Outwitting History (11 page)

“Florida?” ventured Roger.

“Dead!” shouted Mr. Berger, with a whap of his walking stick on the table.
“Toyt! Geshtorbn! Nayn eyln in—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Berger,” I broke in, “but if you’ll just let me finish I think you’ll see we’ve made adequate arrangements to pick up books after people have passed on.”

“
After
they’ve passed on? Let me tell you something, yungerman, you may run an organization but by me you’re still a
pisher,
wet behind the ears. You don’t know the first thing about how the world works, you haven’t seen what I’ve seen, you don’t walk around with death breathing down your neck every day like I do. Take it from me: You don’t go to people
after
they die, you go
before
they die!”

“And how do you propose doing that?” asked Stuart, who, working with older Jews every day at the Workmen’s Circle, was having trouble hiding his annoyance.

“Simple!” shouted Mr. Berger, whapping his walking sticking again against the Formica tabletop; “You go to the hospitals! You set up shop in the Intensive Care Unit.”—
Whap!—
“When it looks like some old Jew is about to breathe his last”—
Whap!—
“you rush over to him and ask him for his Yiddish books!”
Whap! Whap! Whap!

Stuart was aghast. “Mr. Berger, if you think I’m going to walk into a hospital and—”

“Why not? You’ll be doing these old Jews a favor! You’ll take a load off their chests! They can die easy, knowing someone will take care of their books after they’re gone!”

The strategy was unsettling at best, and it was some time before I could restore order and bring the discussion around to my original if
admittedly less sensational plan of canvassing apartment buildings and hanging posters in Laundromats, synagogues, and senior centers. After the meeting, Stuart, Roger, and I stayed behind to clean up. When we finally made our way to elevator, Mr. Berger was waiting for us. He pushed the Lobby button with his walking stick.

“Do you want to know what the real problem is?” he asked as the elevator descended.
“The real problem is that people are dying today who never died before!”
With that he donned his straw hat, turned smartly on his white loafers, and tapping with his pearl-handled walking stick, proceeded calmly into the winter night.

Mr. Berger must have returned to Florida, because we never heard from him again. But notwithstanding his pessimism, the zamler network proved successful. More than two hundred people signed up, from Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard to Nome, Alaska. Where we could, we set up drop-off points: In El Paso, Texas, it was the Ave Maria Religious Store, where the proprietor, Jules Novick, advertised “Crucifixes, Wholesale and Retail” and set aside room in the back for Yiddish books.

For many of our zamlers, saving Yiddish books became their life. Sorell Skolnik, for example, was a resolute woman in her seventies who lived in the Mohegan Colony, a community of anarchists and other progressive Jews just north of Peekskill, New York. The first time we visited Sorell was in 1981. Pat Myerson, Fran Krasno, and I arrived cold and tired at the end of a particularly trying day. We had been drinking caffeinated tea and eating sugary cakes at the homes of older Jews since early morning, and we cringed at the idea of having to force our way through the frosting of one more Entenmann’s. What a surprise, then, when we entered Sorell’s house at the end of a beautiful country lane and inhaled the aroma of simmering chickpea soup! The meal she served us was an organic feast, with homemade bread, and herbs and vegetables picked fresh from her own garden.

Sorell and her husband, Nathan, had been living at Mohegan since the 1920s, shortly after they arrived in this country from their native Russia. Nathan was a garment worker who commuted each day to New York; Sorell was a dressmaker who worked at home. There, amid the pines, they and their neighbors had fashioned a rich Jewish cultural life with weekly study groups in Russian and Yiddish literature, a communal Passover seder, and an annual event to raise scholarship money for young people to study Yiddish each summer at Columbia. (I myself had been a recipient, the summer before I headed off for grad school.)

Sorell proved an amazingly energetic zamler. She had an old Dodge Dart, which she drove to pick up books all over Westchester County. She’d take them back to her house, and we’d come with a truck every three thousand volumes or so to transport them to Massachusetts. We became close friends in the course of these frequent visits. When we launched our annual summer program in Yiddish culture in 1984, we enlisted Sorell as one of our teachers, a position she held with distinction until she was in her late eighties. Her husband died shortly after our first meeting; she herself had a stroke several years back and is now confined to a wheelchair, living in her own apartment near her daughter on Long Island. But she retains every bit of her dignity and determination. As I write she is almost a hundred years old, and though her zamler days are behind her, she still keeps in touch with a loyal following of students, some of whom, themselves in their eighties, travel sixty miles each way for a weekly Yiddish reading circle in her home.

The prize for the most ambitious zamler has to go to Jacob Schaefer of Los Angeles. A survivor who lost his wife and three daughters at Auschwitz, after the war he made his way to New York, where he worked as a tailor, a trade he learned as an apprentice in his native Kovno, Lithuania. It was only after he retired and moved to L.A. that he became a zamler. “I’ll tell you the truth,” Jacob told us one day in his crowded Fairfax apartment. “I never wanted to be a tailor. All my life
what I really wanted to do was work with books, but my father wouldn’t let me, he wanted better I should earn a living. So I sewed. Now that I’m retired, I can do what I want. Every morning I get up early and go out with the car. I drive to Venice, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, I talk with people and they give me their Yiddish books. This is the kind of work I’ve always wanted to do; for the first time in my life I’m really and truly happy.”

With assistance from David and Sylvia Davidson and their fellow volunteers at the L.A. chapter of the Workmen’s Circle, Jacob shipped us more than 45,000 volumes—an all-time record.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Mr. and Mrs. Field, elderly zamlers living on an upper floor of a Co-op City high-rise, used to summon us every six weeks. Each time we came they would have several hundred books waiting for us, all carefully tied with string in neat little bundles of three or four books each.

“You know, Mr. Field,” I told him one day, “you don’t have to tie the books in separate bundles. We’re young, we have handtrucks, we can carry the books loose or pack them into boxes. . . .”

“Oh no,” Mr. Field explained,
“ir farshteyt nisht
(you don’t understand).
Mir hobn nisht keyn machine, darfn mir forn mitn bus kidey oyftsuzamlen di ale bikher
(We have no automobile; we have to travel by bus in order to collect all these books).”

A frail couple in their eighties, they regarded the rescue of Yiddish books as a matter of self-preservation: They had helped build this culture, and they were not about to see it abandoned. With halting steps but an unshakable sense of purpose, they set out every day on the city bus, traveling all over the Bronx, ringing doorbells and carrying donated books back to their apartment, two small bundles at a time.

It was a gray, wet morning, the streets clogged with slush, when Pat Myerson and I arrived in New York City with a twenty-two-foot diesel truck. On our clipboard that day were four special pickups, each of which promised to yield more books than could fit into a single van.

The first was Knight Printing, a venerable Yiddish firm that was going out of business. We double-parked the truck on Lafayette and entered the dim lobby of an old industrial building. Knight Printing was on the eighth floor. We rang for the elevator, waited what seemed like ten minutes, and finally started up on foot. The stairs were caked in dust, and in front of some doors several years’ accumulation of phone books lay unclaimed. At the eighth floor we knocked on an unmarked steel door and were greeted by Mr. Kupferstein, a small, wiry man who, we soon learned, had owned Knight Printing for the past twenty-two years.

“What are you doing on the stairs?” he wanted to know. “Why didn’t you take the elevator like a
mentsh
?”

We explained that we had pushed the elevator button in the lobby, but it was apparently out of order.

“Out of order? What out of order? Where out of order? The elevator operator has been sitting right here talking with me all morning. When you rang he finished his tea and went downstairs but no one was there—you must have started hiking already—so of course he came back up.”

We stepped inside and sure enough, there was the elevator operator, sitting on a well-worn oak swivel chair inside his elevator, which opened directly onto Mr. Kupferstein’s loft. He wore an English driving cap pulled low over his eyes, and his elevator was decorated with calendar pictures of mountains and beaches. An antique parabolic electric heater whirred at his feet.

“You know, Mr. Kupferstein,” said the elevator man in a strong Yiddish accent, speaking directly to his compatriot and ignoring us altogether, “it just goes to show you, the young people these days, they’re always in a rush, they push the button, they expect the doors to open right away, they forget maybe the elevator operator is a person, too, maybe he’s busy for a minute somewhere else. No, Mr. Kupferstein, times are changing, nobody has time to wait anymore.”

Mr. Kupferstein nodded sadly in agreement. After all, his company was going out of business for that very reason, its old letterpresses and hot-lead Linotypes as obsolete as the books they printed.

“What we had here at Knight Printing was
craftsmanship,
” said Mr. Kupferstein as he showed us around the floor. “We were a union shop, our workers took pride in their work. Today no one wants craftsmanship, no one wants union. Now all they care about is quick, all they care about is cheap.” Over the last decade, he explained, what little Yiddish publishing remained had shifted to nonunion shops run by Hasidim who used computers to set the type and inexpensive offset presses to print it. With his old presses and union crew, he didn’t have a chance.

We followed Mr. Kupferstein to the corner of the large loft; there,
next to packed crates of metal galley trays, chases, wooden “furniture,” quoins, and other tools of hot-type printing, were wooden dollies loaded high with what appeared to be new Yiddish books. Knight had been a contract printer, manufacturing books for many of the largest Yiddish publishers. Piled on the dollies were several hundred samples: one copy of every Yiddish title they had printed over the past sixty years.

Mr. Kupferstein deftly secured the books to the dollies with binder’s twine and then, like the warehousemen we’d met near the Fulton Fish Market, grabbed a heavy metal hook and towed them across the room, where the elevator operator, with practiced professionalism, brandished his own hook and pulled them onto the elevator. We and the books rode downstairs together, and then the two older men helped us carry them from inside the building out to the truck. Despite their age, they showed remarkable strength and agility as they ran back and forth through the rain and slush, covering the piles of loose books with their jackets.

When the job was done we stood together in the entryway to say good-bye. The cold rain pounded against the metal roof of the truck. The elevator operator shook my hand. “Maybe next time you’ll wait for the elevator!” he grumbled. I promised I would do just that. But deep in our hearts all of us—Pat and I, Mr. Kupferstein and the elevator operator—knew that there would be no next time. After six decades and countless thousands of volumes, we had just carried out Knight Printing’s very last load.

It rained harder as we hopped back in the truck and headed for the South Bronx. The week before, a Jewish Consolidated Edison worker had entered an apartment building to check the meters and stumbled over boxes and piles of what he recognized as Yiddish books. He phoned the Workmen’s Circle, and they in turn phoned us.

In the early 1980s, the South Bronx was a war zone. Whole blocks
were burned out. Buildings with broken windows and charred beams alternated with empty lots of brick and rubble. We could see little children staring out of empty window frames on this raw, bone-chilling February morning, whole families living in gutted buildings without water or heat.

It took us a long time to find the address the meter reader had supplied. Many street signs were missing and few buildings had legible numbers. After asking directions several times we finally came to a rundown apartment building, the only intact structure on a block of ruins. Acutely aware of the crime rate in the South Bronx, we were at first apprehensive about leaving the safety of the truck, but as we looked about us we realized that despite the devastation the daily lives of decent people still went on. A gray-haired woman, probably a grandmother, was wheeling a baby carriage, covering the child with an umbrella as she herself bent her head into the driving rain. At the corner grocery a delivery man in a Coca-Cola uniform was unloading crates of soda.

We went up to the apartment building and rang for the super. An elderly black man came to the door. Oh yes, he knew all about the books in the basement. “They belonged to an old Jewish lady, lived in the building since God knows when, died just last month. Far’s I know, she hadn’t kith nor kin, so there was no one to call to come claim her stuff. The landlord told me to clear out her apartment so he could rent it to someone else, so I just took everything and stashed it in the basement. You two can take whatever you want . . . assuming the junkies haven’t beat you to it.”

The super put on his raincoat and led us around back, past a mountain of garbage, into a dark, dank basement. The smell of urine and excrement was overpowering. Piled in a corner, already ransacked, were the Jewish woman’s worldly goods: a bed and mattress, two stuffed chairs, a broken table, a threadbare carpet, kitchenware, bundles of old clothes, empty pill vials scattered in all directions, and beneath it all,
two bookcases lying on their backs, still full of Yiddish books. Pat and I wondered aloud about their owner. As the ethnographer Jack Kugelmass later documented in
The Miracle of Intervale Avenue,
small numbers of immigrant Jews still lived in the South Bronx in the early 1980s, either unwilling or unable to leave the neighborhood they had called home for so long. We met such people ourselves in the course of our subsequent travels: some too feeble to move, living what was left of their lonely lives behind locked doors; others too stubborn to move; and still others too idealistic, determined to live in peace with their neighbors, whoever they may be.