Outwitting History (20 page)

I slept fitfully, waking again and again with the thought that somehow it was all a bad dream. When I awoke a little before noon my ribs ached mercilessly, but my head was clear and the events of the night
before did not seem quite so cataclysmic. I tucked a bottle of aspirin into my rucksack, took a bus to Springfield, and boarded the train for New York.

When I awoke on Wednesday morning in Roger’s apartment I was, to my dismay, even more stiff and sore than the day before. The slightest movement sent streaks of pain shooting through my sides, and I was pretty doubtful as to whether I could handle a truck. Fortunately Sharon had greater foresight than I: She had arranged for several friends to help with the shlepping and enlisted her brother Aaron to drive. (An ardent feminist, Sharon was furious with herself for having to resort to male assistance, let alone her older brother, and she vowed on the spot to learn to drive big trucks herself. Within three months, after a series of nerve-racking lessons, she was a full-fledged
balegole
(teamster), piloting heavy truckloads of Yiddish books all by herself.)

The scene at the Atran House was predictably chaotic. It was the building’s last day, and professional movers—big, strapping, tattooed men in sleeveless T-shirts and broad leather weightlifter’s belts—were rushing to remove the last of the furniture. Books, papers, and junk were scattered everywhere. “All the books that are left are yours,” we were told. So we began in the subbasement and systematically made our way up through the building, one floor at a time. In addition to thousands of abandoned Yiddish books we found boxes of periodicals, props and costumes from old Yiddish plays, vintage metal signs with old-fashioned painted hands pointing to things like
Kafeterye
(Cafeteria) and
Vashtsimer
(Wash Room), and a half-dozen sheet Royal and Underwood manual Yiddish typewriters. As sometimes happens when there’s work to be done, my pain somehow, miraculously, eased for the day, and I was able to hold my own with the heavy lifting—although I paid the price for weeks to come.

Our truck was almost full and the sun beginning to set when we finally reached the top floor. I was alone, deeply absorbed in my work,
collecting what books and papers I could find, when suddenly I came upon a large rolltop desk that had not yet been removed and, seated behind it, a very old man reading a newspaper. He looked up and we stared at each other for a long time. Here was I, a young man with a beard, long hair, jeans, and a dirty sweatshirt carrying an armful of Yiddish books, and there was he, a small man at a big desk in an otherwise empty building, silhouetted against a small, arched window, looking as though he had stepped straight from the pages of a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

It was he who broke the silence.

“Ver zayt ir?
(Who are you?)
”
he gruffly demanded.

I told him.

“And who are you?” I asked in return.

“Yud Shin Hertz.”

Yud Shin Hertz? If this really were a Bashevis novel I would have sworn I was talking to a ghost. Yud Shin Hertz was a preeminent historian of the Jewish labor movement in Europe. His four-volume
Di geshikhte fun Bund (The History of the Jewish Labor Bund)
had been standard reading in graduate school, and I had read other books and articles by him as well, including his moving memoir of Jewish life in Poland,
Geshikhte fun a yugnt (The Story of a Young Generation)
. For me Yud Shin Hertz was a legend from another world. I’d assumed he had died many years before.

Suspicious at first, Mr. Hertz was astonished and then clearly pleased when I told him his books were still being read. He was ninety-two years old, he told me, and at his age it was too late for change: Although he knew the building was being emptied, he had decided to remain at his desk until the movers or whoever was in charge actually looked him in the eye and ordered him out.

I left him there, alone at his desk, leaving it to someone with a less acute sense of history to persuade him to leave. Although I was often
exasperated by what I perceived as the stubbornness and intransigence of the old Yiddish world, I found myself rooting for Mr. Hertz in his lonely vigil in that darkling room. His determination struck me not so much as obstinacy as nobility: the Don Quixote of the Atran House attic resolute against the inexorability of change, the last defender of a world that was literally being pulled out from under him. But even before I passed the burly movers on their way up the stairs, I knew that Mr. Hertz’s cause was lost: for as he sat at his rolltop desk, digging in his heels and waiting to do battle with history, the newspaper he was reading was not the Yiddish-language
Forverts;
it was the English
New York Times
.

In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel
Enemies: A Love Story,
the owner of a Yiddish bookshop is asked whether he is afraid of thieves.

“No,” replies the bookseller. “My only fear is that some Yiddish author might break in at night and put in some more books.”

Our own collection was growing by leaps and bounds. On average, we collected four hundred volumes a day, two thousand a week, a hundred thousand a year. Just finding space to store them all had become a major problem. Our new home in an Amherst schoolhouse proved a godsend, but we weren’t there a year before the piles of incoming books grew so high that we had to park a borrowed tractor-trailer out back for the overflow. When that, too, was full we went looking for warehouse space, first in a defunct roller-skating rink, then in the attic of a spice merchant, where the air was so redolent it made us dizzy and the ancient wooden floor literally sagged beneath the weight of our overladen carts. It was only when those spaces, too, were full that our no-nonsense board chair, Joe Marcus, decided enough was enough. The dean of engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Joe prevailed
on a former student to lease us two floors in a renovated nineteenth-century mill building in nearby Holyoke, at the rock-bottom price of one dollar per square foot per year, utilities included, with no increase for the next twenty-five years. Each floor was the size of a football field. We managed to
shnor
$125,000 worth of surplus steel library shelving—but not before the mountain of unopened boxes had grown high enough to crack a three-foot beam on the floor below.

Of course, our warehouse was never intended as
genizah,
a mausoleum for superannuated volumes, but rather as a clearinghouse through which we could place old books in the hands of new readers. We issued regular catalogs offering duplicate copies at reasonable cost, and it wasn’t long before orders arrived. To the bewilderment of those who insisted that Yiddish was dead, our customer list eventually included four thousand individuals and more than five hundred national and university libraries in twenty-six countries!

How can we account for such a groundswell? Why, at the precise moment when older Yiddish organizations were waning, were younger Jews flocking to Yiddish like never before? Part of the reason, as I’ve already suggested, was academic: for a thousand years, Jews in central and eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, and Yiddish sources had therefore become essential for serious research in the emerging fields of Jewish social history and cultural studies. But when all was said and done, the number of scholars remained small, while interest in Yiddish continued to grow. Surely there were other factors to explain the mounting pull of this fading language on a new generation.

One answer, I believe, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, was political: not because of the role of Yiddish in proletarian struggle, as championed by many of the older Yiddish organizations, but because of its potential for
cultural
struggle, as championed by my generation since the Vietnam War. Consider, for example,
Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture,
the 1980 memoir by Abbie Hoffman, perhaps the best known of the
self-described “cultural revolutionaries.” It is, on the whole, a surprisingly Jewish book, but nowhere more so than in Abbie’s account of the trial of the Chicago Seven, who were charged in federal court with conspiracy to incite riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Half the defendants, both defense lawyers, and the judge were Jewish, and, according to Abbie, it didn’t take long for the trial to develop into a confrontation between two competing American Jewish possibilities: specifically, himself, Abbie, the unabashedly Jewish, Yiddish-quipping, curly-haired activist from Worcester, Massachusetts, and the judge, Julius Hoffman, a highly assimilated German Jew. “We fashioned our own little battle,” Abbie recalls, “the war of the two Hoffmans.”

The contest came to a head in the final days of the trial, when the judge sent one of the defendants, David Dellinger, a pacifist, behind bars on contempt charges.

I really exploded. “You’re a disgrace to the Jews. You would have served Hitler better,” I screamed [at the judge], “you
shtunk
!” And then, in the sharpest thrust of all, I called him
“a shande fur de goyim,”
which roughly translated is a Yiddish expression meaning “a front man for the gentiles.”

I don’t want to overstate the case. Abbie was no Yiddish scholar. His translation of
“a shande far di goyim”
—literally, “an embarrassment in the eyes of non-Jews”—was inaccurate, although whether he was mistranslating or intentionally reinterpreting is not clear. What is clear is that he saw Yiddish as a
counterculture,
and he didn’t hesitate to use it to challenge the mainstream culture from which, in his eyes, the war derived.

Of course, what Abbie didn’t know—what few Jews his age or younger could have known—was that Yiddish had been pressed into service to challenge mainstream values since at least 1878, when Mendele Moykher Seforim published a short novel entitled
The Travels
and Adventures of Benjamin the Third
. Loosely modeled on
Don Quixote,
the book tells the story of two small-town Jews, Benjamin and his side-kick Senderl, who leave their wives and set off in search of the lost ten tribes of Israel. The book is openly satiric of its heroes’ narrow horizons and
kleynshtetldik
(small-town) ways. When, just a few days’ walk from home, they come to Teterevke, a provincial town with sidewalks and two-story buildings, they mistake it for Constantinople and stand philosophizing in the middle of a busy street until they’re almost run over by a passing wagon. Some pages later Benjamin and Senderl are kidnapped from a
shvitz,
a communal steam bath, and sold into service in the tsar’s army. For the first time in Yiddish literature, Jews come face-to-face with the non-Jewish world—with predictable results:

They were utterly bewildered. . . . Everything around them was strange and grotesque: the barracks, the other soldiers, the language and the rudiments of military drill. Their uniforms draped them with all the gracefulness of [beggars’] sacks, their caps were tilted at a ludicrous angle. To the casual beholder the whole thing appeared farcical: the pair looked like scarecrows got up to parody soldiers and to burlesque military bravado.
Az okh un vey tsu der biks, nebekh, vos iz arayngefaln tsu undzere parshoynen
—pitiful was the fate of any rifle that fell into the hands of either of the two recruits. . . . Their drilling was one endless comedy, and needless to say they came in for their share of resounding blows.

Benjamin and Senderl decide to escape. Late one night they sneak out of their barracks and head to the perimeter fence, where they are caught by a sentry and brought before a court-martial of resplendent Russian officers. The charge is desertion, the penalty is death. But Benjamin is undaunted. Instead of pleading for his life, he defends himself by challenging the military itself—from a decidedly Jewish point of view:

“Your honor,” Benjamin vociferated. “Trapping people in broad daylight and selling them like chickens in the marketplace—that’s permissible? But when these same people try to escape, you call it a crime? If that’s the case, the world must be coming to an end and I fail to understand what you call ‘permissible’ and ‘not permissible.’ . . . Speak up Senderl—don’t stand there like a
golem
! Come out with God’s own truth . . . and say together with me: ‘We want to tell you that we don’t know a thing about waging war, that we never did know, and never want to know. We are, praised be the Lord, married men; our thoughts are devoted to other things; we haven’t the least interest in anything having to do with war. Now then, what do you want with us? You yourselves ought to be glad to get rid of us, I should think!’”

We lose something in the translation. What Benjamin actually says about the “arts of war” is this:
“Zey geyen undz afile gor in kop nisht
—They don’t even go into our heads.” In other words, militarism lies outside their cognition: beyond their interest, their ability, or their comprehension. Their position, as Abbie Hoffman would have appreciated, is radical to the core, for it challenges not only the legitimacy but the very
premise
of military culture. And the incredible thing is that they get away with it. Roaring with laughter, the assembled officers set our Jewish heroes free on grounds of insanity.

To quote the title of another of Mendele’s works,
“Aderabe, ver iz meshuge?”
(On the Contrary, Who Is Really Crazy?) If Mendele began writing in Yiddish to spread Western Enlightenment among the Jewish masses, it didn’t take him long to recognize that Yiddish-speaking Jews—despite, or rather because of, their marginality—had something to teach the Western world. In short, the Yiddish medium had become the message—a point underscored exactly one hundred years later, when Isaac Bashevis Singer stood in Stockholm as the first Yiddish writer to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature:

The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language, a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both gentiles and emancipated Jews.