Outwitting History (22 page)

That was a few hundred books. By my estimate, fully half of the congress’s forty thousand books were stored in its basement. When I expressed my concern I noticed Yonia and Manny exchanging glances with the congress’s young, American-born executive director, who had joined us for the tour.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Well,” the administrator said sheepishly, “a pipe did break about two years ago. We lost two thousand volumes. That’s one of the reasons we’re offering the books to you now.”

As I saw it, there wasn’t a moment to lose. I returned to Amherst and presented the proposal to our board. Several board members strongly opposed paying for books; they didn’t want to establish a precedent we would live to regret. But there was no denying that the twenty thousand books in that basement were in imminent danger, and that further delay could have disastrous consequences. The board authorized the expense—provided I could find the cash.

It wasn’t easy. The Center has always run on a bare-bones budget. At the time, in 1992, we had zero cash reserves and could barely meet payroll each week. The sum was, quite simply, beyond our imagination.

So Jeffrey and I went back and negotiated a reduced fee, to be paid in equal installments over the next five years, which took the pressure off our cash flow. Eventually we’d find the money; now was the time
to act. Jeffrey hired a tractor-trailer and driver, reserved the Center’s own truck (an Isuzu diesel purchased in 1987), and inveigled four of our staff members and former interns to join us. At 7:30 on a chilly October morning, we gathered in front of the Atran House, ready to begin.

Shlepping forty thousand books is no small job—especially when they’re in movers’ boxes weighing close to a hundred pounds each. My coworkers were not particularly brawny, but they were young (at thirty-seven, I was the eldest of the crew), and the day would have gone smoothly enough were it not for an unforeseen problem. The tractor-trailer, which was supposed to meet us in front of the Atran House at 8:00
A.M
. (Jeffrey had arrived at six to stake out a row of parking spaces), didn’t actually pull up until nightfall, a full nine hours late! By that point, the oversize boxes we had been assiduously hauling out of the building since early morning had grown into a solid wall, three boxes wide and four high, from the entrance to the far end of the block.

While the rest of us shlepped, Jeffrey had seen to it that at least one person remained on the street, keeping guard over the boxes. But as the day wore on, the sight of that growing ridgeline proved increasingly unsettling to the Culture Congress staff and just about everyone else inside the Atran House who ventured outside to have a look. For the first few hours they were still joking and kibbitzing with us. A few even kissed us, grateful that someone had finally come to clear the decks, freeing up badly needed floor space in their offices.
“Gotenyu!”
one secretary gasped as we removed floor-to-ceiling boxes from behind her desk, “who knew there was a wall there? Tomorrow I’m going to bring a framed picture. It will look so nice.”

By midmorning, though, others were getting testy. The sheer size of that Berlin Wall on the sidewalk was becoming a
shtokh,
a goad, a vivid
display of exactly how much they were giving up. Inside the building it was even worse. If you’ve ever moved, you know how shabby a room can look once it’s stripped of its familiar furnishings. The effect on the Atran House was no different: As we descended on each office in turn, we left shmutz on the floor and unfaded rectangles on the walls where the boxes had blocked them. The inhabitants’ growing uneasiness was not just aesthetic; it was existential. Now that the books were gone, who were they, exactly, what was their mission, and where was the culture they sought to maintain?

My young colleagues and I were not insensitive to what was happening. We took time to talk to people in every office, explaining where we were taking the books and what we would do to get them into the hands of new readers. We also let them know that the considerable money we were paying for the books would enable the congress to publish new titles and begin new programs. Some people were mollified by these explanations, but others only became more agitated. The executive director, not much older than I, started pulling individual volumes from boxes as our staff members carried them past. Then he started shouting orders: “Put that box down! Don’t take
those
books— we spent two years putting them in alphabetical order, you’ll get them all mixed up! No, not the ones in the bookcase—a bookcase is supposed to have books in it. How will it look without books?”

I didn’t mind leaving some books behind: If the Culture Congress could use them,
gezunterheyt.
There were enough to go around. What the executive director seemed to forget, though, was that the books were ours, we had paid for them, we had a big job to do, the boxes weighed a hundred pounds apiece, and his kvetching was not making our work any easier. Fortunately, at about 10:30 Yonia Fain showed up. When I explained the situation he agreed immediately: We had bought the books fair and square, and he promised to do his best to keep the director out of our hair.

We kept on working, mostly upstairs. In the offices of the congress proper, boxes were stacked almost twelve feet high. Our bibliographer, Neil Zagorin, retrieved an extension ladder from the Center’s truck, set it against the wall, and precariously positioned himself at the top. I balanced myself on a rung halfway down, from which I was able to relay the heavy boxes to our people on the floor below, who loaded them onto hand trucks and rolled them out to the street. We were nothing if not efficient—within twenty minutes the whole pile was gone.

Yonia took one look at the empty wall and now it was his turn to protest. We were moving very fast: American kids, boys and girls, long hair, blue jeans, shouting back and forth in fluent English, exuberant, laughing and joking as people engaged in hard physical work are wont to do, and all the while Yonia’s books, his past, his very being, were disappearing before his eyes. Was it any wonder he started to yell?

“Why are you taking so many books?” he demanded. “You have to leave some for us! Why are you trying to liquidate us? What are
we
supposed to do when the books are gone?”

I reminded him of our mission: We were going to take the books to Massachusetts, store them safely, match them with new readers—and pay the congress enough money to continue its good work. But Yonia wasn’t listening. “What will we be without the books? Go ahead,” he shouted, “take them, take them all, finish us off! Everyone else wants to destroy us—why don’t you just make an end of it?”

I admired Yonia, and I understood his passion. Born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, he hadn’t learned Yiddish until the age of ten, when he and his parents fled to Vilna. He immediately fell in love with Yiddish literature. He spent the war as an art student in Moscow, then settled in Mexico as a protégé of Diego Rivera. Later he came to the States, where he became an art professor at Hofstra University. His paintings hang in the Whitney and other major museums. At the same time, he also became an important Yiddish writer. When, after
Dr. Shulman’s death, the Yiddish literary magazine
Zukunft
needed an editor, he took the job, “writing half of each issue myself.” He regretted he no longer had enough time to paint, “but someone has to do it.” Presumably he felt the same way about his responsibilities at the Culture Congress.

I wasn’t about to get into a shouting match with Yonia or argue with him in public, so I asked our staff members to take a break. Meanwhile Yonia stormed off into his private office. When I tried to follow he slammed the door. “I don’t talk to people like you,” he yelled. “I want nothing to do with you!” I pushed into the office anyway and shut the door behind me, trying to ignore the fact that the partition did not go all the way to the ceiling and people outside could overhear. At first Yonia was accusatory: We were
khazerish,
we were greedy, we wanted to build an empire, we couldn’t stand the thought that someone else should have books, too.

That wasn’t fair. “Who do you think we are?” I asked him. “Why do you think we’re collecting these books? You think we’re here to make money? To build an empire out of dirty boxes covered in rat shit, of books that no one’s read for forty years?”

Yonia began to weep. “Look at these books,” he said, lifting a volume of the
Lexicon
from his desk. “What are we doing, selling a book like this for two dollars? For one dollar? What about all the work that went into writing it, into printing it?” He held his head in his hands. “It’s okay, Ahrn, I’m not mad at you. Do you know who’s really to blame?”

I couldn’t imagine. The truck driver? The dispatcher?

“Hitler!”
he screamed. “If it hadn’t been for Hitler you wouldn’t be here now. We’d be selling these books ourselves for forty dollars apiece. Don’t you see? Hitler killed our readers, Hitler destroyed our world.

“Here in America, the Jewish establishment, they won’t listen, they
think Yiddish is over and done with, they think we’re all dinosaurs, they want to bury us, they want us to fade away, they want us to close up and disappear. But we
won’t
disappear!

“It’s okay, Ahrn, I know you’re not our enemy. It’s just that everywhere I turn, people want to destroy us, and I just can’t take it anymore. I see these Jews today in America, I go to
simkhes
(Jewish celebrations) and see these fancy Jews, these rich lawyers and businessmen and bankers, they think they’re so special, they spend fifty thousand dollars on a bar mitzvah, but they don’t have a penny for us, for all of Yiddish culture. Let me tell you, Ahrn, those bankers, with all their money, not one of them has the
yidishkayt
of the lowest tailor in Vilna!

“I respect you,” Yonia continued. “I respect so much what you’ve done, and I’m so ashamed that I spoke to you like that. I didn’t mean it, you are close to my heart, I’m so hurt and frustrated and heartsick from all that’s happened to Yiddish in this country that I just lashed out at the wrong person. I’m so ashamed.”

I offered my hand, but it wasn’t enough, so we stood up and hugged each other, and we both felt hot tears, undone by the irredeemable sadness of it all.

We had lost an hour’s work, but I, for one, was glad for the catharsis. I opened the door of Yonia’s office with a new sense of calm and determination . . . only to find the executive director up in arms. “Stop!” he cried. “You have to stop right now! I forbid you to take one more book. It’s all illegal. Our board never voted to sell you the books, Yonia didn’t have the authority to sign, let’s just stop right now.”

“You know, if you had called me last week, if you had called me yesterday, I would have understood,” I replied. “But right now there are thousands of books sitting on the sidewalk, a forty-five-foot
tractor-trailer is on its way, and I’ve got five staff members here in New York. We can’t afford to come down again. If you want to sell us the books, then we need to take them now.”

It was true: This was costing us a fortune, and I had no desire to come back. What’s more, we weren’t going to leave books on the street, and we certainly weren’t going to shlep them back down to the basement. Fortunately one of the congress’s board members, an elderly man, was present, and he spoke to the director. “Lahnsky is right,” he said gently, “there’s a contract, you can’t cancel now. It costs a lot of money for a truck.” The director was unappeased, but this sounded like the right tack, and so, in desperation, I uttered the only misleading statement I made that day: “Do you have any
idea,
” I asked indignantly, “how much it costs for a
union truck driver
?”

To tell the truth, I had no idea, either: The driver who canceled on us was an owner-operator, and I didn’t have a clue whether the replacement company, for whom we were still waiting, was union or not—though I rather guessed it wasn’t. No matter. We were in union territory, the home turf of the Bund Archive and the Jewish Labor Committee, and my question garnered instant audience support. “He’s right!” someone said in a heavy Yiddish accent, “a union driver isn’t cheap!” “A union man is on his way, you can’t just ask him to come back some other time.”

God forgive me my trespasses, but the ruse worked: We went back to hauling boxes from the basement, and we continued hauling till late that night. When the truck driver finally did arrive (the delay, he assured us, was the dispatcher’s fault, not his), he graciously agreed to help. So, too, did a rail-thin homeless man whom we recruited off the street. At 8:00
P.M
. we all sat down on the boxes on the sidewalk for supper from a nearby deli: seltzer, sandwiches, pickles, and cookies. We continued working until the tractor-trailer and our own truck were
overloaded, and even at that we had to send a truck and crew back the following week to retrieve the books that remained.

By that point most people in the Atran House were starting to appreciate their newfound space, and if any of them still had qualms, they were too exhausted to say. In the years that followed we made good on our promises: The Culture Congress was paid in full, the books we retrieved were sorted and cataloged, and many have been sent to students, scholars, and libraries around the world. Yonia and the Center remain on good terms:
Pakn Treger,
our magazine, recently published a translation of a wonderful short story of his, which he illustrated himself. The Congress for Jewish Culture is still here: I read recently on the Web that they’ve started a Yiddish coffeehouse for young people— presumably in space once occupied by boxes of books—and they’re pursuing several interesting publishing projects. Meanwhile, announcements of the demise of other, older Yiddish organizations have also proved premature: Some may be little more than shadows of what they once were, but they still exist.

Some have even flourished. The Forward Association, publisher of the newspaper, had a
groyse gevins,
a great stroke of good luck, when they sold WEVD, their one-time Yiddish radio station (the call letters are a tribute to socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs), for an astronomical sum and used the money to shore up the Yiddish
Forward,
introduce a Russian-language edition, and in conjunction with private investors, to launch a new
Forward:
a first-rate, national English-language Jewish newspaper. YIVO, the Yiddish research institute, met with similar
mazl:
Under the leadership of an enterprising businessman named Bruce Slovin, it joined forces with the American Jewish Historical Society, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Yeshiva University Museum, and the American Sephardic Federation to establish a new $54-million Center for Jewish History. Other older organizations are
also gaining new ground, including the Workmen’s Circle and the resurgent Folksbiene Yiddish Theater.