The People of the (Yiddish) Book (Exchange)
Krasno, Francine
THE PEOPLE OF THE (YIDDISH) BOOK (EXCHANGE) FRANCINE KRASNO "Yiddish?" the mother of a friend says to me when I tell her I am going on a book collection trip for the National Yiddish Book...
...I have books to give away," he wrote...
...The small mountain of books in the headquarters of the National Yiddish Book Exchange is a testament to the tenacity both of the language and its readers...
...We are answering an urgent plea that came to the Exchange in the form of a postcard from an 87-year-old man about to leave on a trip to Israel...
...It began to rain and they worked faster...
...Others sit us down and commence to read poetry they have just written...
...Some bring out old letters and ask if we can translate them...
...During the depressing ride back to the city I remind myself that in this line of work it's important to keep one's perspective...
...This one you'll come back for next time...
...Aaron gets up and goes to the phone...
...Mrs...
...He takes us upstairs and with us goes through his valuable library of Yiddish and Hebrew books...
...They called out the titles of each valuable edition as it surfaced: Schauss's Tanakh, Hayyim Greenberg, Kadia Moladowski...
...They rented an oversize U-Haul truck and pulled up alongside the dumpster...
...Lansky estimates that there are about 350,000 volumes of Yiddish books still in existence lying abandoned in basements and attics...
...The Young People Need Books" Day two of the collection trip begins in Seagate, near Coney Island, at the home of Shmuel and Leah Ostroff, zanders for the Exchange...
...Although his junior by 50 years, the best I can manage is a kind of awkward hoist...
...No, no, Aaron says, thank you but we have«a few more stops to make today and it's getting late...
...A woman I guess to be in her early 50s greets us as we come up to the second-floor landing and ushers us in to meet her 90-year-old father who is donating his library...
...Memories of visits to Coney Island with my grandmother rise like the spectacular silver roller coaster I see through the van window...
...How come they're always tied like this...
...He chose Amherst, Massachusetts, as a home base, returning to the area where he had lived as an undergraduate at Hampshire College, and set up shop in the loft of an ex-silk mill...
...Tens of thousands of Yiddish books have been piling up in an old school-house in the improbable locale of Amherst, Massachusetts during the last two years...
...Maybe it is the feeling of just having been adopted by a new set of grandparents or being in a landscape from my childhood that puts me in a nostalgic mood...
...The quality of the literature was consistently high and rare, and unusual books routinely turned up alongside the popular Sholom Aleichem and translations of Jack London...
...This one I'll give you today...
...My volunteer work at the Exchange—including going on regularly scheduled book collection trips— opened a world of Yiddish literature and culture and taught me something about the people who brought it to life...
...Katz says, pointing to his floor-to-ceiling bookcase...
...They are retired and live in a small apartment whose walls are covered with Mr...
...He helps us put his books in boxes (an impressive collection of Yiddish history, political theory and literature) until the shelves are emptied...
...There are cultural and educational activities at the Amherst headquarters as well: courses in Yiddish language and literature and a series of lectures by noted Yiddish authors (funded by the Aaron and Sonia Fishman Foundation for Yiddish Culture...
...Field and his wife, we head toward the next stop in Brooklyn...
...Zamlers, volunteer book collectors, are working in cities across the country to round up Yiddish volumes that have been neglected and abandoned for years...
...The Dumpster Days Are Over By the time we are back on the New York side of the Hudson our spirits have risen considerably...
...Before we go out to collect books, they treat us to a three-course breakfast—"you should have your strength"—of whitefish, bagels, cream cheese, kugel, fruit and coffee...
...The Exchange's first catalogue of 350 selected titles will appear this spring, offering rare and out-of-print Yiddish books that have been unavailable for decades...
...It was commonplace for students who needed Yiddish books to go door-to-door in the Jewish neighborhoods, asking to borrow particular titles...
...Munching on cheese and tomatoes, Aaron breaks into an impromptu rendition of Woody Guthrie's "Hard Travelin' ": "I've been having some hard traveling, I though you knowed...
...Among them were the poets Moshe Nadir, Itzik Manger, and Aliza Greenblatt...
...From there, it's on to Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans," Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," and an imitation of Janis Joplin singing "Me and Bobby McGee...
...He knocks on the doors of his neighbors and announces, "Shalom Aleichem...
...Aaron hands over cash for the van and I notice with a silent gasp that one of these gentlemen has a gun...
...A small, dignified man meets us in the lobby of a high rise for the elderly...
...You should eat something before you go, no...
...Mrs...
...We want to take old books and let them live again...
...It is the only organization of its kind in the world devoted to actively collecting, cataloging and distributing Yiddish books...
...Aaron and I have heard the story before and exchange a wordless message: thrown out...
...He has been mugged three times in the last year by kids who followed him from the subway, she explains, and while she knows he is sorry to leave his neighborhood, she can't bear to worry about him anymore...
...When the organization moved from the 6th Avenue building the books were left behind for safe storage...
...Ostroff says, "you'll take a snack for the road...
...Mr...
...He hangs up and comes into the room...
...It's for you," our friend says...
...To my surprise, Mr...
...You'll come back, we'll talk some more...
...Several thousand volumes were damaged beyond repair by the rain, but more than 4,000 volumes were saved...
...It is then time to leave...
...A dozen workers and volunteers are busy processing books...
...If the books are not collected now," Aaron Lansky, the Exchange's founder and Director says, "one of the last physical remnants of a great world culture will be gone forever...
...My future involvement with them would have come as even more of a surprise since my knowledge of Yiddish was only a smattering of phrases gleaned from my parents' conversations with each other...
...How will he fare in a Maryland suburb, I wonder, resolving to remember him as I see him now, among his own books and papers...
...Does anyone read them...
...We have made our last stop for the day...
...Then there are the books that were saved from a rain-soaked, Manhattan street during what has come to be known at the Exchange as the Great Dumpster Affair...
...Ostroff's brown paper bag and go over tomorrow's itinerary: a stop in Water-bury, Connecticut at a Jewish Community Center that is closing...
...I've been shlepping some Yiddish books, way down the road...
...This one I'll give you now...
...We glance back in the van and congratulate ourselves on a respectable load— 2,500 volumes...
...Another 15 minutes and we have parked the van and announced ourselves through the intercom...
...Before he never had time to visit her, he was so busy going to meetings of various Yiddish culture groups...
...His goal is to save these books from imminent destruction and ultimatelyfo place Yiddish collections in major research libraries throughout the world...
...And it was threatening to rain...
...The saying goes that Yiddish is a dead language that refuses to be buried...
...Within the next two years, the Exchange grew to a twelve-person staff with its own building, a red brick schoolhouse donated rent-free by the town of Amherst...
...Initial publicity about the Exchange generated an immediate response from book donors, and thousands of books began arriving at the original office in Florence, Massachusetts...
...The rabbi cordially explains to us that the books we have driven 40 miles out of our way to collect are not there, are nowhere to be found, have perhaps been misplaced by the janitor...
...Aaron took the last train out of Northampton, Massachusetts, the 2 a.m...
...Fortunately, there was very little of what we would call trash in the popular literature," Lansky says...
...Members of the Exchange's Board include Isaac Bashevis Singer as Honorary Chairman, Sidney Berg, a Long Island philanthropist, and Marjorie Guthrie, widow of folksinger Woody Guthrie and daughter of the Yiddish poet, Aliza Greenblatt...
...Besides, this way she'll get to see him more...
...What is happening here and why...
...He stands up, takes a book from the shelf and puts it on the table...
...She finds a brown paper bag of the size I use to carry home a week's groceries and stuffs it with one head of letAaron Lansky The idea of collecting Yiddish books came to Aaron Lansky during a class when he was enrolled as a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal...
...Francine Krasno, a writer living in Northampton, Massachusetts, is Assistant Director of the National Yiddish Book Exchange...
...We want to get these books out to new readers who desperately need them...
...Ostroff-says...
...The zanders, volunteer book collectors, located in dozens of cities, keep a steady stream of books coming to the Exchange with an average of 350 volumes arriving weekly...
...The phone rings...
...We have a number of stops in the Bronx, one of them in the vast complex known as Coop City...
...Among a box of books I brought to the Exchange from my hometown were three volumes of stories by the great Soviet Yiddish writer, Dovid Bergelson, that were published in Berlin in 1923...
...Montrealer," and arrived at the scene at 7:30 that morning...
...We are not a mausoleum," Lansky says, "but a clearinghouse...
...The left side looks as if it has been hit broadside by a garbage truck and we will soon discover that the windshield wipers work intermittently at best...
...We then run through Aaron's complete repertoire of Yiddish folk songs...
...Field unlocks a storage room where the books, tied into bundles of about a half dozen volumes each, are stacked...
...Then it's time to go the Beth-Am Center in Brighton Beach, an old Labor-Zionist social center that is now used as a yeshiva...
...When Lansky's personal collection finally outstripped the confines of his parents' home, he decided it was time to start an exchange that would be a central source of Yiddish books for scholars and general readers...
...She has come to help her father pack up and move with her to her home in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...We arrive at the Lower East Side in record time but spend half an hour driving up and down 4th and 5th Streets looking for a parking space...
...There are now 95,000 books in the Exchange's repository and a full scale cataloging and distribution program is getting underway...
...The young people need books...
...He begins to make two piles...
...For 50 years I've been dusting these books...
...In that case," Mrs...
...Peretz, Reisen, Yankev Patt, Even found some A. Greenblatt, I've been doing some hard traveling, Lord...
...That was Mr...
...The books had been discarded accidentally by workers renovating a building that had once been the headquarters of Farband, the American Labor-Zionist movement...
...she repeats, as if I have just proposed a revival of the Model T. "Who reads Yiddish anymore...
...It is 11 p.m...
...The rapid growth of the Exchange, an exceptional feat even in times of economic prosperity, is due in large part to the wide membership base and a national system of book collection...
...Isaac...
...Katz says as he looks at the books on the table and at us...
...They tell us stories from the 1940s and '50s when they lived in a larger apartment and in the evening opened their home to a circle (sevive) of Yiddish writers, poets and actors...
...It is miraculous actually, given the years of neglect and abandonment, that so many Yiddish books survive intact...
...the mother of a friend says to me when I tell her I am going on a book collection trip for the National Yiddish Book Exchange...
...They realized they forgot to pack the kugel...
...These are the books I have," Mr...
...and Mrs.-Katz, a couple in their 70s, meet us at the elevator door...
...I am afraid that after I will be gone, they will throw them in the trash...
...I can hear him speaking Yiddish...
...By mid-afternoon, the van is a quarter full...
...After circling it three times, helplessly locked onto the Expressway, we take an exit on a hunch and find ourselves on a road speeding toward the behemoth...
...There are hugs and kisses, one last-ditch effort to get us to stay for lunch, an exchange of phone numbers, and a promise from us to call them when we get back to Manhattan that night...
...I'll tell you what...
...The workers and zamlers of the Exchange are saving the remaining books from the same fate and getting them back into active use...
...After a cup of tea with Mr...
...Yiddish books have been routinely destroyed for decades...
...Several friends were there to meet him...
...We finish off the contents of Mrs...
...As the sky darkens, we shift imperceptibly into a gospel mode—"Swing loooow, sweet chariot"—until we have nearly exhausted our memories and are reduced to bawling "John Jacob Jingle Heimer Schmidt, naanaanaanaanaanaanaa" into the night...
...Ignorant of New York metropolitan geography, my navigation is a little timid at first but I am soon shouting directions over the din of the traffic with all the authority of a native...
...tuce, two loaves of French bread, a full package of Swiss cheese, two cans of sardines, several tea bags, a handful of hard candies, a honey dew melon, two tomatoes and a cucumber...
...Katz interrupts, "give 'em the books already...
...Aaron and I go into their apartment, are invited to sit, have a cup of tea, and talk for a while...
...When I go out to get the books, I tie them like this so I can carry them on the bus...
...The National Yiddish Book Exchange was founded in June 1980 with an old typewriter, some government surplus furniture and a few volunteers...
...Field," Aaron says, "these are such nice, neat bundles, it's a pleasure for us...
...Ostroff's drawings, paintings and sculptures...
...On The Road Aaron and I enter the truck rental office, a hole in the wall with an assortment from the Lower East Side demimonde checking out the rubes walking up to the desk...
...Some people open their front doors and in one definitive move hand over the books in shopping bags and are done with it...
...He begins to speak to us in Yiddish and in English explaining that he came here with his wife after living for years in Argentina, where they ran a Yiddish publishing house and founded a Yiddish-Spanish folkshul...
...Field explains that he does not have a car...
...1 can see that he has some reservations about a woman doing this sort of work...
...They crossed a continent, an ocean, and survived the flood that inundated Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1972...
...I'll take you through another floor of the building...
...when we finally get back to our friend's apartment and collapse exhausted on the couch...
...This unexpected windfall is compensated for at our next stop, a synagogue in a New Jersey suburb...
...I moved to Amherst five years ago to teach creative writing, not dreaming that in this New England town I would find a mecca for Yiddish books...
...When we have almost finished putting them into the van, he calls out from the lobby, "Wait a minute...
...In half an hour, we are back in Manhattan and after a cup of tea and a sardine sandwich we cross the river to New Jersey...
...We load about a thousand books into the van and by the time we have finished and are back at their apartment it is early afternoon...
...On a typical day, the Exchange is visited by local residents stopping by to chat, by out-of-town members who are taken on tours of the building, and by students enrolled in a Yiddish conversation circle...
...They worked in silence, pulling arm-fuls out of the pile...
...Di yungelayt darfn hobn bikher...
...Thus we set out onto the streets of New York...
...Would you give them the books already...
...Our last stop of the day is at a high rise on the Upper West Side in Manhattan...
...Our luck is with us because we find a parking spot directly in front of the building, a four-story walk-up...
...Members come from cities and towns throughout North America, as well as from more farflung places such as Belfast, Northern Ireland and Kanaa, Hawaii...
...It began shortly after midnight when Aaron got a call from a friend informing him that there were about 8,000 books that would most likely be hauled off as trash the next morning, sitting in a dumpster on 16th Street near 6th Avenue...
...He has been an officer of his Workmen's Circle chapter for the last 60 years...
...He and Aaron are old friends, and in Yiddish they talk about how the collection work is going...
...There are about 30 bundles in all...
...I have just begun to digest the breakfast...
...Ostroff gives us pointers on the correct way to schlep a box...
...A thousand books...
...Aaron says that three zamlers, independent of each other, called the Exchange to tell him there were Yiddish books at the Center...
...People come out with shopping bags and armfuls and boxes of books—close to 500 in all...
...This one you'll come back for next time...
...The rows of high rises in Coney Island are completely unfamiliar, though, and in the rain and winter afternoon light, the scene is unspeakably dreary...
...It is my job, of course, to get us into this maze...
...The activity captures the overall spirit of the venture...
...No, no, no," Mr...
...Morris Field, a local zamler, meets us at the elevator...
...Please do help me out...
...Ostroff," he says, "calling to say they've been terribly upset, they've been worrying all afternoon...
...Local chapters of the Friends of the National Yiddish Book Exchange are now forming to coordinate publicity and fund raising on a local level and to act as liaisons with community leaders and potential contributors...
...Mr...
...We check the address, double-park and hop out...
...Our van, waiting for us in a next door lot, has seen better days...
...Almost always, there is the obligatory cup of tea...
...Ostroff hops right into the van...
...The days when books end up in the dumpster are over," he says...
...As the day progresses, I am intrigued by the many rituals for giving away Yiddish books...
...I have given up on keeping my coat clean—Yiddish books are old and dusty and, on minimum contact with water, sprout a mold that turns to slime—and I am starting to like the feel of my developing arm muscles...
Vol. 7 • May 1982 • No. 5
