priority. “When we started, nobody wanted these books; they were throwing them away. It became our job to educate the world as to why they are important.”

  Placements began almost immediately, but the major break came in 1989 when Yale University announced it would acquire ten thousand books from the center, the funding coming from Josalyn and Joseph Newman of New York City. “What Yale did was announce that anyone who wishes to pursue modern Jewish scholarship must deal with the Yiddish language,” Lansky said. “It was a vindication of everything we set out to do.”

  As more institutions take books and introduce courses in Yiddish, Lansky sees his mission changing. “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, I’ll be spending a lot less time rescuing books, but I’ll have more work to do,” he predicted. “One of my pet projects is to start reissuing works of Yiddish literature. Facsimiles aren’t really satisfactory, because in any given Yiddish book, you find that between fifteen and twenty percent of the words do not appear in any Yiddish dictionary. There are words that come from Russia and Lithuania, Ukraine, where there were different concepts. So we will develop a database; maybe we’ll even enter entire novels into the computer, run them against the database, and identify the words that are not in the dictionaries.” The new editions will be annotated. Once undocumented material is recorded, “we will work with scholars and the older Jews who are still around to identify these words and phrases and cultural oddities that are no longer recognizable to modern readers. In the books we reprint, there will be English-language footnotes at the bottom of each Yiddish text that give these new translations and explanations.”

  When we first met, in 1990, Aaron Lansky was thirty-four years old and was putting in sixteen-hour days on his reclamation project. He traveled constantly to give lectures and raise money, he organized summer internships, he developed new programs, and he worked on the center’s news magazine, The Book Peddler. “My mother keeps telling me I should slow down, find a good Jewish wife, and start a family,” the young bachelor said with a shy shrug. There was no shortage of matchmakers trying to nudge him in the right direction.

  Two and a half years later, it was time for another visit to the National Yiddish Book Center. The Wall Street Journal had recently published a story telling how Lansky had brought an old Linotype machine up from New York and reassembled it in the Holyoke annex, making it the only apparatus in the country still producing metal type in Yiddish. Also, Lansky had accepted a dollar-a-year offer from Mount Holyoke College to use a gracious old mansion that looks out on a range of western Massachusetts foothills, and had moved his headquarters from Amherst to South Hadley. Even though the arrangement is not permanent, it does allow time to move into a new home just off the campus of Hampshire College. Construction of a $4 million book center began in the fall of 1994 on the site of a onetime apple orchard; it is expected to open in 1996.

  As we brought each other up to date, I was pleased to notice a wedding ring on Lansky’s left hand. “We have a baby girl,” he said, beaming, and showed me a photograph of Sarah Rayzel Lansky. “That doesn’t mean things have slowed down,” he quickly added, “it just means that I have my wife, Gail, to help me now.”

  Still, there are nights when Aaron Lansky acknowledged that he goes into Holyoke by himself to make sure everything is all right at the annex. “I don’t go to the factory in search of a religious experience, I go probably because the alarm is ringing,” he said. But when his business is finished, and the lights are turned off, he invariably pauses for a moment before locking up and leaving for home.

  “The life and the vitality and the culture of a thousand years is on those shelves, and I never take it for granted,” he said. “Even in the dark, I can feel the weight of a million books. As I get older, and since I’ve had a child, my perception of all this becomes much deeper, because now that child validates everything that I do in my life. She reminds me all the more for whom I am saving those books.”

  Arthur Alfonso Schomburg was born in Puerto Rico in 1874, the son of Mary Joseph, an unwed laundress from the Virgin Islands, and Carlos Féderico Schomburg, a German-born merchant of mixed parentage then living in San Juan. Although Arthur took his father’s surname, there is no evidence to suggest that he was raised as an heir of the Schomburgs, a family well known in Puerto Rico. Arthur Schomburg moved to New York in 1911, where he lived until his death in 1938. His biographer, Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, has written that like many other early black book collectors, Schomburg was not motivated by the prospect of indulging in a “delightful diversion,” but as a mission “to document the history of their race.” He was not the first black collector, but he devoted his greatest energy to the task, and his legacy is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (a division of the New York Public Library), a library in Harlem that is ranked among the world’s best.

  The need to document black history has been recognized by many individuals, especially that of the period from the end of the Civil War through the turn of the century. One such individual was William Dorsey of Philadelphia, the custodian of the American Negro Historical Society and a dedicated compiler of 388 scrapbooks filled with thousands of clippings from newspapers published between 1873 and 1903. Most of the articles he preserved reported daily events in the lives of black people, including many obituaries, invitations to social events, and political broadsides. Deposited after Dorsey’s death in 1923 at Cheyney State University in Pennsylvania, the scrapbooks were ignored and forgotten for half a century, only to be rediscovered in a library basement behind a movable wall by a graduate student in 1976. They have since provided the raw material for a detailed history of black urban life during this critical period of transition.

  Unlike Dorsey, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg made sure his efforts would not be ignored. At a Howard University seminar on “Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History” in 1983, Dr. Sinnette told how during her research she found two typewritten sheets among Schomburg’s papers that quoted the California book collector Hubert Howe Bancroft. On one piece of paper, “the Negro” was described as being an “incompetent and unreliable” citizen, “an unmitigated nuisance” who in all likelihood “will remain so.” And on the other, Schomburg had copied this excerpt: “However learned he may become, however lofty his ideals or his aspirations, he must wear the badge of ignorance and servitude, he and his children, forever. God hath made him so. We do not need the Negro for any purpose and never shall.” At the bottom of the second sheet, Schomburg had written in bold letters, “Where are our Negro historians, our defenders who have let Bancroft commit such a dastardly crime against the Negro race?”

  Not only did early black collectors like Dorsey, Schomburg, Jesse E. Moorland, and Marcus Garvey seek out material that would refute such mindless pedantry, they collected the slanderous material itself. “These pioneer black collectors existed in a society that not only denied their humanity but seemed skeptical about their ability to achieve,” Dr. Sinnette wrote. It is not surprising, therefore, to see such “scientific” works as Charles H. McCord’s The American Negro as a Dependant, Defective and Delinquent, 1914, or Robert Bean’s 1906 essay in the American Journal of Anatomy, “Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain,” represented in their collections.

  Schomburg became an active figure in what is known as the Harlem Renaissance, and included among his friends Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. “We need in the coming dawn the man who will give us the background for our future; it matters not whether he comes from the Cloisters of the University or from the rank and file of the fields,” he wrote in 1913. Three years later, he helped establish the Negro Book Collectors Exchange, which committed itself to contacting “all Negro book collectors throughout the United States, Africa, the West Indies, South America and Europe,” and asking them to register the titles of books in their libraries. “They were drawn together by a common cause and shared a common
passion for searching out evidence of the historical accomplishments of black people,” Dr. Sinnette wrote. “Theirs was a close, friendly network of men who corresponded with each other, visited each other’s libraries, went book hunting together, and enjoyed the camaraderie of mutual interests.”

  Schomburg was by far the most driven of the group, and though he worked as a clerk for Bankers Trust on Wall Street for twenty-three years, collecting was his first priority. He developed a friendly rivalry with Arthur Spingarn, a wealthy white lawyer who shifted his collecting focus from English literature to the works of black authors as he became more involved in combating racism. Shortly after he became legal counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1911, Spingarn began assembling a reference library, which evolved into a collection. A 1962 article in Negro Digest described him as a “White Warrior” for Civil Rights. He served as NAACP president from 1940 to 1965.

  Spingarn’s collection of five thousand books, journals, playbills, speeches, letters, and ephemera was purchased by Howard University in 1946 and was combined with the library of Jesse E. Moorland to form the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Spingarn’s holdings were particularly strong in Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, and Haitian writers, and included many scarce titles. In an unpublished memoir on deposit at Howard University, Spingarn recalled that he met Schomburg “long before the First World War,” and though the lawyer acknowledged having the means to travel more readily than his rival, he often found himself being beaten to the prey. “Whenever I discovered an interesting trail leading to Negro books I invariably found that Schomburg had either been on it before me or else was following very close behind.” Spingarn recalled occasions when he saw Schomburg “approach an immense pile of apparently worthless material and unerringly find in its huge mass one or two treasures which would have been lost to a less inspired collector; how he found them I never could discover unless he smelled them out.” The best explanation for this uncanny success was the “infinite patience” Schomburg combined with a “sixth sense for rarities.”