Outwitting History (6 page)

I arranged things with my parents and returned to Montreal with my rucksack and two heavy shopping bags full of books. I was beginning to suspect that unwanted Yiddish books were a problem not only in Ohio and New Bedford, but in communities throughout North America. After all, immigrant Jews had been voracious readers. When they died, their treasured Yiddish libraries were left to children or grandchildren who couldn’t read the language. In the best of cases books were preserved in synagogue libraries or stored in cellars or attics for safekeeping; more often, it seemed, they ended up shredded, buried, or thrown out with the trash.

Admittedly, at the time, I was looking for Yiddish books strictly for my own use, and I figured that if I could just walk into a synagogue and find them in a small city such as New Bedford, imagine what lay in store in a city as big as Montreal, with a Jewish population forty times as large! And so, as nonchalantly as I could manage, I let it be known in my own Montreal neighborhood that I personally, a young graduate student, was interested in Yiddish books.

Almost immediately people started calling: widows and widowers, children and grandchildren. Within days I was racing around the city on my bicycle, then on a moped with a milk crate bolted to the back, and finally in a borrowed station wagon. When the local Jewish high school decided to clear its shelves of “surplus” books, they offered me a two-thousand-volume Yiddish library. I rented a van, hired two neighborhood kids, and carried all the books up to my apartment. That night my fellow grad student Borukh Hill, Ruth Wisse, and I crouched on my living room floor and opened boxes, sorting through hundreds of dusty volumes and dividing the books among us. My share included two crucial reference works: a complete, ornately bound, four-volume set of Zalman Rejzen’s
Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (Lexicon of Yiddish Literature, Press and Philology),
a pioneering biographical dictionary of Yiddish literature, published in Vilna between 1926 and 1929; and, a bit less practical but no less enjoyable, Nahum Stutchkoff’s 35,000-word
Yidisher gramen-leksikon,
the first and only
Yiddish Rhyming Dictionary,
published in New York in 1931. Both Ruth and Borukh went away with treasures of their own.

Meanwhile the calls continued. Before I knew it Yiddish books covered every square inch of my living room floor, then the hallway and the kitchen. When the piles spilled over into the bedroom, my new girlfriend decided enough was enough. I responded by buying a big, colorful Guatemalan hammock, which I suspended high over the growing mountain of books on the bedroom floor. That provided enough novelty to smooth things over for a while. But a week later my parents
were on the phone from Massachusetts, and now
they
were issuing ultimata: The rabbi had given them so many Yiddish books that they were afraid the second story of their house was about to collapse.

Even I had to admit the situation was getting out of control. The next day—I remember the exact moment—I was sitting in class at McGill. Sleet pounded against the window pane, the lecture droned, the radiator hissed, and suddenly, like that, the idea came to me: I would take a leave of absence to save the world’s Yiddish books before it was too late. When I shared the idea with Ruth she could not have been more supportive. At the end of the semester I loaded my now formidable personal library onto a U-Haul truck and headed south, where untold Yiddish books—and a very different sort of Yiddish education—awaited.

Dear Mr. Lansky,

I thank you for your interest in Yiddish books. I hope you are interested in Hebrew also as I have books in both languages to give away. I am a very old man and I am afraid that after I will be gone they may throw them in the trash. Please do help me out.

Your Respectfully,
Norman Temmelman

In late July of 1980, I emptied my bank account, packed my ruck-sack, rented a van, and set out on the road for the first time. My plan was to begin with Mr. Temmelman in Atlantic City, then make additional stops in Philadelphia and New York. I figured that if I left Amherst early enough, I could do it all in a single day.

As I soon discovered, just scheduling such a trip was a workout. My knowledge of East Coast geography was imperfect, and when I phoned people to get directions and set a time for pickup, they were often so eager to talk, they wouldn’t let me off the phone.

All except Mr. Temmelman. He, it turned out, didn’t have a phone.
So I sent him a telegram letting him know when I’d arrive. On the appointed day I left Amherst early and made it to Atlantic City by noon. Mr. Temmelman’s address turned out to be a high-rise building for the Jewish elderly just off the boardwalk, a block from one of the city’s sprawling new casinos.

I entered the lobby and was immediately approached by a very old man wearing a heavy, dark wool suit on this steaming summer day.

“Mr. Lahnsky?” he asked in an unmistakable Yiddish accent.

“Mr. Temmelman?”

He smiled and shook my hand. “I’ve been waiting here in the lobby since seven this morning, I didn’t want I should miss you.” He took me firmly by the arm and led me up the elevator to his fifth-floor apartment. He lived in a single room. In one corner were a narrow bed and a metal nightstand piled with bottles of pills, in the other were a sink, a hot plate, and a kitchen table covered with stacks of bills and papers. The rest of the room was taken up with bookcases and cardboard boxes filled with hundreds of Yiddish and Hebrew books.

Mr. Temmelman put a kettle on the hot plate and set out a bowl of sugar cubes and two glasses for tea.

“Have you lived here long?” I asked.

“Oh no, we had a regular house. But three years ago my wife,
olehasholem
(may she rest in peace), died, and I had to move here, for the elderly. I left the furniture behind, but the books I brought with me.” He was eighty-seven years old, he told me, and was about to leave on a trip to visit relatives in Israel. At his age he might not return, and he wanted to make sure his books were taken care of before he left.

I had figured book collection meant picking up boxes, carrying them out to the truck, and
fartig,
you’re done and it’s time to move on to the next stop. Instead, Mr. Temmelman insisted I join him at the kitchen table, where, for what seemed like hours, we sipped tea, sucked on sugar
cubes, and talked. When it came time to part with his books, his eyes welled with tears as he began handing them to me, one volume at a time.

“This book,” he recalled, pulling a handsome volume of Zishe Landau’s
Lider (Poems)
from a cardboard box, “this book I bought in 1937. It had just come out, it was a very important book, my wife and I we went without lunch for a week we should be able to afford it. And
this
book,” he said, holding aloft a yellowed copy of
Ven Yash iz geforn (When Yash Set Forth),
Jacob Glatstein’s powerful account of his travels in interwar Europe, “have you read this book?”

“Well, no, actually I haven’t,” I conceded.

“In that case, I want you should sit down right now and read this book.”

It was a long afternoon. Every book he handed me had its story. This wasn’t at all what I expected, and too spellbound and polite to interrupt, I fell hours behind schedule. But I did begin to understand what was taking place. Sitting together in that crowded apartment—he an eighty-seven-year-old man in a wool suit, I a bearded twenty-four-year-old in jeans and a T-shirt—we were enacting a ritual of cultural transmission. He was handing me not merely his books but his world, his
yerushe,
the inheritance his own children had rejected. I was a stranger, but he had no other choice: Book by book, he was placing all his hopes in me.

It was late afternoon before I was finally able to carry the books out to the van. I made a few quick calls from a pay phone in the lobby to apologize to the next people on the list. And then, as I opened the door to the van and was about to drive off, Mr. Temmelman came running over, grabbed hold of my arm, and spoke in Yiddish.
“Eyn minut, yungerman, vuhin loyfstu
? (One minute, young man, where are you running?)”

“Where am I running? I’m heading to Philadelphia and then on to New York. I have other stops to make, I’m hours behind schedule and—”

“
Oy yungerman, ir farshteyt nisht
(Oy, young man, you don’t understand). When I got your telegram I told everyone in the building you were coming. They also have books for you!”

I peered up at the twelve-story building.

“
All
of them have books?”

“
Vu den?
Of course all of them!” he responded, proudly indicating the full height of the building with a sweep of his hand. We walked back inside, Mr. Temmelman leading the way, and proceeded floor by floor, knocking at every door.

“Zayt mir moykhl,”
he’d say,
“ober der yungerman darf hobn bikher
(Excuse me, but this young man here needs books).”

People smiled. They clapped their hands. They came out with shopping bags, cardboard boxes, wicker baskets, suitcases . . . all filled with Yiddish books. To a greater or lesser degree, every person had to enact the same ritual of cultural transmission. They sat me down at their kitchen tables and poured
a glezele tey,
a glass of hot tea, which they served with homemade cookies,
lokshn kuglekh
(noodle puddings), or Entenmann’s cakes. They all told stories. Some cried. One, a retired tailor, made me sit for twenty minutes while he stood and recited his latest Yiddish poetry. Everyone made sure I ate, at least half tried to fix me up with their granddaughters, and they all kissed me when I left. The sun was low in the sky when I finally said good-bye to Mr. Temmelman. By that time the van was so overloaded that the muffler scraped bottom at every bump, and I for my part was so full of tea and cake that I had to stop at every gas station between there and Philadelphia.

My first inclination after leaving Montreal in the spring of 1979 was to make New York my home base, since, to paraphrase Willy Sutton, that’s where the books were. But my teacher, Ruth Wisse, was dead set against it. The politics of the Jewish world there were too contentious, she explained, and the rancor of the Yiddish world was even worse. “If you’re going to succeed,” she insisted, “you have to start fresh. What you need is a Jewishly neutral location.” So I returned to Amherst, the New England town where I had gone to college, moved in with friends, and, while finishing my master’s thesis, began to lay the groundwork for what I was calling the National Yiddish Book Exchange. (Two years later we changed the name to National Yiddish Book Center, to reflect our expanding mission; for the sake of consistency, in this book I have used Center throughout.)

At the age of twenty-three, the first thing I needed was credibility, so I wrote letters to prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals. The response was heartening. Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin said it was “an idea whose time has come.” Joshua Fishman, distinguished professor of linguistics at Columbia, called it “the only truly brilliant substantive/administrative plan suggested in the entire Yiddish Studies field in the
past decade.” And Saul Bellow spoke from personal experience: “I was recently given a set of the complete works of Sholem Aleichem from a woman who didn’t know what to do with them and would otherwise have thrown them out. So I understand the urgency and wish you good luck.”

While universally supportive, almost every letter carried the same caveat:
Hurry
—it may already be too late! I consulted with scholars who, after some deliberation, estimated that there were seventy thousand Yiddish volumes extant and recoverable in North America. I figured it would take me two years to collect them all. But first I needed money: approximately $10,000, I thought, to cover the cost of a truck, gas, insurance, travel expenses, storage, and a modest living allowance for myself. So I sent off proposals to the major Jewish organizations, cut my hair, trimmed my beard, ironed my shirt, borrowed a suit and tie from a friend, and boarded the train for New York.

For the next two days I trudged from office to office, meeting with the leaders of the American Jewish community. My enthusiasm matched only by my naïveté, I assumed they’d review my proposal, listen to my irrefutable arguments (a chance to rescue an entire literature, after all!), ask a few probing questions (all easily parried), confirm my qualifications, applaud my initiative, and hand me a check. Instead, across one titanic desk after another, I met not with encouragement and support but condescension and dismissal:

“
Yiddish
books? You want us to help you save books in
Yiddish
? Why? Who cares? Don’t you know that Yiddish is dead?”

Admittedly, some were kinder than others, but the sentiments remained:

“The Jewish future lies with Hebrew, not Yiddish.”

“Only
bubbies
read Yiddish anymore.”

“Your plan is a throwback, an anachronism.”

“You’re riding the wrong horse, barking up the wrong tree; why don’t you just go back to school and forget the whole idea?”

“I don’t think you understand,” I protested. “If we don’t save these books now they’ll be lost
forever
! We as a people can’t afford to lose our literature, our history, our culture. . . .”

S’hot geholfn vi a toytn bankes
—it helped like cupping helps a corpse. At first I took it personally: Maybe my proposal wasn’t clear enough, my borrowed suit didn’t fit properly, I’d done a poor job ironing. But after listening to the same riff three, four, five times in a row, I began to see that it didn’t matter how long my proposal or how short my hair. The priorities of the Jewish establishment had been set in stone years before: Israel, anti-Semitism, social services. In 1980 the national allocation for culture—literature, history, continuity, creativity—was less than one tenth of one percent of the total monies raised.