Outwitting History (19 page)

We were still reconnoitering when the landlord appeared, demanding to know who we were and what we were up to. I explained that we were from a nonprofit organization and that we had come to retrieve Yiddish books that were the rightful property of Mrs. Langert and other members of the cooperative. The landlord was Jewish. He was also
prost un farbisn,
coarse and snappish, and he made it clear that he had no sympathy for a Yiddish library, let alone a left-wing Yiddish library that occupied good space and paid no rent. “Anyway, you’re too late,” he said. “I’ve got trucks coming in less than an hour to haul all this junk away. This isn’t a pinko co-op anymore, this is private property and I’m the owner. As far I’m concerned you and your hippie friends are trespassing and I want you out of here
now
!”

Thank God for Sidney Berg. A landlord himself, he stepped forward, introduced himself, and offered a deal: If the man let us have the books, we in turn would give him a receipt that he could use to claim a whopping write-off on his taxes. “All right,” the landlord agreed, “I’ll
give you till four this afternoon. Whatever you can carry out of here between now and then is yours. Whatever’s left goes to the dump.”

We sprang into action—but our progress was painfully slow. It took forever to remove the wood and plaster under which the books were buried. The landlord had just had the whole space fumigated, and as the temperature climbed into the nineties we had to tie bandanas around our faces to keep from gagging on the acrid stench. By noontime we had removed fewer than a thousand books, and it was clear that with just the five of us shlepping, we didn’t have a prayer of finishing by four.

That’s when we realized that a bunch of neighborhood kids had gathered to watch us. When we removed our gloves and masks and stepped outside for a quick lunch in the shade of the truck, an eleven-year-old Puerto Rican boy named Victor came over and asked what we were doing. We explained that the apartment complex had once been a cooperative and that we were saving Jewish books from its former library. Although Victor had come directly from San Juan to the Coops less than two years before, his English was excellent and he responded to this news with greater interest than I would have expected. “Imagine,” he said, “a whole library right here where we live!” When I told him that we were racing to meet a four-o’clock deadline, he looked genuinely surprised. “Do you guys need help here or something?” he asked.

Did we need help! In a flash Victor was off. Ten minutes later he returned with a dozen more black and Puerto Rican kids his age, whom he proceeded to organize into a brigade snaking from the library to the truck. I think every kid in the neighborhood ended up shlepping books that day—with the exception of Victor himself, who in light of his linguistic and managerial talents appointed himself foreman and stood at the top of the stairs supervising everyone else. Sidney went off twice to buy cold Coca-Cola to fuel the troops; other than that, they worked without stopping. By the time four o’clock rolled around, the job was
done. Almost fourteen thousand books lay safely stacked in the back of the truck. For Victor, new to the neighborhood, it was a personal triumph: He had proved himself a leader. For Mrs. Langert it was also a triumph, although of a somewhat more political nature: Despite her sadness at the loss of the library, she was proud to have played such a crucial role in its rescue. Even more, she was proud of the way the library had been saved—all those local boys, black and Puerto Rican, passing Jewish books from hand to hand was, in her eyes, a shining example of working-class solidarity prevailing over racial and ethnic divides. In its final hour, its library in ruins and its books about to be driven off to points unknown, the Coops’ progressive vision had been realized at last.

When we got back to Amherst, our truck groaning under the weight of the Coops’ library, we were greeted by a half-dozen staff members and volunteers and, as fate would have it, by Dr. Elias Shulman, a frequent visitor to the Center, an accomplished historian of Yiddish literature, and editor of
Di tsukunft (The Future),
the oldest of the Yiddish literary magazines. Dr. Shulman was a
farbrenter
(passionate) anticommunist, and when he learned where the fourteen thousand books on the truck had come from, he couldn’t help but gloat.

“So this is what the
linke
(the leftists, the Jewish communists) have come to,” he tsked. “It just goes to show you. They don’t care about Yiddish and they never did. For them Yiddish was just window dressing. If they really valued their books, they wouldn’t have let them end up this way!”

As it turned out, the final disposition of the Coops library was not as dire as Dr. Shulman might have imagined. Once we sorted them out, we sent several hundred of the most valuable volumes to the Bodleian Library, at Oxford University, and most of the remaining books to a handful of other major university and research libraries. But how did
Mel Brooks put it? “We mock the thing we are to be.” Deep in his heart Dr. Shulman must have known that the downfall of the Coops library was a result of its demographics, not its ideology, and he must have feared a similar fate for his movement as well.

Which was sad, because I liked Dr. Shulman. This tall man in a silk ascot possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of Yiddish literature, which he shared unstintingly with me and other members of our staff. He was European born but American educated (apart from two years as an
aspirant,
a research fellow at the Vilna YIVO), he was married to an American-born woman (an accomplished watercolor artist), and he spoke English with only the slightest trace of a Yiddish accent. For all that, it was no easier for him than for most people in the Yiddish world to communicate with an American-born generation.

I once invited Dr. Shulman to deliver a public lecture at the Center. I forgot to say that by that time we had moved from our original factory loft into an old redbrick schoolhouse in Amherst, which we rented from the town for a token sum. The only problem was that we couldn’t afford to heat the building, so our few staff members usually worked huddled around a kerosene heater in the middle of a first-floor office. When Dr. Shulman arrived, we decided to fire up the big steam boiler in his honor. That was a mistake, because as the building heated up, several dozen dormant flies felt the warmth and came back to life, dive-bombing the overhead fluorescent lights of our public reading room just as the lecture began. That wasn’t all. Dr. Shulman was of the old school who insisted on reading their lectures verbatim, and he needed a podium, which we didn’t have. Sharon improvised by stacking four boxes of books and covering them with a
shmate,
a rag, in this case a shabby, red cotton horse blanket. Fifty people crowded into the room, most of them young and all of them enthusiastic. Dr. Shulman was in fine spirits, buoyed by the audience. But the minute he stepped to the makeshift podium he turned stiff and formal and began reading
his lecture from a prodigious stack of yellowed three-by-five cards. He mumbled. The radiators hissed. The flies whapped against the lights. At one point he began reading from a book he was discussing, Chaim Grade’s
Musernikes (Mussar Students),
a thin paperbound volume published in Vilna in 1939. When he turned the brittle pages they literally crumbled in his hands, and as he continued reading, the fragments fell in a steady rain until the red blanket was festooned with crumbs of brown paper. My old teacher Leonard Glick leaned across Sharon to whisper in my ear, “This isn’t a lecture, it’s a metaphor!” The radiators went on hissing and the speaker went on droning, until, on my right, to my horror, I could feel a volcano stirring: Sharon was giggling!

There’s a Yiddish expression for uncontrollable laughter:
“Der nar shtupt mikh
(the fool is pushing me).” It was contagious: crowded
pulke
to
pulke,
thigh to thigh, I could feel Sharon’s shaking, and before long the
nar
was shtupping me as well. I clapped my red bandana over my mouth, but I too started shaking, tears rolling down my face, which only got Sharon going more.
Hiss! Whap! Drone!
Sharon had her bandana out too: two paroxysmal cowboys at the front of the room for all to see. We were seconds from disaster when suddenly, deus ex machina, Dr. Shulman dropped his cards. Talk about fifty-two-card pickup— three hundred yellowed index cards went cascading down the horse blanket and onto the floor! Dr. Shulman was on his hands and knees, members of the audience jumped up to help—and in the confusion Sharon and I made a mad dash for the door,
pppffft,
hands over our mouths, just one step ahead of the explosion.

I don’t remember exactly what happened next. We took refuge in the bathroom, splashed cold water on our faces, and somehow managed to compose ourselves. After five more minutes of chaos Dr. Shulman reshuffled the cards as best he could and continued reading as before, although his lecture had now turned kaleidoscopic, the paragraphs hopelessly out of order. By that point it didn’t really matter,
most people having lost track of the lecture long since. Even when language was no barrier, communication between the old Yiddish world and the new wasn’t easy.

Although we booked no further lectures for Dr. Shulman, he and I remained good friends. I went often to his apartment in Greenwich Village to discuss Yiddish literature. He suggested books to read, and we discussed them the next time I came. For me our private tutorials were a gift of knowledge to be found nowhere else; and for him, I think, they offered a glimmer of continuity—the hope that at least an echo of his vast learning would live on after he was gone. But even he could not refrain entirely from the dark humor of the Yiddish world. When, in the face of dwindling readership, the
Forward
switched from daily to weekly publication, he told me that Yiddish writers were now trying to figure out a way to die on a Thursday “so they can make the weekly deadline and someone will show up for their funeral.” And though he ridiculed the communist Coops for losing their library, I think he was not all that surprised when, a year later, his magazine and a host of other like-minded, anticommunist, socialist Yiddish organizations were forced to give up the building where they had been housed for decades and leave many of their own treasured Yiddish books behind.

Here’s how it happened. For many years, the Atran House, a large, comfortable building at East Seventy-eighth Street, had been home to many socialist Yiddish groups, including the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Bund Archives, CYCO (the Central Yiddish Cultural Organization), and
Di Zukunft (The Future),
Dr. Shulman’s magazine. There was only one problem: The building was owned by the Atran Foundation, whose bitterly divided board was now dominated by third-generation family members who did not share their late grandfathers’ interest in Yiddish culture. When real estate prices went through the roof and they were offered a substantial sum
for the Atran property, they decided to sell. Their plan was to relocate the Yiddish groups to smaller, cheaper space elsewhere in New York, and then use the difference in cost to help fund Jewish nursing homes in Florida.

Rumors of the imminent demise of the Atran House had been circulating for several years, but whenever we checked with the tenant organizations they steadfastly denied it. Proud, defensive, suspicious of everyone, they insisted that their ailing organizations were as healthy as ever, their space was as secure as ever, and there was therefore absolutely no need for them to jettison their Yiddish books. We tried to be as deferential as possible—we respected their past accomplishments and didn’t think it our place to shatter the illusions of their declining years—and so we kept our distance, reminding them only that we were there if and when they needed us. Unfortunately, by the time they were finally willing to admit what was happening to call for help (it turned out that they had known the sale date for almost a year and had been packing for months), it was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and the building had to be completely vacated by Wednesday afternoon. That left us exactly two days to remove almost fifteen thousand Yiddish books that, for lack of space in their new quarters, they could not take with them.

Sharon was off speaking in Cleveland the day the call came in. I tracked her down by phone, and she was able to rebook her return flight so as to rendezvous with us the next morning in New York. Noah, who had just returned home from college for his Thanksgiving vacation, agreed to drive down with me that night. I phoned the Ryder office in Manhattan and arranged for the one-way rental of a large truck. That evening, at about seven o’clock, Noah and I loaded handtrucks and dollies into the back of my big Ford station wagon, stopped to pick up juice and sandwiches, and then set out for New York.

Noah was at the wheel and I was in the passenger seat eating an avocado
and cheese sandwich when, cresting a bridge over the Connecticut River at thirty-five miles an hour, we watched in sudden horror as the headlights of an oncoming car turned directly into our path. What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion: the moment of impact, breaking glass, crumpled metal, the seat belt forcing the air from my chest, and then, ever so slowly, the realization that I was still alive. Noah was slumped over the twisted wheel. “I never saw him coming,” he sobbed. I assured him it wasn’t his fault, and then, because his right hand was hurt and because his own door was crushed, I helped him out through the passenger-side window. Together we ran over to the other driver, who was still sitting at the wheel of what little remained of his late-model sports car. His nose was bleeding and he seemed to have lost several front teeth. “It’s my father-in-law’s car,” he moaned, his mouth foaming with blood. “I got no insurance, man. I got no insurance.”

The police and ambulances arrived almost immediately. A friend happened to be driving by, and I vaguely remember asking her to help me remove the Book Center’s handtrucks from the back of the station wagon. Both cars were a total loss. At the hospital the other driver was treated for a broken nose, two missing teeth, and a mild concussion. Noah had a badly sprained right hand, and I had five bruised ribs. Other than that, we had been very lucky. The doctor bandaged my ribs, gave me a prescription for painkillers, and told me to lie in bed for the next three days. Under the circumstances, that was hardly an option. A board member, Rich Alpert, came to the hospital and drove me to a friend’s house. I managed to catch Sharon in Cleveland (she had just finished her lecture) and we agreed to postpone the pickup until Wednesday. I phoned Ryder to change the reservation, then took a good shot of
shnaps,
climbed upstairs, and fell into bed.