Outwitting History (7 page)

Of course, when you’re talking about a $1.5 billion annual campaign, even one tenth of one percent begins to look like real money. So I made an appointment and the next day found myself in a skyscraper on East Forty-second Street, sitting across from Mr. Cohen, the head of the umbrella agency charged by the Jewish establishment with disbursing national funding for Jewish culture. I was optimistic. For one thing, there were books on the wall: real books, literature and scholarship, in Hebrew and English. For another, the meeting did not begin with a peremptory dismissal but with a sincere expression of interest.

I spoke at length, and when I was through, Mr. Cohen nodded in agreement. “You’re absolutely right. The Jewish community should not allow Yiddish books to be destroyed,” he said. “I’m with you all the way. There’s only one problem. We have no money to give you.”

“But I thought you’re the national agency for Jewish culture.”

“We are,” he said, “but it’s not so easy. After our own expenses, the money we get is divided among ten constituent cultural organizations. Some are big, some are small, and you can imagine what it took before
we finally worked out a formula for who gets what. Now no one wants to risk their own percentage by reopening the discussion. We haven’t made an allocation to a
new
organization since we began, and I can’t see our board members starting now, no matter how good your cause.”

“But that doesn’t make sense!” I protested. “The solution isn’t to cut the pie smaller. The solution is to bring in new organizations, encourage young people with fresh energy and ideas, and create such a buzz that the federations will give you more money. That way you’ll end up with a bigger pie for everyone!”

Mr. Cohen sighed so deeply, it sounded like an outbound commuter train releasing its air brakes across the street at Grand Central Station. “You’re right, of course,” he said softly, “but it just can’t be done. Not yet. Not now.” A kind man, he did offer one small measure of hope. As I was getting up to leave, he assured me that the entire process was “in transition,” and that major changes in the structure of Jewish cultural funding were imminent.

“What do you mean by ‘imminent’?” I asked.

“Well, the committees are being formed, and we’re about to begin a thorough reevaluation along some of the lines you’re suggesting. I think we’ll start to see some real changes within the next three to five years.”

“Three to five
years
! But books are being destroyed right now! What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

He shrugged. “I guess you’re on your own till then. Maybe that’s why no one has succeeded in establishing a new national Jewish cultural agency in America in almost twenty years. Who knows—you’ve got a good cause, maybe you’ll be the first.”

I left Mr. Cohen’s office, walked across town to Penn Station, and boarded the Amtrak for New England. I was tired. I was disappointed. Above all I was angry. Yiddish books were being lost
right now
. There wasn’t time for committees and studies. If the Jewish establishment
wouldn’t supply the modest funds I needed to save Yiddish books, I’d just have to find the money someplace else.

So I spent that summer picking blueberries with a crew of migrant workers in Maine, and the next fall I took a job teaching evening Yiddish classes at the University of Massachusetts. My earnings were modest, but they were enough to live on as I began to lay the foundation of a new organization.

My first step, after printing business cards and letterhead, was to convene a board. I turned to the people I knew best: local professors and college administrators. Some, like Haim Gunner, Rich Alpert, Ruth Stark, and, later, our successive early board chairs, Joe Marcus, Penina Migdal Glazer, and Gail Perlman, accepted my invitation immediately and remained mentors and stalwart allies for years. Only one person turned me down: He told me he could not possibly jeopardize his “unsullied reputation” by associating with an enterprise “which in all likelihood will not succeed.”

With help from my father, who’s a tax lawyer, we incorporated and won tax-exempt status from the IRS. Then, on a cold night in April 1980, the entire board gathered around a simmering woodstove in the home of Nancy and Jules Piccus, my first Yiddish teacher, for our initial meeting. The agenda was brief: They signed the articles of organization, appointed me executive director, toasted
l’khayim,
and then adjourned to a table of white wine and brie, leaving it to me to work out the details.

The first detail was to find a building—a task complicated by our having no money. Space was at a premium in our area, but in early May I came across a want ad that sounded promising:

6,000 square feet on second floor of older industrial building near Northampton. Ideal for small business. Loading dock, elevator, ample parking. Reasonable rent. Inquire now for immediate occupancy.

The space was in a nineteenth-century redbrick silk mill, located in Florence, just three miles north of Smith College. I prevailed upon my old college professors Leonard Glick and Jules Piccus to drive over with me. The building’s owner, Steve Cahillane, greeted us in person.

“We run a trash-hauling business out of the first floor,” he explained, “and on the third floor is a clinical psychologist with a table tennis club on the side. The whole second floor is available: six thousand square feet at a dollar fifty a foot, nine thousand a year. Some people I’ve showed it to have found the space a little, well,
unconventional,
but that’s something you’ll have to judge for yourselves.”

He wasn’t kidding. The previous tenant had been a nonprofit group called Women in Construction, and one of the construction skills they taught was wallpapering. They practiced with remnants, and as a result, in the entire space virtually no two strips of wallpaper were the same. There were pinks, greens, yellows, and blues, flowers, stripes, paisleys, and polka-dots; the crowing roosters of a kitchen pattern alternated with the seashells of a bathroom, the tumbling astronauts of a kid’s bedroom, the ducks and hunting rifles of a man’s study, and the gold fleur-de-lis of a formal dining room. But apart from the funky wallpaper, the space was remarkably well suited. About half the floor had been left open as a single warehouse space, the rest divided into offices. There was more than enough room for all the Yiddish books our experts thought existed. Without so much as a word to me or Len, Jules walked over to the landlord and said, “It’s not perfect, but what the hell, we’ll take it!”

Leonard and I looked at each other, aghast. We didn’t have enough cash to cover the first week’s rent, let alone a year-long lease.
“Gelt,”
Len addressed Jules in an urgent whisper,
“m’darf hobn gelt
(you need money first).”

Jules was unfazed. He may have been a college professor, but somehow he was also a surprisingly astute businessman. There he was, negotiating
on our behalf, using terms like “liquidity,” “balloon payments,” “accrual,” and “deferral.” The upshot? The landlord agreed to let us move in on June 1, with the first payment not due until September. “That way we’ll be able keep our cash flow liquid until our major grant comes through at the end of the summer,” Jules explained.

“Major grant? What major grant?” I asked as soon as we were alone.

“Don’t worry,” Jules assured us, “September is three months away. We’ll come up with something before then. In the meantime we’ve got a space. Let’s start collecting books.”

W
E MOVED IN
on June 1, 1980. My best friend, Noemi Schwarz, contributed half her household furniture. Paul Novak, a master scrounger, drove in from Omaha with a large van and, for $100, managed to buy us a desk, two file cabinets, a picnic table, and a secondhand IBM Selectric typewriter. The next day I sat down at the IBM and wrote my first press release, announcing the formation of the National Yiddish Book Center and encouraging anyone with unwanted volumes to send them to us.

I made copies at the local Xerox shop and mailed them to three hundred newspapers. Then I sat down in the empty factory loft and waited: one day, two days, three days . . . The only sound was the occasional
boing-boing
of a Ping-Pong ball dropping through holes from the floor above. With no money for a telephone, I had routed calls through my friend Rich Alpert at the dean’s office at Hampshire College. Toward the end of the week Rich phoned me at home to tell me that Jean Caldwell, the western Massachusetts correspondent for the
Boston Globe,
had seen a copy of the press release and would be at the loft to interview me at ten the next morning.

I woke early, bicycled the thirteen miles from Amherst to Florence, and changed from my bicycle shorts into carefully ironed clothes (well, at least they
were
carefully ironed before I stuffed them into my
rucksack for the ride over). Jean was right on time and her appearance was reassuring. An older woman with a warm smile, she carried a pencil and notebook and was dressed in comfortable clothes covered by an old London Fog coat. We sat down at the picnic table, surrounded by the dizzying display of wallpaper, and I began to explain my plans. I told her how important Yiddish was, how many young people were beginning to study the language, how urgently books were needed, and how, until now, unwanted Yiddish books had been regularly abandoned or destroyed. “Now all that will change,” I assured her. “Soon this entire loft will be filled to the rafters with Yiddish books.” And then, pointing to the only two boxes of books in the place—books I had picked up the day before by bicycle from a woman in Northampton—I boldly proclaimed, “You see, the deluge has already begun!”

Jean looked doubtful: two boxes weren’t much of a deluge. But when I pulled out a jackknife and opened them, her whole attitude began to change. There were the usual books from Russia and Poland, printed before the war. “Imagine the miles those books must have traveled!” Jean marveled. There were novels, poetry collections, history, and essays—each with its own story. And as luck would have it, there was a copy of Harkavy’s
Brifn-shteler,
a curious volume published in New York in 1902 offering a selection of form letters in Yiddish and improbably baroque English for use by newly arrived Jewish immigrants. Jean laughed aloud over choice selections, such as “From an Ardent Lover to a Lady,” “Letter from a Young Lady to a Gentleman Declining the Offer of His Hand in Marriage,” and “Telegrams of Ten Words or Less.”

Objectively, there probably wasn’t much of a story in an empty factory loft with two boxes of books. But Jean was charmed by the books she did see, and she was at least bemused by my vision of the deluge to come. Several days later her story appeared in the
Globe;
then the news went out on the AP wire, and before long the deluge did begin: so
many books that our local post office balked at the prospect of delivering them all, and we had to ask our congressman to intervene.

Along with the books came letters. Elderly Jews, often writing in Yiddish, offered their own libraries “so that someone should read these books after I’m gone.” Younger Jews—often typing their messages on the letterhead of law firms, medical practices, businesses, or universities—told how they had inherited Yiddish books from parents or grandparents and had held on to them all this time, waiting for someone to come along who wanted them. By the end of June I was spending ten and twelve hours a day in Florence, swiveling between the IBM and an old Yiddish manual, answering the letters one by one. I advised everyone the same: Get sturdy boxes from your local liquor store, pack the books carefully, take them to the post office, and mail them in.

Fortunately, along with the books some people sent contributions. Modest, yes, but enough to install a telephone and buy planks from a local sawmill, which my housemate, Scott, sawed and planed and nailed into shelves.

Some of the letters I received were enormously touching. Martin Moroff, an elderly immigrant who ran a cigar store in Reading, Pennsylvania, wrote in Yiddish that he had been collecting Yiddish books on his own for many years, storing them in his home. Among the boxes he was preparing to ship were several that he recovered at the last minute from the
meysim shtibl,
the room where corpses are prepared for burial at the local Jewish cemetery. He whisked them out of there as fast as he could, he assured me, because “
Di bikher zenen geven lebedike nefoshes
(The books were living souls).”

In a later letter Mr. Moroff had another story to tell, about a scholarly Jew from Poland who had settled in Reading shortly after the war. The scholar and his wife loved books, and they amassed a large Yiddish library. But gradually, as the man became more successful in business,
he became more assimilated. He changed his name and spent less and less time reading. When his wife died he remarried, this time to an American-born woman who had little regard for literature. She promptly decided to renovate the house, and the first thing she did was get rid of her husband’s books, piling them up on a neighbor’s porch. As fate would have it, it began to rain that day, and by the time Mr. Moroff arrived at night—in response to an urgent phone call—the books were soaked through:

S’hot mir farklemt baym hartsn. Ikh hob oyfgehoybn a por bikher, es hot gekopet fun zey der regn. Neyn, s’hot getripet trern, di bikher hobn geveynt.
(My heart tightened with emotion. I picked up a few of the books and the rain dripped off of them. No, they were tears that fell, the books were crying).

Mr. Moroff was able to ship his books—and we were able to visit him in person some years later. But there were many people who, like Mr. Temmelman, could not manage to pack their books or carry them to the post office: They lived in walk-up apartments, or were too old or too infirm or simply had too many books to give away.

The visit to Mr. Temmelman was my first and last trip alone. After that, I tried whenever possible to travel in a team of three: two to do the shlepping and the third to be the Designated Eater. The latter was the really hard job: While the others carried boxes, you had to sit with the host at the kitchen table, listening to stories, sipping endless glasses of tea, and valiantly working your way through a week’s worth of dishes cooked “special,” just for you—gefilte fish and
khareyn
(horseradish), kasha varnishkes, blintzes and sour cream, potato latkes, and
lokshn kugl
. Given a choice, I preferred to shlep: better to strain muscles, I figured, than to sit at the table, watching your arteries harden before your eyes. And that’s not to mention the care packages: So many people gave us a “little something for the road” that we had to unload the van with great care, lest a bag of onion bagels or a Tupperware container of chopped herring end up buried in our warehouse. Eventually we devised an “emergency kit” that we carried with us on every trip: an old Boy Scout knapsack packed with Ben Gay ointment and Ace bandages for the shleppers, and, for the Designated Eater, a roll of Tums, a jar of salted Japanese umeboshi plums (great after too much sugar), a canteen of water, and six packets of Alka-Seltzer.