Outwitting History Read online

  Outwitting History

  THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF A MAN WHO RESCUED A MILLION YIDDISH BOOKS

  by Aaron Lansky

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  PART ONE:

  Learning Yiddish

  1. Out of the Dumpster

  2. Bread and Wine

  3. “Come Back after Yontef!”

  4. “What Is Mendele Doing in a Fruit Basket on the Floor?”

  PART TWO:

  On the Road

  5. A Ritual of Cultural Transmission

  6. “Don’t You Know That Yiddish Is Dead?”

  7. A Day in the Life

  8. A Brief History of Yiddish Literature

  9. “People Are Dying Today Who Never Died Before”

  10. “Pretty Soon We’ll Have a Whole Forest in Israel and No More Members Here”

  11. “Love and Peace”

  12. “Ostroff! Sea Gate!”

  13. The Great Newark Book Heist

  PART THREE:

  “Him I Don’t Talk To!”

  14. “You’re a Liar!”

  15. “They’re Tearing Apart the Library”

  16. A Ghost in the Attic

  17. “If Not Higher”

  18. “Hitler’s Fault”

  PART FOUR:

  Ganvenen dem Grenets—Crossing the Border

  19. Squandered at the Concord

  20. Kaddish

  21. A Job for the Young

  22. The Four Corners of the Earth

  23. Back in the U.S.S.R.

  PART FIVE:

  Bringing It All Back Home

  24. Der Oylem Redt—The World Takes Notice

  25. A Home of Our Own

  26. Immortality

  27. The Valise at the Bottom of the Sea

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  FOREWORD

  MAX WEINREICH, the greatest Yiddish scholar of his generation, was delivering a lecture in Finland when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The lecture saved his life. Unable to return to his home in Vilna, he made his way to New York, where he opened his doors to American students. Few came. Although many thought his work here was hopeless,Weinreich persevered. When a student asked him why, he answered simply: “Because Yiddish has magic, it will outwit history.”

  And so it has. Not long ago, I met under an apple tree with a group of very bright college students. “Why are you interested in Yiddish?” I asked. They laughed. “Don’t you understand,” one young woman explained, the sun glinting off a diamond stud in her bellybutton, “nowadays Yiddish is hip!”

  Just how hip is something I’ve had a chance to gauge for myself over the past twenty-five years. In 1980, at the age of twenty-four, I decided to save the world’s Yiddish books. At the time scholars believed 70,000 volumes remained; today, my colleagues and I have collected more than one and one-half million—many of them at the last minute from attics and basements, demolition sites and Dumpsters. Most Jewish leaders dismissed my plans by saying that Yiddish was dead; today the organization I founded, the National Yiddish Book Center, has thirty-five thousand members, making it one of the largest Jewish cultural organizations in the United States.

  This book is an adventure story: It tells how a small group of young people saved Yiddish books from extinction. It’s also the story of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who owned and read those books—how they sat us down at their kitchen tables, plied us with tea and cakes, and handed us their personal libraries, one volume at a time. The encounters were almost always emotional: People cried and poured out their hearts, often with a candor that surprised us all.

  At the time, my coworkers and I were still in our early twenties. We drove dented trucks and wore sweatshirts and faded jeans. Yet whether out of hope or desperation, people trusted us with their yerushe, their inheritance—their books and stories. For us it was a huge and sometimes overwhelming responsibility: How could we take care of so many books, remember so many stories, preserve so much history?

  I am now forty-nine years old, and with few exceptions the people who entrusted me with their books in those early years are gone, and their world with them. Even as I write, despite the growing curiosity of scholars and the enthusiasm of young people, within the Jewish mainstream the story of Yiddish culture continues to be erased, our history rewritten, our sensibility recast, our identity redefined. More and more, as memory fades, the books we collected are all that remain. For that reason, the time has now come to tell this tale. It’s sad, and funny, too. It’s the best way I know to identify what’s missing from contemporary Jewish life—and to begin to reclaim what we’ve lost.

  PART ONE

  Learning Yiddish

  1. Out of the Dumpster

  The phone rang at midnight. That wasn’t unusual: Older Jews often waited until the rates went down before phoning me about their Yiddish books. But tonight I had just returned from a long collection trip, it was snowing outside, our house was cold, the phone was in the kitchen, and I had no intention of crawling out from under the covers to answer it.

  Brinnnnng! Brinnnnng!

  My girlfriend, Laura Nelson, covered my ears. “It can wait,” she hushed.

  Apparently it couldn’t. Five, ten, fifteen rings and finally my house-mate, Scott Bolotin, went bounding downstairs to answer it himself. Thirty seconds later he was pounding on my bedroom door. “Aaron! Quick! Get up! It’s for you! It sounds really important this time!”

  I wrapped myself in a blanket and stumbled to the phone.

  “Aaron, is that you?” I recognized the voice at once: It was Sheva Zucker, a young woman who had taught me Yiddish at a summer program in New York four years before. “I’m sorry to call so late,” she said, “but this is an emergency! There are thousands of Yiddish books in a garbage Dumpster on Sixteenth Street and it looks like it’s going to rain. How soon can you be here?”

  There was only one train a day from Northampton, Massachusetts, near where I lived, to New York City, but fortuitously it came through at 2 A.M. If I hurried I could make it. I phoned my old college friend Roger Mummert in New York and told him to expect me at 6:45. Laura stuffed a sleeping bag, work gloves, and a loaf of bread into my rucksack. Scott raided our communal food kitty and the tsedoke jar, the shared charity fund we kept hidden in the freezer, and handed me a paper bag filled with $60 in loose bills and change. All I had to do was figure out how to get to the train station, eight miles away.

  The roads were too slippery to go by bike. The local cab company was closed for the night. “What about your pickup?” Scott asked. He meant my ‘63 Ford, a vehicle so unroadworthy, so full of rust and holes, it had stood abandoned under a pine tree in the backyard since failing the state inspection six months before. But there was no other choice. Scott, Laura, and I rushed outside and brushed off the snow. I pulled out the choke, turned the key, and somehow the old engine shuddered to life. With a lot of pushing we managed to rock it out of the ruts where it had frozen in place. I plastered a clump of snow and pine needles to the windshield to cover the expired inspection sticker and made it to the train station with ten minutes to spare.

  “LAAAADIES AND GENTLEMENNNN, the station stop is Pennsylvania Station, New York City. Please watch your step while leaving the train. Pennnnnnn Station . . .” I was out the door and running through the station before the conductor could finish. On Eighth Avenue I looked up and noticed the inscription chiseled on the post office across the street: “Neither Rain Nor Snow Nor Heat Nor Gloom of Night Stays These Couriers from the Swift Completion of Their Appointed Rounds.” The sky was dark and spitting sleet. The clock read 6:37.
I hailed a cab and picked up Roger, and together we raced over to Sixth and Sixteenth to find the Dumpster.

  It wasn’t hard to see. Standing on the street, the size of a tractor-trailer, it was literally overflowing with Yiddish books. The volumes at the top were already wet. A few dozen lay splayed on the street, run over by passing cars. The sleet had turned to rain, which showed no sign of letting up anytime soon.

  Roger and I climbed into the Dumpster, where a few minutes later we were joined by Sheva and her friend Eric Byron, the young man who had discovered the scene the night before. By this point they had managed to figure out where the books came from. It seems an old Yiddish organization had once occupied offices in a nearby building. As their membership dwindled they could no longer afford the rent, so they moved out, consigning their large Yiddish library to a basement storeroom for safekeeping. Now the building was being made over into condos. When workmen found the forgotten books in the cellar, they began hauling them out to the Dumpster. It was only last night, when the pile got high enough for books to spill over the sides, that Eric noticed them and phoned Sheva, who in turn phoned me.

  There was no time to lose. Roger went to the nearest pay phone and called the Dumpster company; their number was emblazoned on the side. They agreed not to pick up the bin until evening. He also called every friend the four of us could think of, looking for reinforcements. Meanwhile I was on the adjacent phone, trying to scare up a truck. After several calls I found a U-Haul dealer on Eleventh Avenue willing to rent without a credit card—none of us had one—provided we could come up with a cash deposit of $350.

  For a motley crew like ours, $350 was a fortune, but luckily Sheva had money that she was saving to pay her taxes. As soon as the bank branch opened, she made the withdrawal. While Roger and Eric stayed with the books, Sheva and I took a cab over to Eleventh Avenue—with a Yiddish-speaking cab driver, no less!—and rented a twenty-four-foot truck, the biggest they had. By the time we made it back, a half dozen people, all under the age of twenty-five, had responded to Roger’s call and were huddled on the corner, ready to help. I backed up to the Dumpster, turned on the emergency flashers, and then organized a “bucket brigade” so we could pass books into the truck. It was raining hard now, and within minutes all of us were soaked. Worse still, our clothes were turning colors: red, yellow, blue, and green, splotched by the book covers’ dyes running in the rain.

  At about 9:30, in response to an urgent phone call, our board member, Sidney Berg, arrived from Long Island with enough cash to reimburse Sheva. He also brought his handyman, Joe, a seasoned worker who seemed to double our speed single-handedly. We stayed in that Dumpster all day, racing the rain for every book. Many people stopped to watch. Some shrugged; others cried. A reporter for the New York Times, a young black woman in the process of converting to Judaism, told me it was the saddest sight she’d ever seen. Another reporter, for one of the tabloids, was less sympathetic. “I don’t get it,” he yelled up from under his umbrella. “I mean, these books are in Yiddish. Who’s gonna read ‘em? What is this for you kids, some kind of nostalgia trip?”

  Shivering, half numb with fatigue and cold, I doubt I managed much of a response. And it probably didn’t matter—the question was rhetorical, his stereotypes about Yiddish set long since. We continued working until dark. By that time our volunteers had gone home, leaving just Joe, Roger, and me in the Dumpster, with Sidney Berg, under an umbrella, standing vigil on the street. All told, we had saved almost five thousand volumes; the rest, probably another three thousand, were soaked beyond any hope of salvage, floating in a fetid, dye-stained pool at the bottom of the Dumpster. Roger and I said good-bye to Joe and Sidney, climbed into the cab of the U-Haul, turned the key . . . and nothing. The emergency flashers, blinking since morning, had drained the battery, and the truck wouldn’t start.

  I might have dissolved into tears right then and there had I not spied a gas station across the street. The burly mechanic on duty wasn’t much help. “I ain’t gonna leave the station to go work in the middle of no street,” he said. “I’ll tow you over here if you want, but that’s gonna cost ya.”

  “How much?”

  “Hundred bucks for the tow and five bucks to charge the battery.”

  “How about if we bring the battery to you?”

  “In that case just five bucks. But how you gonna get that battery over here?”

  After what we had been through that day, I was sure we could find a way. I asked the attendant if we could borrow a wrench, but he said it was against the rules. I handed him a soggy five-dollar bill and the rules changed. Roger and I walked back across the street, managed to disconnect the cables and lift the battery out of the truck. It was a heavy-duty truck battery, weighing a good fifty pounds. Since Roger is considerably taller than I, the battery listed precipitously as we walked. By the time we put it down on the oily floor of the garage, I realized the acid had leaked out and burned a hole right through my wet canvas parka.

  We waited for the battery to charge, then drove back to Roger’s apartment. I took a hot bath, ate supper, drank four cups of hot tea with honey, and fell sound asleep. At two o’clock the next afternoon I was back in Massachusetts, where a large crew of volunteers was waiting for me. Without a functional elevator it took us the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening to pass five thousand books from the back of the truck, up the stairs, and into our second-story loft, where we spread them on pallets to dry.

  What had we saved? Almost two-thirds were “new”: unread publishers’ remainders printed in the 1930s and 1940s, including works on Zionist theory, history, memoirs, and at least five hundred copies of a large-format Yiddish translation of the Torah. The rest came from the organization’s library: a solid assortment of Yiddish titles, most published in New York. Almost all of these books ended up in libraries or in the hands of students around the world.

  Before I went home that night I returned the U-Haul and retrieved my unregistered pickup from the Northampton train station. Then I collapsed. For the next three days I remained in bed, my temperature spiking to 104. As I lay there, drifting in and out of fevered sleep, my thoughts turned to the tabloid reporter in the rain. Why was I doing this? Was it really just a matter of nostalgia? What did I hope to accomplish? And how had it all begun?

  2. Bread and Wine

  Well, it definitely wasn’t nostalgia: I was too young to have much to be nostalgic about. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1955, I heard Yiddish when my grandparents spoke to one another or when my American-born parents, whose Yiddish was imperfect but serviceable, wanted to discuss our bedtime or allowance. No one ever spoke Yiddish to me, to my brothers, or to anyone else our age. We were, after all, American kids, and there was no reason to weigh us down with the past.

  As with so much else, it wasn’t until I went off to college that all this began to change. In the fall of 1973, during my first semester at Hampshire College, I enrolled more or less by chance in a course called Thinking about the Unthinkable: An Encounter with the Holocaust. Organized the year before by a group of Hampshire students, it was, we were told, the first time a course on the Holocaust had ever been offered on an American campus. Our teachers, mostly visiting scholars, were the best in the field: Raul Hilberg, George Mosse, Eric Goldhagen, Yuri Suhl, Isaiah Trunk, and Zosa Szajkowski. As the semester progressed I found myself less interested in the Holocaust per se, in how the Germans went about murdering the Jews of Europe, and more in the people whom they sought to destroy. If, as the historian Salo Baron once argued, anti-Semitism resulted from the “dislike of the unlike,” then in what way were the Jews of Europe “unlike,” in what way were they so different, so utterly antithetical to fascist ideology, as to seal their destruction?

  I shared these questions with Leonard Glick, a physician and professor of cultural anthropology who served as the course’s faculty adviser. He told me he was becoming interested in similar questions himself, and he invited me to learn by his side. For
the next three years my education progressed in exactly the way Hampshire’s founders intended: days of discovery in the library, followed by lively discussion in Len’s office or at his kitchen table. What I could not fully appreciate at the time was how revolutionary all this was, not only pedagogically but historiographically. In 1973 the field of Jewish scholarship was still called Judaic Studies, implying an emphasis on Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Jewish Studies, as the field is now widely called, the study of Jews as a people. The die was first cast in France almost two hundred years before, when Jews were permitted religious differences so long as they downplayed social, cultural, and above all, national specificity. With notable exceptions, mainstream Jewish historiography restricted itself to Geistesgeschichte und Leidensgeschichte, the history of spirituality and the history of suffering.

  As an anthropologist, Len instinctively rejected this narrow view. “Jews must have been doing something more for the past two thousand years than writing books and getting killed,” he insisted. “How did they make a living? What did they teach their children? What did they eat? What did they read? What stories did they tell? What songs did they sing? What was the relationship between men and women? How did they interact with their non-Jewish neighbors?” In short, Len was interested in culture, the full constellation of human experience, and he intuitively embraced what the pioneering Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow had characterized as “the sociological view of Jewish history,” the study not of Judaism but of Jews.

  Knowing that I would need to learn languages in order to handle primary historical sources, I dutifully enrolled in courses in Hebrew and German, then the prescribed curriculum for aspiring Judaic-studies students. Those languages, together with Aramaic, may have sufficed had I limited myself to the study of theology, philosophy, and sacred texts. But as I quickly discovered, for much of the last millennium Jews in central and eastern Europe had spoken not Hebrew, not German, but Yiddish. If I wanted to understand their lives, I had no choice but to learn their language.