Outwitting History (27 page)

My heart started thumping—I didn’t know what to do first. I hid the book, locked the door, and turned on the burglar alarm. That night I could hardly sleep. Early the next morning I phoned Zachary Baker, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Yiddish bibliography. He confirmed what I had begun to suspect: The book our interns discovered could well be the last copy on earth.

How had it survived—and how did it end up at the Center? We placed a query in
Pakn Treger,
our English-language magazine, asking for information. Two days later I received a phone call from a woman on Long Island. The book, she said, had belonged to her father, who in 1929 had traveled to the Soviet Union to visit his cousin, Slutski. They were together at the printing plant in Kiev when the first copies of the
dictionary came off the press, and his cousin had handed him one as a gift. The American had placed it in his luggage and carried it home to New York, never knowing that just days or maybe even hours after he left, the NKVD, the secret police, had burst into the factory and destroyed the entire run. This one copy had remained in his private library until his death, whereupon his daughter mailed it to the Center, and our interns discovered it in an otherwise unassuming box of Yiddish books.

B
OOKS WEREN’T THE
only treasures we found. During our first internship program, in the summer of 1986, we received an urgent call from Arye Gottlieb, a rabbi in Paramus, New Jersey. He had just heard rumors, he said, of a two-car garage in Boro Park, a Hasidic neighborhood of Brooklyn, that was “literally filled to the rafters” with Yiddish and Hebrew sheet music. I was skeptical. By that point we had collected more than six hundred thousand Yiddish books, and in all that time had found fewer than one hundred fifty intact folios of sheet music. It wasn’t because immigrant Jews didn’t like music; to the contrary, they liked it too much. The sheet music they bought was in almost constant use, leafed through at the piano (a surprisingly common fixture even in poor immigrant homes), passed around for family sing-alongs, opened and closed and opened again until few copies remained.

Or so we thought. As Rabbi Gottlieb explained, much of the Yiddish and Hebrew sheet music in America was published by a company called Metro Music, located in the heart of the Yiddish theater district on New York’s Second Avenue. The company sold the scores of the latest Yiddish theater hits, as well as cantorial music, art songs, folk songs, socialist anthems, and work songs of the
halutzim,
the Jewish pioneers in the Land of Israel. Metro Music went out of business in the early 1970s and sold its entire back stock—an astonishing
eighty-five thousand
brand-new, unsold folios—to a group of private investors, who hoped to resell the music on the commercial market.

The investors were ahead of their time: The klezmer revival hadn’t yet begun, and demand for Yiddish sheet music was limited at best. This remarkable treasure trove might well have been lost were it not for the heroic intervention of a young, religious Jew named Sidney Rimmer. A part-time cantor, Mr. Rimmer realized that there was a great deal of
khazones,
cantorial music, mixed in with the Metro Music stock, and he saw it as a mitzvah, a good deed, to save it all, regardless of its commercial value. So he made the necessary business arrangements, cleared out a two-car garage behind his Boro Park home, filled it with secondhand steel shelving, and carefully stored all eighty-five thousand pieces. Many were still packed in the publisher’s original brown-paper bundles, the oldest sheets dated to the 1890s, and virtually all were in mint condition.

And there they lay. Occasionally a local cantor would hear of the collection and come to Mr. Rimmer in search of a particular piece of liturgical music. For the most part, though, the existence of these folios—the largest single collection of unsold Yiddish and Hebrew sheet music in the world—remained largely unknown.

When Rabbi Gottlieb explained all this to us, we immediately phoned Mr. Rimmer. He was thrilled to hear from us, eager to have the music returned to active use, and more eager still to get his garage back after all these years. “Come as soon as you can,” he said. “It’s all yours.”

Two days later, on a hot, muggy morning in late July, two interns, Elliot Glist and Jennifer Luddy, joined me in the cab of a big, yellow rental truck. Mr. Rimmer, who was standing in the middle of the street waiting for us, turned out to be a friendly, clean-shaven, relatively modern man in a short-sleeved shirt and small black yarmulke. He directed us down a narrow alleyway beside his house. The truck was so tall it necessitated the removal of the
eruv,
the ritual Sabbath boundary wire stretched overhead. When he pulled open the double doors to his detached brick garage, we understood just what a mitzvah he had done.

We set up a ramp, brought out the hand trucks, and began loading. The day was
hot,
ninety-two in the shade, and the humidity was palpable. Elliot and I were wearing cut-off shorts and T-shirts; Jennifer had on gauzy pastel shorts and a matching sleeveless top, with a generous display of
pupik
in between. Although this was not exactly regulation dress for Boro Park, Mr. Rimmer, his wife, and two children could not have been less judgmental. In fact, the only problem came at noon, when it was time to break for lunch.

“Is there a restaurant nearby?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Mr. Rimmer, “but I’m afraid it’s closed. You see, today is the Seventeenth of Tammuz.”

It took a moment for the significance of the Hebrew date to register. Of course! Sheva-esrey Tammuz was an obscure Jewish fast day . . . obscure for us, that is. We realized with sinking hearts that there’d be no lunch here in Boro Park that day—which was not a great problem, since it was too hot to eat anyway. What was a problem was thirst. We had depleted our own water bottles long since, and we were sweating so profusely that the Rimmers finally concluded it was
pikuah nefesh,
a matter of life and death—a Jewish legal concept that trumped most other commandments and allowed them to bring us a welcome pitcher of ice water.

After working all day we spent the night in Great Neck, where Sidney and Ruth Berg treated us to a huge dinner in an air-conditioned restaurant. The next day an excited crew of interns was on hand in Holyoke to help us unload. It took months to sort and catalog all eighty-five thousand folios, which boiled down to roughly eleven hundred discrete titles, most with wonderfully ornate covers. There were old favorites, such as “
‘Rumania, Rumania’
—The Sensational Song Hit Starring Aaron Lebedeff!” and “That Tremendous Success of the People’s Theater,
‘Der Idisher Yenke Dudl’
(The Jewish Yankee Doodle)!” by Boris Tomashevsky, the grandfather of the conductor Michael Tilson
Thomas.
“Di Yidishe shikse”
by Dora Weisman is about the travails of a newly arrived Jewish immigrant. Zionist favorites included
“A folk on a heym
(A People Without a Home),” “
Erets-Yisroel iz undzer land!
(The Land of Israel Is Our Home!),” and
“Prezident Artur Tsions shif
(President Arthur, Zion’s Ship),” a celebration of the S.S.
President Arthur
of the American Palestine Line, which had delivered Jewish pioneers to “Zion’s Gate.” Of course, there were arrangements by all the great cantors: Moyshe Oysher, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Yossele Rosenblatt. There were many love songs—all of them sad. Thirty or forty titles concerned themselves with immigrant mothers: “A Letter to Mama,” “A Mother’s Heart,” “A Mother Is the Best Friend,” “When There Is No Mother,” “Mamenyu, Buy Me That!” “Can a Mother Be Guilty?” “A Mother’s
Nakhes,
” and “A Mother’s Tears.”

Father songs? There were only two:
“Narishe tates
(Foolish Fathers)” and—though it wasn’t until I had children of my own that I was able to appreciate it—“
A tate iz nisht keyn mame
(A Father Is Not a Mother).”

When Merriam-Webster published its dictionary of “the world’s seven most widely spoken languages” in 1966, Yiddish was one of them. That’s not because so many people spoke the language (at its peak, the number never exceeded one half of one percent of the world’s population) but because those who did speak it were so widely scattered. Fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, Yiddish-speaking Jews found refuge in
arbe kanfes ha’orets,
the four corners of the earth, and wherever they went they brought, bought, or published Yiddish books. When those Jews died or, as sometimes happened, when new political upheaval forced them to flee yet again, it fell to us and our
zamlers
to track down the books they left behind.

Not long ago, on a warm spring morning, a tractor-trailer backed up to the loading dock of our Amherst building. On board was a huge wooden crate with the improbable return address of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was once the British colony of Rhodesia, where some five thousand Jews took refuge before World War II. Successful in business, they created Jewish schools, synagogues, and cultural centers, but in the 1970s, as colonialism unraveled, most took flight,
abandoning large numbers of Yiddish books. It was a local rabbi named Bryan Opert, our only zamler on the African continent north of Johannesburg, who rounded them up, packed them into this homemade crate, and dispatched them by ship to Amherst, by way of Harare, Capetown, and Boston.

The crate was so big that it took most of our staff to wrestle it off the truck and two crowbars and a stepladder to open it. Inside were hundreds of volumes, many of them exceedingly rare, such as prewar imprints from Vilna, a Zionist pamphlet published in Tel Aviv in 1938, and various
yizkor
books and Holocaust memoirs. But most interesting by far were Yiddish books written and published in Africa. One,
Unter afrikaner zun (Under the African Sun),
sounded like a Jewish version of Hemingway. Another,
Udtshorn: Yerushalayim d’Afrike (Oudtshoorn: The Jerusalem of Africa),
was the chronicle of a commune of Yiddish-speaking ostrich farmers who, before styles changed, supplied the lucrative market of feathers for women’s hats. Most of these African imprints were titles we’d never seen before, and we immediately set them aside for cataloging and scanning. A short time later, the day before Yom Kippur 2003, we received word that the Bulawayo synagogue had burned to the ground. Had Rabbi Opert not sent us the books when he did, they would surely have been lost.

I
MADE MY
first attempt to organize book collection in Israel in the late 1980s, when I accepted an invitation to address the Veltrat, the World Council on Yiddish. A thousand delegates from around the world crowded into the ballroom of a faded beachfront hotel in Tel Aviv for the three-day conference. When they rose to sing the
Hatikvah,
the national anthem, at the start of the first session, they used the opportunity to get better seats, jostling one another and pushing their metal chairs forward like so many mechanical walkers, so that by the time the anthem was over the neat rows were in shambles and the entire
audience was jammed together as close to the stage as they could get. I was seated on the stage, at a long head table with delegates from two dozen countries, each of whom was supposed to speak for five minutes. Instead, they spoke—or rather shouted—for a half hour each, invoking over and over again the familiar refrain,
“Vu iz undzer yugnt?
—Where are our youth?
”
Although the chairman pounded away with his heavy rubber mallet (the sort used to bang hubcaps onto a car), some speakers refused to relinquish the microphone, giving rise to several onstage scuffles. My scheduled 3:00
P.M
. lecture—an hour-long slide show and appeal for books—finally took place at 7:30 in the evening. It wasn’t enough that I had to address a thousand people in Yiddish; the whole time I spoke, the chairman was whacking me from behind with a rolled-up newspaper, loudly whispering,
“Gikher! Gikher!
(Quicker! Quicker!)
”
I spent the next two days hanging out in the back of the hall with the Israeli sound crew (the only other young people I could find), or else lying by the hotel’s empty swimming pool reading Henry Beston’s
The Outermost House
—about as far from Yiddish as I could get. This was not the organization that was going to help us collect Yiddish books in Israel.

Then in 1991, UNESCO passed a resolution—over the objection of its Arab members—declaring Yiddish “an endangered language” and calling for immediate steps to assure its preservation. I was invited to join delegates from Canada, France, Holland, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Poland, and the United States (the Soviet delegates had been denied visas) for three days of intensive deliberations in Israel to decide what the world should do. The scholar Chone Shmeruk presided as chairman, and Avrom Sutzkever, arguably the greatest living Yiddish writer, lent a certain gravity to the proceedings. We labored conscientiously for three days. On the last night I was assigned the task of drafting the final resolutions—in English, since despite UNESCO’s sudden embrace of Yiddish, no one there could actually read it. Working in my
Jerusalem hotel room on a then state-of-the-art, fourteen-pound laptop computer, I finished at midnight and, without thinking, plugged in my brand-new portable printer.
Kaboom.
Apparently the printer wasn’t wired for foreign current, because it blew its main circuit board, along with every light on the floor. Not knowing where else to turn, I phoned a young Yiddish performer named Mendy Cahan, whom I had met earlier that evening. A native Yiddish-speaker from Antwerp, where his Hasidic family worked in the diamond trade, Mendy was now a student of Yiddish literature at Hebrew University. As I suspected, he owned a printer, he and his girlfriend were up late anyway, and they invited me over. The espresso was already steaming when I got there, we talked for hours, and by the time I left, proposal in hand, he’d accepted my invitation to serve as a faculty member and
tumler
-at-large (a sort of all-purpose emcee and entertainer) at our upcoming “Winter Program in Yiddish Culture” in San Diego.