I finished college in December of 1976, planning to continue my studies the following fall as a graduate student in East European Jewish Studies at McGill University, in Montreal. But first, with eight months of freedom ahead of me, I decided to “split for the Coast,” taking advantage of a $49 fare to ride the Greyhound to San Francisco. There I hooked up with my college friend Paul Novak, who had accompanied me on my first trip to the Lower East Side, and moved into a railroad flat in the Fillmore district. After a few false starts I landed a job at the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley, a converted mansion on a tree-lined street, that billed itself as the Jewish Museum of the West.
Chronically underfunded, the Jewish Museum of the West was in no position to hire additional staff—the curator, with a Ph.D. in art history, was making $7,000 a year—and it’s unlikely the founder and director, an affable Jewish Community Federation official based in San Francisco named Seymour Fromer, would have agreed to interview me at all if he hadn’t had a big problem on his hands. Several years before my arrival, the museum’s small library had been overwhelmed by the donation of almost ten thousand Yiddish books from a declining commune of left-wing Jewish chicken farmers in nearby Petaluma. Having no room in the main building, Seymour consigned the Yiddish books to an old carriage house out back. Now he wanted to transform the carriage house into badly needed museum space, but first he had to do something with those books. As soon as he heard that I had studied Yiddish, he hired me on the spot for an effective salary of $1 an hour plus all the duplicate Yiddish books I could carry.
Talk about hefkeyres (disorder): The carriage house overflowed with books, and it was my job to sort them and weed out the duplicates. I loved every second of it. As word of my efforts spread, curious visitors began to show up. Kathryn Hellerstein, a graduate student of Yiddish poetry at Stanford, came looking for books for herself. Sometimes she brought with her Malka Heifetz Tussman, a distinguished Yiddish poet who seemed to have a personal story about every author I shelved— a remarkable number of whom she claimed had courted her in her youth. Another regular visitor was Dov Noy, head of the folklore department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who was in town as a visiting professor at Berkeley. A native Yiddish-speaker, Dov had been the first professor to teach Yiddish literature in Israel, and he enjoyed regaling me for hours with stories about the books I was sorting and the people who wrote them.
Perhaps the most revealing visitor was an old man who showed up one day to “tell the truth about all these books.” An early member of the Petaluma commune, he quit after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes in 1956 and had been bitterly disillusioned ever since. “You want to know why these books are in such good condition?” he asked. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because nobody ever read them! The only reason the commune had Yiddish books at all was because the Party made them buy them!”
Be that as it may, the books were in uncommonly good condition. I remained at the carriage house for four months, until all the boxes were unpacked and the sorting complete. Between work and commuting, I had little time for reading, but a process of literary osmosis took place nonetheless. By the time I got to graduate school in Montreal I not only recognized most authors’ names, but thanks to Malka Tussman and Dov Noy, I felt I knew many of them personally. And, what with all the duplicate books I received in lieu of salary, I arrived with the best personal Yiddish library of any student in my class.
WHEN I WAS growing up my mother used to call upstairs with the same question: “How would you like your sandwich today, dear, on rye bread or on gayishe?” Gayishe was her folksy Galitsianer pronunciation for goyishe, which, as I learned before I could walk, was synonymous in this context with white bread. Jewish or goyish was the grand bifurcation of the universe. If, on rare occasion, my parents uttered a sentence that did not contain the word “Jewish,” odds were it contained “goyish” instead.
I learned other aspects of Yiddish sensibility at shul, in the Conservative synagogue we attended every Saturday morning. In the front rows, where my parents sat with other American-born professionals, the proceedings grew steadily more decorous with each passing year. In the back it was different. There the European-born immigrants davened (prayed): tough Jews in enormous wool taleysim (prayer shawls), bootleggers, peddlers, and junkmen, who drank shnaps (straight whiskey) out of water glasses, munched on herring and raw onions, spoke mostly in Yiddish, and almost never stopped talking. I was seven years old, with a clip-on tie, but instinctively I preferred the heymish, home-grown, back of the shul over the highbrow front, and I escaped there every chance I got. The old men greeted me in their heavy Yiddish accents, hugged me to their bristly cheeks (they never shaved on Shabbos) and let me sit with them while they told and retold their jokes and stories. They listened with one ear to the service and interrupted their kibbitzing only long enough to shout “Omeyn! (Amen!)”
I learned about Yiddish sensibility at Hebrew school, too—albeit inadvertently. Our teachers taught us to read siddur (the prayer book) and Torah in Ashkenazic Hebrew. There was something strange about these nervous men with their heavy accents. Mr. Asch used to smoke half a cigarette, pinch the end between his fingers, and save the rest for later. Dr. Gross once got so exasperated with a student that he threw the boy’s public-school notebook out the second-story window. Only years later did I learn that most of these teachers were Holocaust survivors, philologists with Ph.D.s from Viennese universities. Not that it would have mattered. We were American kids and we tormented them mercilessly, imitating their accents, hiding their books, placing tacks and bubble gum on their chairs, barraging them with spit balls and paper airplanes. But at least they were colorful. And authentic.
A year before my bar mitzvah our synagogue, in concert with other Conservative congregations across the country, changed from Ashkenazic to Sephardic Hebrew. The ostensible reason was to bring liturgical Hebrew in line with the spoken language of the young State of Israel. Never mind that 99 percent of the congregants were Ashkenazic Jews with roots in central and eastern Europe. And never mind that the reason Zionist leaders insisted on the harsher, more “masculine”-sounding Sephardic pronunciation in the first place had more to do with ideology than linguistics: They wanted to purge the ancient Jewish language of its “Yiddish accent,” of the slightest whiff of the European diaspora. To me, Sephardic Hebrew sounded more like a tonsil exam—“BAAAH-rukh AHHHH-tah”—than like the soulful prayers I had known, and the characters in our new Israeli textbooks—Yu-ri, YA-el—sounded as though they’d be more at home in a Superman comic book. To this day I have a hard time substituting mah-ZAHL TOVE for mazl tov, nah-khat for nakhes, or rahk-mah-NOOT for rakhmones. It’s as though the most intimate Jewish expressions of our parents and grandparents, the felicitations, endearments, and consolations used by Jews for countless generations, were somehow wrong, illegitimate, and in need of reinvention.
Pronunciation was hardly the only sphere where the past was recast. That same year, 1967, we returned from summer vacation to find that every one of our European teachers had been dismissed, replaced by young Israeli women, the wives of local doctors and lawyers, who spoke fluent Hebrew but had little or no knowledge of Jewish tradition. The course they taught in Jewish history began with Abraham and Moses and continued—if we were lucky—until the defeat of Bar Kokhba and the fall of Jerusalem in 135 CE. Then, in a single dizzying leap, they skipped over the next eighteen hundred years until—whoosh!—suddenly it was 1948 and we were all back in Israel. What happened during those intervening centuries—how Jews ended up in Europe; where my own grandparents came from; why they spoke with Yiddish accents; even what happened during the Holocaust—these were stories never told.
Like most of my classmates, I didn’t take well to the new regime. One by one the noisy, shnaps-drinking old men disappeared from the back of the shul. What remained up front was stiff, formal, and boring. I celebrated my bar mitzvah in May of 1968—a year when it seemed the whole country was coming of age. Seven months later I aimed a snowball at a friend, missed, and hit my Israeli Hebrew school teacher instead, unseating her beehive hairdo. She sent me to the principal’s office and I was summarily expelled. While my classmates looked on with silent envy, I gleefully scooped up my books and left Hebrew school for the last time, certain that my Jewish education had come to an end at last.
It was, appropriately enough, a book that finally brought me back, and that led me to study Yiddish literature in Montreal: a slim volume by Ruth R. Wisse called The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. I read it during the summer of 1976, when I was running a fruit juice cart in Copley Square, across the street from the Boston Public Library. Business was bad that summer but reading was good, which was lucky, because once I started the book I couldn’t put it down.
Ruth’s thesis was this: The schlemiel, the familiar protagonist of much of Yiddish and, later, American-Jewish fiction, appears foolish only insofar as he is out of place—a Jew who ventures into the mainstream world and asks “the wholly spontaneous questions of a different culture.”
Outrageous and absurd as his innocence may be by the normal guidelines of political reality, the Jew is simply rational within the context of ideal humanism. He is a fool, seriously—maybe even fatally—out of step with the actual march of events. Yet the impulse . . . of schlemiel literature is generally to use this comic stance as a stage from which to challenge the political and philosophical status quo.
Born in the shadow of nuclear weapons, coming of age during Vietnam, I was all for changing the status quo. The book confirmed my conviction that culture—and in particular Yiddish culture—could undermine political policy and in so doing become a powerful tool for social change. It showed why Yiddish literature could still speak to modern readers (or at least to me). And, not incidentally, it was one of the few academic books I had encountered that was not only profound but beautifully written: clear, fresh, and fun to read. I didn’t know at the time who Ruth Wisse was or whether she even offered a graduate course, but by the time I finished the book I knew for sure that there was no one else with whom I wanted to study.
Fortunately Ruth had just established a graduate program at McGill in East European Jewish studies, and when I arrived in the fall of 1977 I found my teacher every bit as brilliant, human, and down-to-earth as her book suggested. As I had guessed, she was plenty political: though in exactly the opposite direction from what I had assumed. She was, in fact, the most right-wing person—or at least the most right-wing rational person—I had ever met: an unyielding hawk on Israel; a critic of feminism who opposed the ordination of women rabbis; a fierce anti-Communist who championed American military strength to a degree that made Ronald Reagan look like a dove. One might think, given my Hampshire College education, where feminism, pacifism, and critical theory are imparted as revealed truth, that Ruth’s stridency would prove a problem for me. And in a certain sense it did: She once handed back a paper, telling me it was an excellent effort, “even if it is inimical to everything I believe in.” I was still too young to question my own politics, but thankfully she was too much of a mentsh to let political differences stand in our way. She had been a student of Max Weinreich’s and she knew as much about Yiddish literature as any person alive. As a teacher she was unfailingly warm and generous. Her classes were intellectually exhilarating. And despite her literary acumen, despite her genius, she never lost sight of the fundamental humanity upon which Yiddish literature rests. One day, for example, we were pursuing a complex analysis of Sholem Aleichem’s short story “Hodel” when Ruth decided to underscore her point by reading directly from the text; she read out loud, in Yiddish, with such empathy and feeling that before she was through she and all her students were in tears.
Did we ever read! Between Ruth and our other professor, Eugene Orenstein, we were often assigned two full-length novels a week. I still read relatively slowly in Yiddish, with frequent recourse to a dictionary, and my first year of graduate school found me at my desk till two or three in the morning every night but Shabbos.
Where did we find all the books our teachers assigned? Thanks to its native bilingualism and a large postwar Jewish immigrant population, Montreal was, at the time, remarkably hospitable to Yiddish. There were quadrilingual Jewish schools in the city: English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish; a thriving Yiddish theater (where the laughter always came in two waves: once when the line was delivered, and again after the Yiddish-speaking members of the audience had a chance to whisper the translation to their neighbors); and the Jewish Public Library, a unique institution where several hundred people turned out every Saturday night—often braving biting winds and subzero temperatures—to hear scholarly talks on Yiddish literature. So when Ruth or Eugene assigned a given Yiddish book—inevitably out of print—the four or five students in our class knew exactly where to go. The fastest would claim the copy at the Jewish Public Library. If we were lucky, there might be another copy at the McGill library. The rest of us loaded up with change and resigned ourselves to hours at the coin-operated Xerox machine—a recourse so common it once caused Ruth’s brother, David Roskies, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, to lament that “We are no longer Am hasefer, the People of the Book; we are now Am ha-kseroks, the People of the Xerox.”
There was an alternative. There were still many individuals in Montreal with excellent Yiddish libraries of their own. As time went on, we figured out who they were and began ringing doorbells, asking to borrow the books we needed for class. People were remarkably forthcoming: They gladly provided them, as well as hot tea, cookies, and impromptu reviews. When we returned the books the following week we were served more tea and cookies and then examined on what we had read. The arrangement worked well enough in Montreal, with its large Yiddish-speaking population, but I couldn’t imagine what students were doing in Austin, Madison, Berkeley, Ithaca, or other, more far-flung communities where Yiddish was by then being taught.
Then I received a letter from Kathryn Hellerstein, the graduate student who used to visit me with Malka Heifetz Tussman at the carriage house in California. She wrote that she had just returned from a visit to her home city in Ohio, where the local rabbi informed her that he had been given a nine-hundred-volume Yiddish library from the estate of a recently deceased congregant. He tried to donate the books to various schools and libraries, but no one wanted them, so, he told Kathryn, there was nothing else to do but send them to the junkyard to be sold as scrap.
I was incredulous. Dispersed and landless throughout most of our history, Jews venerated books as a “portable homeland,” the repository of our collective memory and identity. As a child I had been taught that if a book fell on the floor—it didn’t matter whether it was the Rambam or Norman Mailer—I was supposed to pick it up and kiss it. So how could a rabbi, of all people, throw books out?
A month later, while visiting my parents in New Bedford, I stopped by the local shul to chat with the rabbi, Bernard Glassman, a kind, scholarly man who had just published a work on the persistence of anti-Semitic stereotypes in England during the centuries of Jewish expulsion. I found the book intriguing, and was just settling down in his study for a leisurely conversation when, out of the corner of my eye, I spied a fruit basket filled to the brim with what appeared to be old Yiddish books! On the top of the pile I could make out the Collected Works of Mendele Moykher Seforim, about whom I was then writing my dissertation.
“Excuse me, Rabbi,” I inquired, “but what is Mendele doing in a fruit basket on the floor?”
“Oh, we’re going to bury him,” the rabbi answered nonchalantly.
“You’re gonna what?”
“Bury him. We bury all our old religious books when they’re no longer of use. We have a bunch of old siddurim (prayer books) to bury, so we’ll just throw these in at the same time.”
I gasped. As a sign of respect it was traditional for Jews to bury shames, worn-out religious books that contained the name of God. But these were modern, secular Yiddish books. I jumped out of my chair and began rummaging through the basket.
“Look, Rabbi, here’s Mendele!” I exclaimed. “And beneath him, here’s . . . Avrom Reisen! And Karl Marx—Karl Marx in Yiddish translation! Do you really think the members of the congregation want you to be burying Das Kapital together with the old siddurim, l’havdil (you should make a distinction)?”
The rabbi could see the point.
“Listen,” I said, still crouched beside the fruit basket and exaggerating slightly, “I know millions of people who are looking for Yiddish books! There are all sorts of students who could use them. . . .”
The rabbi was a scholar in his own right. He had tried to place the books at several university libraries but could find no takers. “Aaron,” he sighed, “if you know someone who wants Yiddish books, then by all means, they’re yours.”
I thanked him profusely, repacked the fruit basket, propped it on my shoulder, and headed for the door before he could change his mind.
“We get Yiddish books here all the time,” Rabbi Glassman called after me. “I’ll tell you what. From now on I’ll save them for you and give them to your parents. Just let me know when you’ve got enough.”
I arranged things with my parents and returned to Montreal with my rucksack and two heavy shopping bags full of books. I was beginning to suspect that unwanted Yiddish books were a problem not only in Ohio and New Bedford, but in communities throughout North America. After all, immigrant Jews had been voracious readers. When they died, their treasured Yiddish libraries were left to children or grandchildren who couldn’t read the language. In the best of cases books were preserved in synagogue libraries or stored in cellars or attics for safekeeping; more often, it seemed, they ended up shredded, buried, or thrown out with the trash.
Admittedly, at the time, I was looking for Yiddish books strictly for my own use, and I figured that if I could just walk into a synagogue and find them in a small city such as New Bedford, imagine what lay in store in a city as big as Montreal, with a Jewish population forty times as large! And so, as nonchalantly as I could manage, I let it be known in my own Montreal neighborhood that I personally, a young graduate student, was interested in Yiddish books.
Almost immediately people started calling: widows and widowers, children and grandchildren. Within days I was racing around the city on my bicycle, then on a moped with a milk crate bolted to the back, and finally in a borrowed station wagon. When the local Jewish high school decided to clear its shelves of “surplus” books, they offered me a two-thousand-volume Yiddish library. I rented a van, hired two neighborhood kids, and carried all the books up to my apartment. That night my fellow grad student Borukh Hill, Ruth Wisse, and I crouched on my living room floor and opened boxes, sorting through hundreds of dusty volumes and dividing the books among us. My share included two crucial reference works: a complete, ornately bound, four-volume set of Zalman Rejzen’s Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (Lexicon of Yiddish Literature, Press and Philology), a pioneering biographical dictionary of Yiddish literature, published in Vilna between 1926 and 1929; and, a bit less practical but no less enjoyable, Nahum Stutchkoff’s 35,000-word Yidisher gramen-leksikon, the first and only Yiddish Rhyming Dictionary, published in New York in 1931. Both Ruth and Borukh went away with treasures of their own.
Meanwhile the calls continued. Before I knew it Yiddish books covered every square inch of my living room floor, then the hallway and the kitchen. When the piles spilled over into the bedroom, my new girlfriend decided enough was enough. I responded by buying a big, colorful Guatemalan hammock, which I suspended high over the growing mountain of books on the bedroom floor. That provided enough novelty to smooth things over for a while. But a week later my parents were on the phone from Massachusetts, and now they were issuing ultimata: The rabbi had given them so many Yiddish books that they were afraid the second story of their house was about to collapse.
Even I had to admit the situation was getting out of control. The next day—I remember the exact moment—I was sitting in class at McGill. Sleet pounded against the window pane, the lecture droned, the radiator hissed, and suddenly, like that, the idea came to me: I would take a leave of absence to save the world’s Yiddish books before it was too late. When I shared the idea with Ruth she could not have been more supportive. At the end of the semester I loaded my now formidable personal library onto a U-Haul truck and headed south, where untold Yiddish books—and a very different sort of Yiddish education—awaited.