Outwitting History (17 page)

Wherever I went in the Yiddish world, otherwise rational people continued to fight old battles with a tenacity that left me speechless. One night Roger, Fran, Noah, and I arrived at a high-rise building in Chelsea to pick up books from Diana Sandler, the widow of Philip Sandler, a prominent Yiddish journalist. While Roger and Noah removed hundreds of her late husband’s books from the living room shelves, Fran and I sat with Mrs. Sandler at her kitchen table and talked. She was leaving New York to be near her daughter in Michigan. Given her age she felt too lonely and isolated to remain.

“Don’t you have any friends in this building?” Fran asked.

“No,” she said sadly. “Once, many Jewish people lived here, educated people, Yiddish writers and scholars. My husband and I had many good friends. But over the years they either died or moved away.” She sighed and stared into her coffee for a long time. When she looked up again, she shook her head and added softly, “Actually, there
is
one other person in the building that I know—very well, in fact—but
him,
him I don’t talk to.”

The other person was Paul Novik, then more than ninety years old and still the editor-in-chief of the
Morning Freiheit,
the communist Yiddish newspaper. For many years, Diana Sandler explained, her husband had worked under Novik as the
Freiheit
’s city editor. Their families were close friends, so close that they took apartments in the same building. Then came 1956, when Khrushchev made his speech to the Party Congress confirming the magnitude of Stalin’s crimes. Deeply shaken, Sandler quit his job and moved to the noncommunist
Tog;
Novik remained at the
Freiheit,
and although they continued to live in the same building, the two men and their wives never spoke to one another again.

Except once, Mrs. Sandler explained. Five years earlier, in the middle of an unexpected blizzard, she went downstairs to get her mail and saw Novik pacing back and forth in the lobby. Usually, she said, Novik was a vigorous man, but that night he looked small and frail, and she knew something was wrong.

“There were already big drifts outside. I looked at the snow, I looked at Novik—I could see he was worried. I felt terrible, I knew I shouldn’t speak to him, but what could I do, I’m also a mother. ‘Mr. Novik,’ I said, ‘is something the matter?’ It was the first time I had spoken to him in maybe twenty years. ‘Yes,’ he said in a daze, ‘my wife, she went out shopping, she should have been back an hour ago—’ I didn’t let him finish. I said, ‘Mr. Novik, it’s all right, it’s snowing, the buses are running late, she’ll come home soon.’ And then I took him by the hand and we sat down together on a bench in the lobby. We talked quietly for a long time until the door finally opened and his wife, poor thing, came in half frozen, covered with snow. I waited to make sure she was all right. Then Mr. Novik, he turned to me and he said, ‘Thank you.’ Just that, ‘Thank you.’ Me, I didn’t answer him, I went into the elevator and back up to my apartment. That was five years ago. We still see each other from time to time, in the elevator, in the lobby, but we haven’t spoken a word to each other since.”

The battles still aren’t over. As recently as December of 2002 I received a phone call from a Yiddish editor in New York, asking if the Yiddish Book Center could help underwrite the cost of
Der yidisher kemfer (The Jewish Fighter),
the hundred-year-old magazine of the Labor Zionist movement. To be honest, I didn’t even know the magazine was still alive. But I wasn’t completely surprised by the call. Three months earlier, I was approached by the ninety-seven-year-old editor of another Yiddish journal, who needed help to keep his faltering publication alive, and I knew of at least two other New York Yiddish journals that were on equally shaky ground. “You all seem to be in the same boat,” I pointed out to the
Kemfer
editor when he called. “There are four separate Yiddish magazines, all without enough writers or readers or money to survive. Why don’t you just join forces and create one single, viable Yiddish periodical?”

The editor laughed.
“Ummeglekh!
(Impossible!)
”
he said, explaining why the ideologies and personalities of the various publications couldn’t mix. His vivid characterization of the respective editors—all insisting on autonomy, all at odds with one another—was entertaining, but it was also tragic. Even at this very late date, they’d rather die alone than work together. I was reminded of a Yiddish expression:
Yeder makht shabes far zikh,
Everyone is making Shabbos for himself. Itche Goldberg, the erudite head of the erstwhile communist Yiddish cultural world and himself no stranger to bitter internecine Yiddish polemics, once characterized the present state of Yiddish culture as a conflagration: “The entire edifice of Yiddish culture is on fire,” he told me, “it’s burning out of control. Every once in a while a lone individual or organization comes along with a little bucket of water to throw on the flames. But before he can get close, he has to pass by a committee of representatives of all the other organizations, who check to make sure that his
tsitses
(the fringes of his ritual garment) are kosher. Never mind that the members of the committee do nothing to extinguish the flames themselves, they
still want to make sure that no one with the wrong political credentials should have a chance.”

I so wanted it to be different. I wanted these old radicals to be feisty and funny, like the geriatric rabble-rousers in John Sayles’s “At the Anarchists’ Convention.” But there was a danger in romanticizing them. My coworker, Sharon Kleinbaum, who was enamored of anarchist theory, once made a pilgrimage to the elderly editor of a Yiddish anarchist newspaper. She went expecting to talk about Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Emma Goldman; instead, the editor pinched her on the
tukhes
and chased her around the living room.

At least he still had the oomph to chase her; many of the people we met were just plain bitter—characters not from John Sayles but from Cynthia Ozick’s masterful 1969 story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Envious they were—of each other, and even more so of us. They envied us our youth, our optimism, our success. Why should the newspapers publish pictures of us instead of them, who spoke Yiddish so much better and had been championing Yiddish culture since before we were born? Once, when an article about the Center appeared in the
New York Times,
the board of a major Yiddish organization filed into its public reading room (a friend of mine was sitting at an adjoining table) and convened an emergency meeting, the subject of which was “What to do about Lahnsky.”

It wasn’t only envy. When all was said and done, they regarded our work in rescuing Yiddish books not as a triumph but as a sign of their own defeat: If they had been doing their jobs, if they had succeeded in conveying Yiddish culture to their children, then Yiddish books wouldn’t need to be rescued. Of course, the historical depredations and upheavals that unseated Yiddish were hardly their fault. But they couldn’t see that, and their myopia only compounded the tragedy. I’d be lying if I said that their barbs didn’t sting. But in the end we, unlike them, could grasp a deeper irony: No matter how harshly they
maligned us or how stubbornly they refused to speak with one another, sooner or later they would have to call us to pick up their books, and when they did, we would make no distinctions: Their books and those of their antagonists would end up in the same truck and on the same shelves—side by side, together at last.

B
ECAUSE IT’S MY
nature, and because I had studied enough history to impart a certain
rakhmones
for those who suffered the slings and arrows of Yiddish fortune, I tried my best to make peace with the old Yiddish organizations while they were still here. I didn’t take sides (though I was often sorely tempted), and I made a point of speaking to everyone—though I learned soon enough whom not to mention to whom. I visited different organizations and appeared before their
eksekutives,
their executive committees. I attended and spoke at their
banketn,
the interminable banquets where their members got together in the gilded ballroom of one or another of New York’s faded grand hotels to congratulate one another, celebrate the past, and mourn the future. The more radical the organization, it seemed, the more bourgeois its events. Whatever the ideology, though, the speeches were always the same:
“Vu iz undzer yugnt?
(Where are our young people?)
”
their orators would demand as they pounded the hotel podium. And I’d sit there at the head table, looking at my uneaten chicken swimming in grease (I was a vegetarian), looking at my parve ice cream (it never melted, no matter how long the program lasted), and I’d think, With food and entertainment like this, was it any wonder that their
yugnt
stayed home?

Fortunately, not everyone was bitter. Sometimes I connected personally with members of that older generation—and occasionally I even managed to turn them around. Take S. L. Shneiderman, for example. Barely a year after we began collecting books, he wrote a blistering article in the
Forward,
attacking the Yiddish Book Center for
being out of touch with the
real
(meaning older) institutions of Yiddish culture. Why, he wrote, hadn’t we contacted the
Forverts,
why had we ignored the Old Yiddish World, and most of all, why had we never taken the trouble to phone him, Mr. Shneiderman, and let him know what we were up to? The best he could conclude from such gross derelictions was that we were not really interested in saving Yiddish culture, but rather in hoarding books so as “
tsu mumifirn di yidishe shprakh,
to ‘mummify’ the Yiddish language.”

Since I had never met Mr. Shneiderman, since he had never visited the Center or interviewed me or any other member of our staff before writing his article, I didn’t think his attack was quite fair, and I phoned him at home to tell him so.

“Shneiderman!”
he bellowed by way of greeting, in what I took to be a preemptive strike.

I introduced myself and explained where I thought his article had gone astray. To my amazement, he listened, and after an hour and a half—marked by frequent interruptions and pontifications—he was genuinely repentant. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “I had no idea. When you started collecting books without getting in touch with
me,
I naturally assumed you weren’t really interested in
der yidisher kultur
(the Yiddish culture).
Meyle
(no matter), it’s never too late. When can I get a train to Am Hoyrst to see for myself?”

A week later Mr. and Mrs. Shneiderman arrived at the local Amtrak station. He looked like a Jewish Winston Churchill: short but powerful, with broad shoulders and a deep, resonant voice. His wife was considerably quieter and more refined, with a face that revealed both humor and intelligence. In keeping with what I had come to recognize as Yiddish custom, she referred to her husband by his last name alone, as in “Shneiderman was so looking forward to coming here today,” or, “Shneiderman,
zay shtil!
Keep quiet!”

I loaded the Shneidermans into the back of a borrowed car and took
them to the Center. They were impressed. In fact, the relentlessly voluble Mr. Shneiderman was actually nonplussed for a good twenty seconds. Then he wiped a tear from his eye and boomed out his verdict: “
A nes min hashomayim!
(A miracle from Heaven!) Such young people, to do so much! What’s happening here is the
future
of Yiddish culture!
Ershtns
(first of all), I’m going to donate to you all my own books after I’m gone. And
tsveytns
(second), I’m going to write a three-part series for the
Forverts.
The whole world should know what goes on here and not listen to the
yentes
back in New York who only know to criticize and complain.”

He was as good as his word. The
Forward
ran three successive, full-page articles by S. L. Shneiderman, one of which bore the headline
AMHOYRST—NAYER PUNKT AF DER MAPE FUN YIDISH
(Amherst, the Newest Point on the Yiddish Map). My grandmother couldn’t stop
kvell
ing: It’s one thing, after all, to see your grandson in the
Times
and quite another in the
Forverts
! Before long I was receiving handwritten Yiddish letters from scores of older Yiddish organizations, some with checks and others offering to help us collect books in their communities. I responded in kind, accepting invitations to speak at their meetings, attend their banquets, accept their awards, and sometimes even write for their papers. In fact, I’m still waiting for the $25 honorarium I was promised for an article I wrote for the
Forverts
in 1983.

I met many people whom I genuinely liked—decent people, activists, visionaries, idealists—and I spent long hours sipping tea at their kitchen tables while they regaled me with recollections of great writers or eyewitness accounts of movements and events I had only read about in books. But even after hundreds of hours together, I think we both knew that on some level we would remain strangers to one another. Born in the shtetl, versed in Talmud, steeped in Marxism, tested on the streets (and sometimes in jail), well read in Hebrew, Yiddish, and the major languages of Europe, they possessed a depth of
learning, experience, and Jewish erudition that I could barely apprehend, let alone aspire to. And I, for them, was also a cipher: relatively ignorant of Jewish knowledge, true, but an American through and through, unbent by the past and heir to a new world—sexually, politically, intellectually—that could never be theirs no matter how long they lived in America, no matter how much they read or how earnestly they tried to understand. We were time travelers, inhabitants of different epochs stopping long enough to compare notes before returning whence we came. No matter how respectful I was, no matter how intently I listened, it was never enough. They always wanted me to stay longer, return sooner, understand better or appreciate them more. And why shouldn’t they? They’d been famous long ago, they’d lived front and center on the stage of history, they wrote books, they led, they learned, they taught, they organized, and now, in their old age, all they lacked was a
yarshn
—someone to whom they could bequeath not only their libraries but the sum total of their lives. God only knows they deserved it. And God only knows I tried. But in the end, what history had stolen from them, no one—not I, not anyone—could restore.