Outwitting History (9 page)

According to our clipboard, there were two boxes awaiting us at the Geriatric Center. When we arrived a tired-looking social worker led us down to the basement. There were two boxes all right, but they were the kind used to pack full-size refrigerators, and each was piled to the top with Yiddish books.

Roger went out to the truck and returned with two coils of manila rope. We lashed the first box to the hand truck and the three of us tried to heft it back. No luck—it must have weighed five hundred pounds, and there was no way we were going to budge it. So we were left with no alternative: We had to unload both boxes and spend the next hour carrying the books, loose, out to the truck. Fran said that next time she scheduled a pick-up she would ask people to define the word “box.”

We made three more stops in Brooklyn and then headed over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for New Jersey. By now we were even
further behind schedule, and Fran phoned several people to reschedule for the next day. (What a shame cell phones weren’t widely available yet, what with our constant rearranging and apologizing.) We had developed a routine of sorts in the truck. Roger, a nondriver but the only resident New Yorker among us, insisted upon occupying the single passenger’s seat so that he could “navigate.” That left me at the wheel and Fran in the middle, balanced on boxes jammed as tightly as possible between the two seats. Traffic was heavy that late in the afternoon, and as we inched along we passed the time by singing the lyrics of every driving song we knew: “I’ve been doin’ some hard travellin’,” “Take me riding in a car car,” “She’s a little old lady from Pasadena,” “Me and my Bobby McGee.” When we ran out of songs we started making up our own, such as this impromptu version of “Lonesome Valley”:

You gotta shlep
Them Yiddish books now,
You gotta shlep
Them by yourself,
Ain’t nobody here
Gonna shlep ‘em for you,
You gotta shlepppppppp
‘Em by yourself.

We tried Yiddish songs too, along with black spirituals, Frank Sinatra, folk songs, rock songs, campfire songs (Roger and I had both been Eagle Scouts), and protest songs gleaned from the
IWW Songbook
. Our singing was spirited but cacophonous, prompting Fran to suggest that next time we bring along an extra crew: “We can carry the books while they carry the tune.”

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Jersey
With these Yiddish books again?

Like us, our repertoire was pretty much exhausted by the time we reached Passaic. After driving past rows of run-down factories we reached our destination: a synagogue where six boxes were supposed to be waiting for us at the back of a basement coatroom. The rabbi told us he didn’t know where the books came from or how long they had been there, and he apologized because many were not Yiddish but Hebrew.

This wasn’t great news: Several times in the past we had driven many miles, only to be weighed down with
siddurim
and
makhzeyrim,
old, worn-out Hebrew prayer books. But as soon as we pushed through the crowded coat room and opened the boxes, we realized that these books were something else entirely. Most were leather-bound tomes printed on rag paper, which likely dated them before 1850, when pulp paper was introduced. Along with volumes of Talmud were dozens of nineteenth-century rabbinic commentaries and an edition of
Yossipon,
a compilation of Hebrew writings by, among others, Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian. Distinguished by magnificent woodcuts, the book was one of the oldest we’d ever found, published in Durenfurth, Silesia, in 1759.

It was already dark and we were considerably more subdued by the time we returned to Manhattan. There were still two more stops to go. The first was at an elegant apartment building on Central Park West, where a group of cousins had gathered to divide the estate of their late great-aunt. By this point we must have looked pretty grungy, because the doorman, in his red coat with gold braid, curtly sent us around back, out past the garbage cans, to the freight elevator, where a sign read All Delivery Men, Repair Men, and Domestics
Must
Use This Elevator.

Up in the aunt’s apartment, the half dozen cousins didn’t treat us much better. They were our age or a little older, drinking white wine out of antique crystal while they argued over who got what from their great-aunt’s estate.

“If you get the rug, then I want
both
lamps!”

Clearly no one thought their aunt’s Yiddish books were worth very much, because they left us to empty her bookcase while they continued quarreling in the next room. The irony was that their aunt’s library included some extraordinary volumes that one day could be worth more than all the furniture and
tshatshkes
combined. There were, for example, at least a dozen art books, including Avrom Sutzkever’s
Sibir (Siberia),
a large-format volume of poetry based on the author’s childhood in exile, powerfully illustrated by his friend Marc Chagall. No matter. The cousins studiously ignored us until we were ready to leave, and then, as we stood balancing our heavily laden handtrucks by the elevator, a new argument broke out as to who should get the receipt so they could claim the books as a write-off on their taxes.

The last stop of the day, at the home of an elderly widow and her daughter in Yonkers, was another emotional encounter over cookies and tea. We returned to Roger’s apartment at midnight. Roger began preparing a late supper, but Fran and I fell asleep fully clothed on the living room floor before it was ready. It had been a good day: In eighteen hours we collected almost four thousand books. But there were many stops yet to go, and by seven the next morning we would be back on the road again.

The only thing more exciting than collecting boxes of Yiddish books was opening them. What treasures lay within! The more we unpacked, the more we began to appreciate the remarkable scope of modern Yiddish literature.

What are Yiddish books? Who wrote them? When? Where? And for whom?

Despite their dust, their tattered bindings and yellowed pages, the books we recovered were not ancient. Most weren’t even old. That’s because Yiddish literature as we know it didn’t really begin until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before that, when the traditional Jewish world was still intact, educated men spent their days studying in Hebrew and Aramaic. Although they spoke Yiddish, they considered it beneath them to read or write it.

What little literature did exist in Yiddish was intended for women— and perhaps uneducated men—who couldn’t read Hebrew. Women used a folksy Yiddish prayer book called a
tkhine
and a loosely translated Yiddish bible called the
Tsene u’rene.
Beginning in the late fifteenth century, secular Yiddish works—fables, fairy tales, and fanciful stories drawn from European folklore—started to appear in Germany and
Northern Italy. One of the most popular was the
Bove bukh
(1541), a Jewish adaptation of medieval tales of chivalry and knights in shining armor. Although the book is now largely forgotten, it seems to have given rise to a familiar Yiddish expression:
“a bobe mayse”
—an improbable tale. Although most people assume that
bobe mayse
comes from the Yiddish word
bobe,
“grandmother,” some scholars believe it to be a corruption of
bove,
referring to a story so outlandish that it sounds like something straight out of the
Bove bukh
.

It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when modern capitalism and Western Enlightenment finally made their way to eastern Europe, that the traditional Jewish world finally began to open up to other forms of literary expression.

At first the
maskilim
(Jewish proponents of Enlightenment) turned to Hebrew, a language so classical it was used for commencement addresses during the early years of Harvard University. There was only one problem: Like Latin, Hebrew hadn’t actually been spoken for several thousand years, and nonscholars—presumably those who most needed enlightening—couldn’t read Hebrew well enough to understand most of what the
maskilim
were trying to communicate. In 1857 the year’s best-selling Hebrew novel sold 1,200 copies; the same year, a minor Yiddish novel by Isaac Meir Dik sold 120,000.

And so, slowly, with little enthusiasm, some of the braver Hebrew writers decided to try their hand at writing in Yiddish. The most important of these was an accomplished Hebrew stylist—he’s often called the Father of Modern Hebrew Literature—named Sholem Abramovitsh, who made his Yiddish debut in 1864 under the pseudonym Mendele Moykher Seforim, Mendele the Book Peddler. Abramovitsh made no pretense: He regarded Yiddish as ugly and unwashed, and adopted it only as a “necessary evil,” a utilitarian means of spreading enlightenment among the masses. But as I discovered in graduate school, he was enough of an artist to know a good thing when
he saw it: The more he imitated the Yiddish vernacular—ostensibly to ridicule it—the more he came to appreciate its artistic possibilities. Although Mendele never ceased to poke fun at the foibles of the Jewish masses, it wasn’t long before he was using his pen to defend them, as well. His works include a play about a tax revolt by the Jewish poor, an allegorical novel in which a talking horse demands bread before knowledge, a parody of Don Quixote, and Yiddish translations of the Hebrew psalms and classics of world literature. Fascinated by the literary possibilities of “a bird’s-eye view,” he translated Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days
from French to Yiddish. (Ironically, his own grandson became a test pilot and was killed in a plane crash in 1913.)

Mendele was followed by two other “classical” Yiddish writers: Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. They in turn were followed by hundreds more, and it wasn’t long before the dynamism, wisdom, humor, and tragedy that had been cultivated in spoken Yiddish for a thousand years burst forth on the page. Between 1864, when Mendele published his first Yiddish story, and 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, nearly thirty thousand separate Yiddish titles appeared, constituting one of the most concentrated periods of literary creativity in all of Jewish history. Yiddish writers experimented with virtually every form of modern literary expression, from impressionism, romanticism, and naturalism to socialist realism, eroticism, and surrealism.

The new literature found astounding resonance. In Eastern Europe, and even more so in the countries where Jews took refuge, millions turned to Yiddish books for comfort and guidance in a confusing new world. They read widely and voraciously. They scrimped and saved to buy books. They devoured poetry, short stories, novels, drama, history, ethnography, sociology, folklore, linguistics, natural science, religion, and politics. They read about the world, about the Old Country, and about themselves.

In America, Yiddish books and newspapers played a central role in helping newly arrived Jewish immigrants adapt to life in a strange new land. Even religious Jews, who would never have seen a Yiddish book in Europe, bought them in America.
Grine,
greenhorns, studied etiquette books; schoolboys memorized ready-made bar mitzvah speeches; and aspiring Americans pored over Yiddish pamphlets—published by the D.A.R., no less—to prepare for citizenship exams. Another guidebook helped new parents choose a suitably American name for their child.
A Bintl Brief
(A Bundle of Letters), the
Jewish Daily Forward
’s advice column, was a cross between Dear Abby and Maimonides’
Guide for the Perplexed
—an invaluable introduction to American mores and manners.

Of course, Jewish housewives of the immigrant generation cooked the way their mothers did, with a
bisl
of this and a
smitshik
of that. Yiddish cookbooks tried to standardize recipes, adapting them to American ingredients, conventions, and tastes. When Jewish immigrants first arrived in America they assumed that coffee beans, like other beans, were not kosher for Passover—until an enterprising Maxwell House advertising agent came along. First he found a rabbi who publicly declared that coffee beans are really berries and therefore acceptable Passover fare. Then, to reinforce the point, he began distributing free Haggadahs (books used at the Passover seder) emblazoned with the Maxwell House logo. To this day, “Maxwell House Haggadahs” can be found on seder tables across the country.

Popular-science books in Yiddish taught everything from geology and astronomy to chemistry and physics. A Yiddish guidebook to human sexuality was censored under the federal government’s puritanical Comstock laws; though hardly racy by modern standards, entire sections had to be blacked out before the book could be sent through the United States mail.

A surprising number of the books we collected were translations of world literature into Yiddish. We found Yiddish versions of “Bambi,”
The Bhagavad Gita,
Chinese legends, and Finnish folktales. Favorite writers included Jack London
(The Call of the Wild—Di shtime fun blut)
, Mark Twain
(The Prince and the Pauper—Der prints un der betler),
Knut Hamsun, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oscar Wilde, and last but not least, Guy de Maupassant, whose ubiquitous thirteen-volume
Collected Works
was distributed free as a subscription premium for a popular Yiddish newspaper. Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain (Der tsoyberbarg)
and Eric Maria Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front (Afn mayrev front keyn nayes)
were translated into Yiddish by the young Isaac Bashevis Singer, presaging the pessimism and disillusionment that later found expression in his own writing. Shakespeare was almost as popular in Yiddish as he was in English; a favorite title was
Kenig Lir (King Lear),
which dealt with a subject much on the minds of Jewish immigrants:
tsores mit kinder
—trouble with children. The Yiddish title page of one Shakespeare translation read
“Fartaytsht un farbesert
—Translated and Improved.” Jews approached these works with great seriousness and respect; they were a window out of the tenement (or the shtetl), often giving Yiddish readers their first glimpse of the broader artistic and intellectual life beyond.