From Ukarumpa to Broadway and 122nd Street
Zeitlin, Leora
FROM UKARUMPATO BROADWAY AND 122nd SIREET November is Jewish Book Month. What's a Jewish book—and where do you keep millions of them? LEORA ZEITLIN When British archaeologists excavated the...
...And the Leo Baeck Institute has also undertaken to microfilm many of its periodicals, which include some 750 rare German periodicals published by Jews from the 18th to the 20th centuries...
...So they come here...
...the special "high-density" stacks can shelve 90,000 volumes in a single small room by having the stacks roll together on wheels...
...He called this oddity to the attention of the staff, which proceeded to open the bindings...
...Here in Widener we find one particularly unusual example: Published in Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea, it is a small paperback written in two languages...
...What makes a library Jewish...
...Dina Abramowicz, the librarian, sits close and leans forward as she speaks slowly, carefully, of how YIVO was founded in Vilna in 1925 as an academy of Jewish research, and how in 1940 it was transferred to New York...
...Rabbinical works, literature, children's book, histories, philosophy—they're all included...
...He plucks another volume from the shelf...
...Peretz and Sholom Aleichem...
...He was killed in January of 1945, the grandson wrote...
...Could YIVO help...
...Because we don't have a faculty to answer to, we are the collection builders here...
...There is one, alone, from the post-war period...
...And now, according to JTS's Schmelzer, "what we have in America, in terms of totality of resources, is unsurpassed anywhere in the world...
...One day, I peeked over his shoulder to see what he was working on...
...Whichever came first, it's clear they sustain each other—and us...
...The warehouse had neither heat nor humidity controls...
...les and at Berkeley, Brandeis, Ohio State, Yale and Columbia maintain large collections...
...They came to find out what they could do to help...
...a playful rendering of the Scroll of Esther, written in micrography (tiny calligraphy), all in the shape of a bear— a pun on the name of the artist, Baer...
...That means that a student who needs information on Yiddish theater can move from the actual dramatic literature of the Jewish Division to the Theater Division, where he'll find material pertinent to the stage or to specific Yiddish companies...
...Clean, quiet, its colors muted, light streaming in its many windows and skylights—a proper home for books and for the users of books...
...And so they did, for the next day, the specialist turned up with 2,000 pages of handwritten music by Adolph Gimpel...
...Microfilm is not only a way of making one-of-a-kind materials available to distant others...
...He notes a 16th century prayer book in Italian, but written in Hebrew characters...
...Harvard University now owns one of the early Portuguese Hebrew tomes— a large, heavy volume on liturgy that was published in 1489...
...YIVO answers some 2500 telephone queries and 1000 letters each year...
...When Eliezer Ben Yehuda, often called "the father of modern Hebrew," was exiled from Palestine during World War I, he came here and was given a special room in the Jewish Division in which he could continue compiling his Hebrew dictionary...
...Eight years later, Jews were expelled from Portugal...
...The Seminary immediately installed a prefabricated building in its courtyard in ordar to house—temporarily, it was presumed—some of the surviving volumes...
...Scholars knew of the work from other references...
...And, after finding in the library's Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound a recording of Sho-lom Aleichem reading his own stories, I wouldn't argue with Gold's point...
...And microphotography also means that scholars are no longer required to travel to each library that has a book that is important to their work...
...Today the staff is reorganizing the catalogue, in cooperation with the Library of Congress, so that it can be used as a bibliography of Yiddish literature, and will be more accessible to the general public as well...
...Collecting the world's Judaica periodicals and preserving them through microfilm has become one of the major projects of Jewish libraries in this country...
...But the calm is deceptive, for this is one of the busiest libraries in the western world...
...Ten years were to pass before the last of the tenants on the donated property could be relocated and construction begin...
...Staff members proudly point out the latest features in library architecture and accessibility, the bright and elegant reading rooms, the "no expense spared" approach...
...Visitors to New York know the building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street mainly from its steps, where scores of people sit—eating, talking, perhaps playing music, some dozing and others people-watching...
...Glancing through the guide, one sees Jewish history come alive—and, specifically, Jewish migration patterns...
...it is The Count of Monte Cristo...
...Charles Berlin, the Lee M. Friedman Bibliographer in Judaica at Harvard's Widener Library, points to the subject areas as we wander through row after row after row of stacks...
...Only later, after the work was completed, did they discover—hidden among some uncatalogued fragments in the library—a missing page from the work, a page they hadn't even known they owned...
...And Jewish libraries also carry books about Jews or Judaism or Israel—as well as anti-Semitic literature—from other countries, books in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, every major western language, and some neither western nor quite so major...
...With four millenia of history behind us, some of the answers are easy: a Torah scroll from China, a letter signed by Maimonides, a Jewish legal code from 1475, with censor's pen-marks covering the passages...
...The 25,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments they found covered literature, religion, mathematics, botany, chemistry, lexicology, and included administrative documents and letters as well— plus, as with any self-respecting library, a classification system for the entire collection...
...He'd be infuriated if someone else sat in it," Gold recalls...
...And printed on these extra sheets, marvelously well-preserved within the bindings for five centuries, were fragments of the long-lost Spanish Talmud...
...The printer, it seemed, had used extra sheets lying about his shop to pad them...
...And people donated books—more than 70,000 volumes all told...
...The enthusiasm and pride are easy to understand: JTS was without a library for more than 17 years, victim of calamities that ranged from fire to flood...
...Given the centrality of books in Jewish life, one is hard put to say which came first—the book itself, or the love of the book...
...Further uptown on Fifth Avenue is a different type of Jewish library, with a more specialized focus: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research...
...One is Yessan-Mayo, a tongue spoken by about 900 people on the island...
...Consider, for example, the fact that the very first book ever printed in Lisbon was in Hebrew...
...These, too, are considered Judaica or Hebraica...
...Menahem Schmelzer tells of "reunited" manuscripts: The Seminary decided to publish a facsimile edition of Sefer Ha-Halakhot, a beautiful parchment by Alfasi, the 11th century Talmudic authority...
...Harvard's Widener has been especially active in this area...
...The Jewish passion for newspapers, magazines, journals of all kinds may be inferred from his story— or from the statistic that more than 800 periodicals are published regularly in Israel...
...Guard dogs patrolled the area, but staff people never knew when the dogs were "on duty," so their own visits became hazardous adventures...
...But in addition to the Jewish holdings, the public also has access to the other resources of the library...
...Inside the majestic building, there is dramatically contrasting silence...
...But now, at last, it is done...
...there is neither...
...The American Jewish Historical Society in Waltham, on the Brandeis campus, specializes in Judaica from North and South America...
...Still more surprising is that such major libraries have been developed here in the United States in so short a span of time...
...Norich called on his specialist in Polish history, who "scratched his head," dug up some rudimentary information from standard sources, and told Norich that he "thought we might have something more on him...
...What about books that don't touch explicitly on Jewish matters—but are published in Israel, or in Hebrew or Yiddish...
...The situation was, in Degani's words, "a librarian's nightmare...
...No one called them...
...The ancient book survived the persecutions and the expulsions and the revolutions and the wars, and is now safeguarded in Massachusetts, on a continent that Columbus did not reach until the book was already three years old...
...It is from North Africa, in Judeo-Arabic, the spoken language of the country written in Hebrew letters...
...an illuminated miniature book of blessings, hand-painted in Vienna in 1724...
...Take the New York Public Library, for example...
...We are," says Dr...
...LEORA ZEITLIN When British archaeologists excavated the ancient city of Nineveh— where the prophet Jonah reluctantly preached the word of God—they came upon the great library of Ashurbanipal, established in the seventh century BCE...
...Most of all, she speaks of the pioneering efforts of Max Weinreich and his son Uriel...
...In 1981, the library received a $500,000 gift from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation to establish an endowment fund specifically for preservation projects—the first such Judaica preservation endowment...
...The censored code evokes special satisfaction...
...There was a bright side to the saga...
...Harvard's outstanding Judaica ephemera collection includes posters, leaflets, all sorts of Israeli election campaign materials and a myriad of other items that could not survive the passage of time, but that can be preserved through microphotography, thus insuring that generations to come will be provided the kind of understanding of their past that only such materials can provide...
...He was translating The Girl Scout Handbook into Yiddish...
...Other scholars have followed in that tradition...
...No traces of his vast output were known to exist...
...The library houses 240,000 volumes, but has room for double that...
...The senior Weinreich, YIVO's director from 1925 until his death in 1969, was a scholar learned in several languages and with a particular interest in the history of Yiddish...
...YIVO is housed (and severely overcrowded) in what was once a Vanderbilt mansion, and there it represents the lost world of East European Jewry...
...Here, for example, are 75 Dutch periodicals—all but a handful from the 19th century published between 1910 and 1940...
...The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is unmatched for its Yiddish resources...
...The notion that a forlorn shtetl such as Kasrilevke might have two newspapers was not at all outlandish...
...There are numbers of major Judaica collections in the United States, where our books are safely and usefully and respectfully housed, stored and catalogued and made accessible to a growing public of readers, researchers, bibliophiles, users of all kinds...
...But the library is, above all, a public institution...
...And now and again, it is witness to the discoveries and connections that gladden a librarian's heart...
...Leonard Gold, chief of the Jewish Division, "the 'people's university'" Example: One retired gentleman came to the Jewish Division regularly, always sat in the same seat...
...As the English preface explains, the book was published as a primer to teach speakers of Yessan-Mayo how to read Neo-Melanesian...
...For the rise of these libraries has happened, for the most part, in this century and the last...
...Sholom Aleichem was talking about the strains of modernization, of course, but it's appropriate that he chose to make his point by reference to newspapers...
...Among its vast holdings is a Jewish collection that has served as a major research resource for scholars throughout this century...
...The rest were sent to a nearby warehouse...
...When Professor Mordecai Margoliot prepared an ancient work on Jewish magic, he had to piece it together from torn pages collected from libraries the world over...
...About three years ago, Dimitrovsky noticed that some of the Seminary's oldest volumes had softer bindings than were used at the time they were published...
...Menahem Schmelzer, head librarian at JTS, as we enter the high-ceilinged rare book chamber...
...The windows of the reading room are open, letting the hot air of late summer enter into the rooms...
...the other is Neo-Melanesian...
...Perhaps the library story of the year, with all due respect to the others, belongs to the Jewish Theological Seminary, which has just opened its new library building...
...But rare books provide only a partial definition...
...All rakes," Norich laughs...
...So the Jewish library as an institution encompasses literature from the world over, from all of history, and from every discipline and subject...
...Gimpel explained that his grandfather, Adolph Gimpel, was a famous musician and composer of light opera in Poland before World War II...
...Guys in their 30s in business suits, looking like a bunch of bohemians all dressed up...
...The long table is piled high with books, papers, cartons, packages, and, at one end, an ancient "Underwood Semitic" manual typewriter, a relic that is still in use...
...The Louis Ginzberg Microfilm Library at JTS has some 4,000 manuscripts from all over the world, and these can now easily be made available to anyone, anywhere...
...Another example: A Chassidic youth once came, seeking a book his friend had used the week before...
...The books that we celebrate during Jewish Book Month are (mostly) not quite so venerable, but many of them do go back some...
...The prophet Jeremiah said, "Thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware vessel, that they may last for a long time...
...The list is endless...
...Imagine: Movable type was a new phenomenon when this book was made...
...There should be air conditioning and humidity control...
...We've become experts in library disasters," says administrative librarian Edith Degani...
...The NYPL has also been microfilming periodicals on a regular basis...
...And three days later, the staff found a photograph of the Adolph Gimpel Troup...
...Instead, the narrator tells us, the one would refer to the other in words such as these: "That asinine, beggarly, crooked, drunken, envious, feeble, galling, hair-splitting, idiotic, jagged, knee-bending, leprous, mangy, nefarious, ossified, provocating, querulous, rabble-rousing, skimpy, tottering, ugly, venomous, wayward, xenophobic, yellowing and zig-zagging rag whose name we don't even want to mention...
...Despite the devastation of World War II, YIVO managed to assemble a huge collection, the largest Yiddish collection in the world...
...It turned out to be Oysgevehlte Ertsehlungen fun Konan Doyl...
...But there are other kinds of discoveries...
...And one donor bought a site adjacent to the Seminary so that a new library could be built there...
...City officials, college students, ye-shiva students, everyone—just to see if there was something they could do...
...Three centuries were to pass before the French Revolution...
...in the wake of the disasters came unexpected support...
...Jewish books: Jews have been forced to hide, smuggle and bury books in order to save them, and thereby to save the Jewish past...
...Israel alone publishes some 2,000 titles a year (some are reprints and re-issues, of course), and these obviously "belong," as do the several hundred explicitly Jewish books published here in the United States each year...
...So bitter was the rivalry between the radical, modern journal The Bowler Hat and its more traditional counterpart, The Skullcap, that neither deigned to mention the other's name...
...The libraries of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York are enormous repositories of documents, manuscripts, rare and contemporary books and archives as well...
...Sholom Aleichem tells a marvelous tale about two competing newspapers in his "Progress in Kasrilevke...
...Books were stacked in no particular order, so that finding them became a hit-or-miss venture...
...And then he recalls Peter Gimpel's response to the surprising cornucopia: "Thank you for reuniting me with my grandfather...
...And then, four years ago, another part of the collection, stored in the nearby "International House," suffered a major flood...
...the censor's ink was thinner than the book's, and has faded over time so that now the forbidden passages can be read...
...That same year, Widener published a "Guide to Judaica Serials in Microform in the Harvard College Library," listing 605 serials in 15 different languages...
...He founded YIVO in order to develop and cultivate the Yiddish language in an academic setting, as well as to develop Yiddish resources in history, economics, demography, literature and folklore...
...For Gold, the goal of the division is continually to expand what he calls its "subject" collection...
...But today, happily, the tumultuous years are done...
...The JTS library staff, which can collectively handle some 20 Ianguages, is busy completing the cataloguing of all the library's holdings, now that the ingathering of these exiled volumes is complete...
...The book's title explains it: How the Jews Lived...
...In fact, they were microfilming the Jewish Daily Forward back in 1937, using WPA workers to prepare the issues for filming...
...Norich recalls, for example, how, a few weeks after he assumed his position three years ago, he received a letter from a man named Peter Gimpel...
...The story goes back to April 1966, when the entire stack area of the Seminary's original library burned down in a devastating fire that destroyed 70,000 volumes and damaged 125,000 more...
...Schmelzer claims it's unlikely that there are more major collections, like the Cairo Genizah, waiting to be discovered...
...Conversely, "somebody might be studying the history of Poland," Gold explains, "which can't be done without including the Jewish dimension...
...Its holdings include a first edition of Sefer Hasidim (Bologna, 1538), numerous Yiddish books from the 16th to the 18th centuries, volumes including dictionaries and textbooks from the Enlightenment, Yiddish newspapers, publications of Jewish resistance groups during World War II, eyewitness accounts from after the war, maps, town and organizational archives, memorial volumes, vast archives of letters, diaries, film clips, photographs, records...
...It appears that the command to cherish written words comes straight from heaven...
...And, because YIVO has become the central address for Yiddish in this country, it also sponsors exhibitions and lectures and runs the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies, which offers courses in Yiddish language and literature as well as East European Jewish studies...
...The night after the fire, people came here," Degani recalls...
...You cannot name a unit in the research libraries that doesn't have something of interest to the Jewish Division—and vice versa...
...some charred pages from a book, a fragment from the Warsaw Ghetto...
...These are but a few of the items in the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary...
...according to Sam Norich, YIVO's director, the archives alone contain some 22 million documents...
...Sherlock Holmes—in Yiddish...
...It is also one of the main preservation techniques, particularly for periodicals and ephemera printed on inexpensive acidic paper that disintegrates rapidly...
...So how did this book from Ukarumpa end up in the Judaica Department at Harvard's Widener...
...And there are also "specialty" libraries: The Leo Baeck Institute carries some 50,000 volumes on German Jewry, plus 2,000 feet of archival material and photographs...
...The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have vast Judaic and Hebraic divisions...
...After receiving a federal grant under the "Strengthening Research Library Resources Program" of Title II-C of the Higher Education Act of 1965, Widener was able to microfilm more than 200 Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals, 12,000 pamphlets and several collections of Judaica ephemera (leaflets, posters and broadsides...
...That's how it sometimes is with such rare manuscripts...
...Consider the experience of Professor Haim Zal man Dimitrovsky, who was searching JTS for information about a Talmud known to have been written in Spain in the 15th century...
...This means," he says, "that we cover all aspects of Jewish life—no more, no less...
...Its paper is softened, its edges worn, its smell musty...
...Harvard, the University of California at Los AngeLeora Zeitlin is a free-lance author in the Boston area...
...And so forth...
...We have humanities, sciences, social sciences—here's a Hebrew book on Shakespeare—anything relating to the needs of the university...
...At the same time, they continue to catalogue and research their holdings—including complete and reliable editions, available now on microfiche, of all the works of Mendele Mocher Sforim, I.L...
...Eight years ago, the major Judaica collections in this country included over one million books, pamphlets and other printed matter, as well as more than five million manuscript pages...
...In terms of subject areas, the Judaica collection is a microcosm of the university library syste'm as a whole...
...no copy, it was thought, survived...
...An embarrassment of riches," says Dr...
Vol. 8 • November 1983 • No. 10
