Outwitting History (14 page)

During all this monologue neither Sam nor Leah—we were already on a first-name basis—ever stopped moving. They walked back and forth to the tiny kitchen, returning each time with another heaping platter of Jewish food: matzo brie, herring in cream sauce,
lokshn kugl,
latkes, blintzes. When we protested, Mrs. Ostroff assured us it was no trouble: “
Mir zenen shoyn tsugevoynt
. We’re used to it already.” She explained that Sea Gate was once the summer home of many of New York’s greatest Yiddish writers: I. J. Singer, Peretz Hirschbein, Avrom Reisen, Moyshe Nadir, Itzik Manger. Even the young Isaac Bashevis Singer lived there when he first came to America. (He later wrote, “Sea Gate was a quiet little village of retired people, Jews, intelligentsia. And Coney Island was Coney Island. When I went out from Sea Gate to Coney Island I went from paradise into hell. I couldn’t believe that such a quiet place and such a loud place could exist next to each other.”)

The Ostroffs’ next-door neighbor was Marjorie Guthrie’s mother, Aliza Greenblatt, who wrote a book called
Si Geyt afn yam (Sea Gate by the Sea)
. Two doors down lived Israel Zetser, a scholar of Jewish mysticism. “Zetser, he was a little strange,” Mrs. Ostroff confided. “Most people didn’t know, but he was a polar bear. Every morning he went down to the beach to swim in the ocean, even on the coldest days. We used to see him when he walked home in the wintertime, the icicles were hanging off his trunks.”

Another neighbor and close friend was the Yiddish actress Bella Ballerina. As Roger, Fran, and I progressed from the matzo brie to the
kugl,
Mrs. Ostroff told us that Bella Ballerina had once been in a play on Second Avenue where she portrayed a Jewish woman who abandoned her children to run off with another man. “For years after that she couldn’t walk down the street without people yelling at her and spitting. ‘
Feh!’
they would say, ‘leaving three little children like that. How could you do such a thing?’”

Of course, none of these Yiddish writers, actors, and intellectuals made much of a living. Where did they congregate when they came to Sea Gate? “In our home!” Sam said proudly. Since Sam and Lea actually
worked
for a living, he as a plumber and she as a pattern maker and seamstress, and since they only had one child, they could afford to keep a huge apartment, occupying the whole second floor of a big house across the street from the main hotel where they lived now. At night they would cook great feasts, and all the writers and intellectuals would come over to eat and talk.

“Oy, what talking!” Mrs. Ostroff remembered, clapping her hands to her cheeks. “We had a big balcony where we set up chairs. The writers would come and they’d talk about literature, politics, Jewish culture. And what arguments! My non-Jewish neighbors, they used to wonder, ‘What do you do over there? People come over, you don’t play cards, you don’t listen to the radio, all you do is talk. Talk, talk, talk, night after night. What is there so much to talk about?’”

“Often we would stay up till two or three in the morning,” Sam added. “At three-thirty I would go to bed, at five-thirty I had to be up to go to work. But I didn’t mind, because culture,
Yiddish
culture, for us that was the most important thing in the world.”

Remembering the Ostroffs after all these years, I’m amazed by how much ground we covered—and how much food we ate—in just that first visit. Among the many writers the Ostroffs recalled, perhaps the
most memorable was Itzik Manger, author of the
Khumesh lider (Bible Poems),
a cycle in which the familiar characters of the Bible are transformed into Yiddish-speaking Jews. Abraham, for example, wears a long Hasidic coat and eats gefilte fish, Isaac studies Talmud with his children, and Leah cries her eyes out over silly French novels. The anachronisms are funny, but they also serve to underscore Jews’ seamless sense of history and the evolving nature of Jewish identity—how the
rakhmones,
the empathy and sensibility gleaned from a few thousand years of exile, can be read back into our own history. Take, for example, one of the more unsettling stories in the Bible, in which, at Sarah’s insistence, Abraham exiles his lover Hagar and their son Ishmael to the desert, knowing they will almost certainly die. As Abraham haggles with a local peasant for their passage, Hagar pours out her heart—in Yiddish—to her son:

Veyn nisht, Yishmeylikl tate,
Azoy iz undz shoyn bashert,
Ot azoy firn zikh di oves
Mit di lange frume berd.

This is our portion, Ishmael;
Darling, dry your tears.
This is the way of the Fathers
With their long and reverend beards.

Manger was brilliant, but he was also rootless, hard-drinking, and self-destructive. Born in rural Romania, he was a literary sensation in Warsaw as a young man, dodged the Holocaust by working on a British ship, lived with a non-Jewish woman in England, moved to France, and in 1951 took passage to America, where, in his own words, “financially, physically and spiritually bankrupt,” he eventually washed up at the Ostroffs’ door.

“For so many years we had read Manger’s work,” Leah Ostroff recounted. “Now here he is, no money, no friends. So Sam and I took care on him.” The Ostroffs organized an evening in his honor and raised $300. Manger called the Ostroffs
folksyidn,
“my kind of Jews,” and became a regular guest in their home. In later years, when he hit rock bottom, he moved in with them altogether and lived there for two years.

“Of course we loved to have him,” Mrs. Ostroff explained. “But I’ll tell you the truth, sometimes it got a little difficult. Our son Nokhum was still young yet, and when he’d be sitting watching television Manger would come in and change the channel. Nokhum would come running to me, ‘Mama, Mama, Manger changed the channel.’ I’d wipe his tears, but I’d have to explain to him that Manger is a very great writer, if he wants to watch a certain show we have to let him watch. It wasn’t so easy, but what else could we do?”

Another frequent guest at the Ostroffs’ home was Arlo Guthrie. After Woody got sick, Marjorie would take Arlo to spend the day with his grandmother, Aliza Greenblatt, who took him next door to the Ostroffs’. “Arlo used to call me
Der Professor,
” Mr. Ostroff told us. “‘Oy,’ he would scream, ‘
der Professor kitselt,
the Professor is tickling me.’”

Now, of course, Arlo was grown up, Aliza Greenblatt was dead, and the Yiddish writers, actors, and intellectuals who frequented the Ostroffs’ home had all passed on. Which may explain why the Ostroffs welcomed us with such open arms. After Fran, Roger, and I had eaten our last spoonful of compote, Mr. Ostroff poured us each a glass of
shnaps,
wished us
L’khayim,
and then said, “Okay, now let’s get down to business. In whatever time Leah and I have left, we’re ready to work. We have no more writers to take care on, so we’ve talked it over and now we want to become your biggest zamlers.” All we had to do, they said, was leave it to them, and they would assume sole responsibility
for collecting Yiddish books in Sea Gate, Coney Island, and Brighton Beach.

We gladly agreed. During the coming weeks Sam posted hand-painted signs on telephone poles throughout the area:
Az ir hot alte yidishe bikher, iz klingt on Ostroff
(If You Have Old Yiddish Books, Then Phone Ostroff). Business was good, especially in Brighton Beach, where newly arrived Soviet immigrants were displacing an older Jewish population and everyone, it seemed, had Yiddish books to donate before they moved.

For all his energy, after five heart attacks Mr. Ostroff could not actually carry the books himself. Instead he and Leah acted as the advance team: They’d go to see people in their big, old Pontiac, confirm what was there, and schedule a time for “the young people to come with the truck.” Every two weeks, like clockwork, we’d arrive at the Ostroffs’ door. After feeding us (“You can’t lift boxes on an empty stomach!”) they’d climb into the truck with us and off we’d go. Somehow Mr. Ostroff got the idea that my friend Roger was my valet: He called him “Rogers!” and expected him to do all the shlepping himself. Every time I’d prop a heavy box onto my shoulder he would berate me, “Lahnsky,
s’past nisht,
you shouldn’t be shlepping yourself, you haven’t got the build for it. Let Rogers take it.”

Mr. Ostroff felt it was not enough that people just give books: They should also become zamlers. Once, he spent fifteen minutes trying to convince a ninety-eight-year-old man to hang posters outside his building. The man kept smiling and nodding his head and Mr. Ostroff kept speaking louder and louder until the man’s wife finally came out of the kitchen and politely informed us that her husband was deaf.

Sometimes Mrs. Ostroff stayed home (“I want to have a meal ready; you’ll be hungry when you get back”). Then all the widows would flirt with Sam. They loved it when we asked them to stand beside him to pose for pictures. “And why not? I’ll take any excuse to hug such a nice man.”

M
OST OF OUR
encounters with older Jews consisted of a single, oft-times emotional meeting: They’d feed us, tell us their stories, hand us their books, and before we had time to dry our tears or wipe the lipstick off our cheeks, we were already back in the truck, rushing to the next stop to start the process all over again. With the Ostroffs it was different. We spoke regularly by phone, exchanged letters, and spent a full day with them every other week. Sometimes, after collecting books elsewhere in New York, we’d drop by just for a social call. Not only did they feed us, but no matter how blue or discouraged we might be, they were always able to lift our spirits and remind us—just by being themselves—why we were collecting Yiddish books in the first place. Sometimes, after a meal, they would bring out boxes of old photographs and tell us stories. What was most striking was how respectful they were of one another. They held hands, they exchanged smiles, they took turns
kvell
ing, beaming with pride, while the other spoke—except, of course, when they both happened to be speaking at once. “
Ir zent undzere kinder.
You are our children,” Mrs. Ostroff once said, and month after month she and Sam did their best to bequeath their
yerushe,
the stories of their lives. For me they represented a civilization—they were as close as I was likely to get to the lost, living world of Yiddish literature. So I often placed a tape recorder on the table, propped between matching bowls of horseradish and sauerkraut, to capture what they had to say. Sam called it
der geylem,
the golem, the monster. Sometimes, when they came to the juiciest part of a story, they’d say “Now this the
geylem
can’t hear,” and they’d make me shut it off. But most of the time they forgot it was there. Here, gleaned from those tapes, in their own words, are the broad outlines of their lives, a portrait of what I. J. Singer called
“a velt vos iz nishto mer
(a world which is no more).
”

L
EAH BEGINS
:

“Me, I come from Vilna. I was born in 1907. Vilna in those days was known as
Yerushalayim d’Lite,
the Jerusalem of Lithuania. It was a city of
scholars, of learning. Believe me, it was some
yikhes,
it was really something to be born in such a city.

“What went on during the [First World] War don’t ask. I was separated from my mother and my sisters, I lived with a neighbor, we didn’t have what to eat. Before the war I went to Russian school. After the war, when my mother came back, she sent me to Yiddish school. We had to speak only Yiddish; they charged us a penalty if we spoke a word of Russian. We wanted to go to America, but it wasn’t so easy. My father died, and then we couldn’t get a visa. So finally my mother decided we would
ganvenen dem grenets,
cross the border illegally. My uncle in America wired the money. On the way over, in Antwerp, there was a quarantine, we had to go through an inspection. They took us into a bathhouse, we had showers, then the doctors came and examined us. They looked everywhere, in the hair, even in the underwear, to make sure that you’re clean. So I thought, they go to all this trouble, when I get to America it’s going to be cleaner than what we had in Poland, it’s going to be immaculate.

“But then we got to Ellis Island, we had to wait two days for my uncle to come for us. I never saw a cockroach in my life before I got to Ellis Island—but the cockroaches there! So already I’m a little disappointed. Then my uncle came and we left Ellis Island and we came to the Lower East Side and I saw the big tenement apartments with the lines of clothes, the bloomers, the brassieres, the girdles. And then the streets—
azoy shmutsik,
so dirty like I never saw in Poland. So my uncle looks at me and he can see that I’m sitting like this and he says, ‘What’s the matter?’

“I didn’t know what to say. I asked him, ‘Is this New York already?’

“He said, ‘Yes, this is New York.’

“I was so disappointed. But I didn’t say anything. I figured look, the man tried so hard, he spent a lot of money to bring over a family of seven, so I didn’t say a thing.”

Eventually Leah and her family found an apartment of their own. She went to school, became active in Yiddish cultural organizations, learned English, and studied dressmaking.

“As hard it was,” she concluded, “my life was easy compared with Sam.”

S
AM’S STORY
:

Sam was born in Zabludow, a shtetl in White Russia, in 1900. In many ways his story is the story of Jews in the twentieth century, for, perhaps more than most, his life was shaped by the larger historical events that shook the world.

At the age of six he entered
kheyder,
Jewish religious school, where he learned Hebrew and traditional Jewish texts. Later, at a modern school, he studied Russian and basic German. In 1915, when the Germans invaded White Russia, he was pressed into service on a German road crew.

“I was just fifteen. I said good-bye to my mother, I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again. The Germans paid us ninety pfennigs for a twelve-hour day. A loaf of bread cost a mark. So I did a little business with benzoil [gasoline] on the black market. Two people got arrested, an official shot himself, but me they never caught.