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.
Mendy was even younger than I and nothing if not charismatic. What’s more, his Yiddish was perfect. As part of our program we had scheduled a guided tour of the San Diego Zoo, and we enlisted Mendy to offer a simultaneous Yiddish translation. Of course all languages reflect the concerns of those who speak them, and Yiddish is therefore not exactly rife with biological terminology. So before we headed west, we asked Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter, a leading Yiddish linguist and a master of neologisms, to prepare a glossary for us. He accepted the challenge and outdid Adam himself in giving names to all the animals, beginning with aardvark (dos erd-khazerl) and boa constrictor (di boashlang) and continuing through hornbill (der shoyfer-shnobl), koala (dos zekl-berele), panda (der ketsisher ber), porcupine (der shtekhl-khazer), rattlesnake (di klapershlang), rhinoceros (der noz-horn), yak (der yak), and zebra (di zebre).
Mendy took his place in the front of the bus, ready to render into mame loshn the running commentary of our two young, khaki-clad, English-speaking guides. Microphone in hand, he managed to keep up with them sentence for sentence, vilde khaye for vilde khaye (wild animal for wild animal), adding enough Yiddish commentary of his own to convulse our passengers with laughter, turn the head of more than one startled Jewish pedestrian, and make ours the loudest and most uproarious bus in the zoo. It wasn’t until we got to the snake house that the official guides, who’d been playfully trying to stump Mendy from the outset, were sure they finally had him. “Over there are the boa constrictors,” one guide explained. “We used to feed them live rats. But snakes don’t eat very often, and if they weren’t hungry, then instead of the snakes eating the rats, the rats would eat the snakes. That’s why we now feed them dead rats instead.” She then turned to Mendy and said with a wide smile, “Okay, translate that!”
Mendy didn’t miss a beat. “Raboysay,” he said in his folksy Yiddish, “vos ken ikh aykh zogn? S’iz geven a gantser ‘Khad Gadyo’do! (Friends, what can I tell you? The feeding practices here were something right out of ‘Chad Gadyah!’)” a familiar Aramaic song about serial death cheerily if uncomprehendingly sung by Jews every year at the Passover seder. Sholem Aleichem himself could not have done better.
In short, Mendy was a thoroughly modern young man who understood Yiddish culture from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, and I decided then and there to give him a new and even more challenging assignment: to open an office for us in Israel. The truth be told, the Israel office of the National Yiddish Book Center was never quite as grandiose as its name implied. It was located, in fact, in a Jerusalem basement that Mendy and his friends cleared out, painted, and fitted with homemade shelves. But they did collect books. Mendy traveled the country, speaking at Yiddish clubs and cultural centers, appearing on radio and television, even winning an official handshake and congratulations, in Yiddish, from the country’s president—no small feat when you consider how energetically most of the early Zionist pioneers had rejected their native Yiddish. Because Yiddish was no longer a threat (it was now being taught in most Israeli universities and even some high schools), Mendy’s efforts met with more enthusiasm than derision, and before long he was shipping thousands of volumes to Massachusetts.
Unfortunately, they weren’t exactly the unique titles we were looking for, since most of Israel’s Yiddish readers had arrived straight from the liberated death camps and displaced persons camps of Europe, and they had no books to carry with them to their new home. Virtually all the books Mendy found were new imprints, published in Israel after the war, all of which we had seen before. Eventually we spun off our Israel office into an organization of its own, which Mendy dubbed Yung Yidish, Young Yiddish. The basement storeroom was transformed once again, this time into a Yiddish cabaret and coffeehouse. Mendy did much to make Yiddish fashionable among a certain cadre of young Israelis; but as for one-of-a-kind titles, it was apparent that the Jewish homeland was not the place to find them.
OUR ZAMLERS HAVE shipped us priceless volumes from Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil. With the help of a professional translator named Jacqueline Tornell, we traveled to Mexico City and returned with several thousand volumes. But nowhere in Latin America did we find more—or more important—Yiddish books than in Argentina, where, despite (or perhaps because of) widespread anti-Semitism, Yiddish flourished among its estimated five hundred thousand Jews to a degree unknown in most other countries.
As with Mendy Cahan in Israel, in Argentina, too, we had an indomitable ally. Mark Swiatlo was a Polish Jewish refugee who fled to Argentina after the war and lived there for many years before finally resettling in southern Florida. Well past the age when others were content to spend their days golfing in the sun, he set out single-handedly to build one of the world’s great Yiddish research collections at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. It didn’t matter that FAU then had relatively few Jewish students and no courses in Yiddish or modern Jewish studies. If he built it, they would come. With the backing of the library director, Dr. William Miller, Mark began traveling back and forth to Buenos Aires, calling on his many friends and contacts and returning each time with thousands of Yiddish books.
By the time Mark and I met, in the late 1980s, the situation was out of control. Having opened the flood gates, Mark, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, could hardly be expected to close them, and soon enough FAU’s Yiddish collection had taken over an entire floor of the university’s five-story library. There were thousands upon thousands of duplicates, many of them valuable South American imprints, and there were also lacunae: titles published in Europe and North America that Mark had been unable to find south of the River Platte. So we decided it was time for a shidekh—to exchange his proliferating duplicates, which he didn’t need, for selected titles from our collection that he could find nowhere else.
Appearances are often deceiving. At first glance Mark looked like someone’s zeyde, a little old Jewish man from the Old Country. But beneath his mild-mannered and disarmingly charming exterior, he was one of the smartest and toughest negotiators I have ever known. At first I thought we had won the better half of the bargain: For every Yiddish or Hebrew title he chose from our collection, he would send us three duplicates from his, including rare imprints from Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. What we underestimated in our negotiations was Mark’s tenacity: For the next ten years he was constantly on the phone with our staff, haking a tshaynik (literally, banging on a tea kettle) to get them to drop everything and scour our warehouse for one or another title. But over the years we developed a strong mutual respect, and eventually he began sending us more titles than we expected: literature, memoirs, essays, and scholarship—an entire Yiddish universe from the far side of the world.
Without a doubt, Mark’s greatest coup was the discovery of thousands of brand-new, long-lost copies of Dos Poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry): a 175-volume series published in Buenos Aires between 1946 and 1966. Conceived in response to the Holocaust, some of the series’ titles—such as Malka Ovshiani Tells Her Tale, one of the first Holocaust memoirs by a Jewish woman; or works by survivors such as Hillel Seidman, Jonas Turkow, Shlomo Frank, and Szmerke Kaczerginski— were among the most significant first-person accounts published in any language in the years immediately following the catastrophe. Other titles—memoirs, novels, poems, dramas, Hasidic portraits, and ethnographic and historical studies—chronicled not the Holocaust itself, not the process of destruction, but rather the rich, complex, multifaceted tapestry of Polish Jewish life that the Nazis sought to destroy. Many of these are now regarded as classics: Yehoshua Perle’s Yidn fun a gants yor (Everyday Jews); Menachem Kipnis’s One Hundred Folksongs; Chaim Grade’s Pleytim (Refugees) and Shayn fun farloshene shtern (The Glow of Extinguished Stars); Rokhl Korn’s Heym un heymlozikayt (Home and Homelessness); novels by Sholem Asch, Y. Y. Trunk, and Mordkhe Strigler; and Elie Wiesel’s Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Kept Silent), better known through its later incarnation as Night.
When they first appeared, the successive titles of Polish Jewry were instant best-sellers, both in Argentina and abroad. Avrom Novershtern, who grew up in Argentina and is now professor of Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, recalls that “in hundreds of Jewish homes throughout Argentina one could immediately recognize the shelves of volumes standing back-to-back in their distinctive black bindings—a modern type of Zeykher Likhurbm (Holocaust Memorial).” The books proved so popular that, as early as 1950, a list printed in the front of each volume indicated that many of the titles were already oysfarkoyft, sold out. It wasn’t until Mark Swiatlo smoked them out in 1991 that the world learned of the existence of thousands of brand-new copies—including every one of the purportedly sold-out titles—that had been misplaced and forgotten in a Buenos Aires warehouse since the late 1940s!
We raised the money for shipping, and in the spring of 1991 Mark packed the lost copies of the Polish Jewry series into big waxed cardboard boxes, tied them with manila rope, and shipped them by sea to Amherst by way of Boston. Forty-five years after the first titles appeared, we are finally able to distribute them to eager readers and libraries around the world.
Over the years we’ve heard rumors of other Yiddish treasures in Argentina—in remote parts of the country, far from Buenos Aires, beyond even the long reach of Mark Swiatlo. The reports are credible. Beginning with an experimental Jewish agricultural colony in Tierra del Fuego—the last, windswept stop before Antarctica—Yiddish-speaking refugees from Eastern Europe eventually settled throughout Patagonia and across the pampas. There were Jewish gauchos and Jewish farmers who founded rural utopian communities. Here, as everywhere, they read Yiddish books, and when they died or when they or their children finally forsook those distant climes for the cities, as they inevitably did, they often left their books behind. Undoubtedly yet another adventure awaits—but first we had to finish saving other endangered books a good deal closer to home.
IF EUROPEAN-BORN, Yiddish-speaking Jews were gradually fading from view in the United States, they were still surprisingly active just north of the border. Canada, a bilingual country, prided itself on being a “mosaic” rather than a melting pot, which meant the Jewish community felt no need to limit itself to religion alone, as it had in the States. Here my colleagues and I were mavericks; in Canada we coordinated our efforts through the Canadian Jewish Congress, the country’s most important national Jewish organization.
Our liaison at the congress was Sara Rosenfeld, head of its National Committee on Yiddish. A teenage firebrand in pre–World War II Warsaw, Sara had fled to no-man’s land on the Soviet frontier, eluded the border guards, suffered in Siberia, escaped to Kazakhstan, and after the war, made her way to Canada by way of Sweden. When I arrived as a graduate student in Montreal in 1977, she immediately recruited me as a teacher at a local Jewish high school. In 1980, when I founded the National Yiddish Book Center, she became one of our first board members and most energetic volunteers. Unlike most zamlers, who organize a building, a neighborhood, or at best a small city, Sara mobilized a country. She signed up zamlers in Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, and Vancouver; she prevailed on the Jewish owner of a trucking company to transport collected books for free as far as Montreal; and she persuaded her employers at the Canadian Jewish Congress to allocate temporary storage space in their basement parking garage. Every six months, when the pile in the garage grew high enough, Sara would phone us in Massachusetts to schedule a pickup.
Despite the obvious difficulties—snow, cold, language—our door-to-door collection trips in Montreal yielded a disproportionately large number of treasures. Many of the people we met were intellectuals who, having arrived after the war, kept abreast of the latest Yiddish literature. Along with copies of Sholem Aleichem, Morris Rosenfeld, Avrom Reisen, and other writers popular in the early decades of the century, they also donated works by more contemporary authors, such as Chaim Grade, Avrom Sutzkever, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. We were thrilled to meet the surviving spouses and children of some of the major figures of modern Yiddish literature, including the widow of Melekh Ravitch and the daughters of Rokhl Korn and I.M. Weissenberg. We even helped distribute the latest works by contemporary Canadian Yiddish writers, such as Yoysef Heilbloom and Yehudah Elberg.
One day Sarah sent me to the home of a ninety-year-old widow who wanted to give us ten boxes of books that had belonged to her late husband. Born in London, England, the woman confided that she had always been somewhat contemptuous of her husband, a Yiddish-speaking refugee from Poland. Still, when he died, she felt she owed it to him to see that his books were cared for. “I’m curious,” she said in her proper British accent as we carried his library out to a waiting truck; “I’ve always assumed my husband was an unsophisticated man. Just what was it he was reading all these years?”
I opened one of the boxes, expecting the usual authors. Instead what I found were dozens of hand-bound volumes, each of which contained ten to twenty pamphlets published in London and Geneva in 1905 by the Press Abroad of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland. Most of the pamphlets were printed on tissue paper in crowded six-point type, and it took me a moment before I realized what I was looking at: compact political tracts designed to be smuggled into Russia to fan the flames of the 1905 Revolution. How her husband had come into possession of these treasures his widow couldn’t say, but even she was impressed. Many of the pamphlets proved to be the only surviving copies, and they are now in the permanent collections of the YIVO and the Library of Congress.
In all the years I knew Sara Rosenfeld, I don’t think I ever saw her sitting still. She was the only person I ever met who could speak on the phone, dictate English letters to her secretary, type Yiddish letters herself, read mail, and greet visitors, all at the same time. When she was seriously injured in a car accident in Florida several years ago, the doctor ordered her to stay in bed for three months; she was back at work in three weeks. Her disregard for her own health was evident in her eating habits. Being a bit self-righteous about my own commitment to organic food, I once chided her about a jar of instant chicken soup mix on her desk, the first four ingredients of which were sugar, starch, salt, and MSG. “Akh,” she replied, “who has time to cook when there’s so much work to be done?”
In 1982, at Sara’s invitation, three thousand delegates from two dozen countries descended on Montreal for the Veltrat, the World Council on Yiddish and Yiddish Culture. This was the Yiddish equivalent of the Olympics, and the logistics were enough to flummox a general—but not Sara. She reserved the biggest hall at the biggest shul in town for the opening session, and persuaded Elie Wiesel to deliver the keynote address—in Yiddish, no less. Sara was not one to look for koved, for recognition, or to stand on ceremony. The next day, when the Veltrat reconvened at the congress’s headquarters and the speakers, as usual, pounded the podium and bellowed, “Vu iz undzer yugnt?” we, the elusive yugnt, were in the basement with Sara, on our hands and knees, sorting her latest haul of Yiddish books.
As the years passed, the Canadian Jewish Congress began to drift closer to the model of the American Jewish establishment, eschewing culture in favor of a narrower agenda—and trying to cut Sara’s budget in the process. She fought back every step of the way. I was once in her office when she was approached by a particularly pompous executive in a three-piece suit.
“Sara, Sara,” he said condescendingly, “why do you spend so much time worrying about a dying language?”
“Nu, and you’re not going to die someday?” she shot back. “I don’t see how that stops you from worrying about yourself!”
If the Jewish establishment failed to appreciate Sara’s contribution, the government of Canada did not. In Ottawa she was hailed as a national hero for her role in preserving the country’s multicultural heritage. In the summer of 2002, barely eighteen months before her death, she was appointed to the Order of Canada—making her the closest thing to a Yiddish knight the world has ever seen.
For all Sara’s efforts, there was one problem she could not solve: helping us transport the books we collected in Canada across the U.S. border. Historically speaking, Jews have had little use for national boundaries. Countless Jewish refugees made their way to the United States and Canada by hiring smugglers to lead them across the frontiers of Europe. Their historical disregard for borders was not their fault. There were, after all, Jewish families on both sides of the frontiers— prompting a World War I cartoon of Russian and Austrian soldiers in opposing trenches: “Reb Yid,” shouts one soldier to another, “how about joining us in our trench—we need a tenth man for the minyan!” Even when Jews stayed put, the borders themselves kept changing. Between the two world wars there were Jews who never left their shtetlekh yet found themselves living in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, all in quick succession. Not surprisingly, then, the most common way of saying “crossing the border” in Yiddish is “ganvenen dem grenets,” which translates literally as “stealing the border.”
Of course, most law-abiding people do not need to ganvenen dem grenets when crossing between the United States and Canada. The border is relatively open, and before September 11 at least, one could generally cross with little more than a driver’s license and a smile. But not us. After days of book pick-ups in Montreal, we would invariably arrive at the American border with our clothes grungy from attics and basements, our eyes bloodshot from days of insufficient sleep, our rented trucks the cheapest we could find, and our cargo a disordered heap of hundreds of torn and dusty cardboard boxes. In the early days, when we were still in our twenties, the customs agents mistook us for drug smugglers: They’d make us pull over, get out of the truck, and stand against the wall while their German shepherd sniffed around in the back of the truck, presumably in search of a stray joint stashed inside a volume of Sholem Aleichem. All the dogs ever got was a snoutful of dust.
As we got older and began arriving in a more respectable truck of our own, the agents backed off on the drug searches. But now they had a new demand: They wanted to charge us duty on the books we were transporting. The first time it happened they made us pull up to a low cinderblock building and report to a gray-haired officer standing behind a gray metal counter.
“Manifest?” he asked, perfunctorily, fitting a form onto his clipboard.
“Excuse me?”
“Manifest. Where’s the warehouse ticket for your load, the bill of lading?”
“Well, sir, we don’t have a warehouse ticket. You see, we didn’t go to a warehouse, we collected these books door-to-door and loaded the truck ourselves.”
This was apparently highly unorthodox, and it took a good fifteen minutes before we could make the customs man understand that the load came not from a warehouse but from the basement of the Canadian Jewish Congress building and dozens of individual homes.
“Yiddish books, you say?”
“Yes, sir, Yiddish books” I repeated.
“Hmmm,” said the customs man, “we don’t see many Yiddish books coming through here. What’s the commercial value?”
“There is no commercial value,” I replied. “You see, we’re a nonprofit organization; our job is to rescue old Yiddish books and—”
“Look, son, don’t give me a lot of malarkey, you’ve got to have a value, any value, it doesn’t matter what it is, otherwise I can’t let you across.”
In the end we settled on a token $100, which was low enough to exempt us from duty altogether. Before we left, the customs agent made it clear that next time he wouldn’t be so lenient—either we came with a proper manifest and a confirmed valuation or else our cargo stayed in Canada.
Next time came sooner than we thought. While still in Montreal I had recorded a national radio interview with one of Sara’s many friends at the CBC. Now, just two months later, Sara was back on the phone: The broadcast had done its job, and boxes of Yiddish books were pouring in from Halifax to Vancouver.
This time I took no chances. I phoned our congressman, Sylvio Conte, and asked for advice about crossing the border with used Yiddish books. Conte’s office checked with the customs service in Washington and got back to us the same day. Under customs law, all books are exempt from duty. Nonetheless, there was no way to avoid the complicated process of manifests and bonded brokers unless we could show that the books we were carrying were “American Goods Returning”—items manufactured in the United States that, by law, could be brought back into the country without duty or undue delay.
That seemed fair enough. After all, about two-thirds of all Yiddish books were published in New York City. The only problem was the remaining third, most of which were printed in Warsaw, Vilna, and the other great Jewish cultural centers of eastern Europe. Meyle, no matter. They were all in Yiddish anyway—written in a Hebrew alphabet—and the next time I arrived at the border I proceeded with confidence.
“No sweat,” I told the customs man as he hoisted himself onto the running board and peered into the cab, one hand resting on the .45 on his hip. “Just a load of American books, sir, printed in the USA, bringing them all back home.”
The customs man was not impressed.
“Okay, buddy, pull it over.”
I pulled up to the same cinderblock customs shed, and this time another, younger agent came out to meet me.
“You say all these books were printed in the United States?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’m going to have to perform a spot check to confirm that.”
He opened the back of the truck, rummaged through the boxes, and pulled out three books at random. The first two were safe; both were published in New York and had English copyright information on the verso of the title page. The third volume had no such English information. Peering over the customs man’s shoulder I saw to my horror that it was published by Farlag Emes, the Yiddish state publisher in Moscow.
“All right, where’s it say here this book was published in the United States?” the officer demanded, carefully scrutinizing the volume. He was holding it upside down.
I took the book, turned it right-side up, and opened to the title page, where it said in kidish-levone-oysyes, big Hebrew letters: Aroysgegebn in Moskve, meaning “Published in Moscow.”
I swallowed hard, pointed to the Yiddish letters, and affecting my best Borscht Belt accent, pretended to read the Yiddish word for word: “Look, it says right here: ‘Pooblished in Nyu Yoorrk.’”
The customs man sagely nodded his head. “All right,” he said, “in that case, you can take ‘em across.”
The strategy worked, and we’ve been ganvenen dem grenets ever since.
IT TOOK TWENTY years to arrange a collection trip to Cuba— and a twenty-minute flight from Miami to actually get there. Of the fifteen thousand Jews who lived on the island before the revolution, all but a handful had left. As in Zimbabwe, they departed so quickly that many left their Yiddish books behind. We first tried to retrieve them in 1985, but between the U.S. embargo and Cuban intransigence, we made little headway. The situation looked more promising in 1999, when Bob Schwartz, a political activist who regularly delivered medical supplies to the island, led a celebrity delegation that included Ed Asner and Mohammed Ali. Cut off from American television, few Cubans recognized the actor; but no one failed to cheer Ali. One government minister was so grateful for the boxer’s appearance that he asked Bob what he could do in return. “Let us have the Yiddish books,” Bob replied. The minister agreed on the spot, and I was already packing my bags when the head of Cuba’s Jewish community, a retired oral surgeon, intervened at the last minute and said no. True, the books had lain untouched and unread for decades; but for the Jewish leader, it was a matter of pride: “As long as a communist Jew remains in Cuba,” he decreed, “the books will, too.”
So again we bided our time until, in the winter of 2002, I received a phone call from Stephen Rivers, a publicist who had just returned from Cuba with California’s congressional delegation. “Since September 11,” Stephen explained, “Castro has been bending over backward to accommodate Americans and distance himself from terrorism. If you still want the books, now’s the time.”
Although the embargo was still in place, pressure was clearly easing, and thanks to a special exemption for scholars, it took just two weeks to obtain permission from the U.S. government to travel there. Three days later I flew to Miami with Gabriel Hamilton, the twenty-seven-year-old director of our Steven Spielberg Digital Library. We proceeded to the airport’s lower level, past the last baggage carousel, around a No Admittance sign, under a rope, and down a corridor, until—like Harry Potter arriving at Platform 93/4 —we found the unmarked gate for the charter flight to Havana.
An American diplomat wrote of Cuba in 1888: “You are only ninety miles from the winking lighthouses and sandy shore of Florida, but you have entered dominions as foreign, as different, as full of strangeness, as though you had sailed around the world to find them.” His observation was doubly true now. Isolated from the States for forty-three years, Cuba was bursting with contradictions: green cane fields, white sand beaches, good-natured people, and lovingly maintained vintage American cars (where else can you hail a Desoto taxi?), alongside crumbling, overcrowded houses, renovated Mafia-built hotels (for foreigners only), pulsing music, ubiquitous sensuality, and rationed food. In the words of one guidebook, “Sex, music and dancing are Cubans’ greatest pleasures, since none is rationed and all are free.”
Our mission in the country seemed straightforward enough: Track down the surviving Yiddish books, identify important titles, and secure permission from the head of the Jewish community to bring them back and digitize them. But no sooner had we landed than we realized the job would be anything but straightforward. Despite the six e-mails and twenty-three faxes we sent to the Cuban Jewish community before we left, there was no one at the airport to meet us and no message waiting for us at our hotel in downtown Havana. Gabe and I were on our own until the next morning, when we went looking for La Gran Synagoga, the Ashkenazic shul that serves as headquarters and library for Cuba’s roughly five hundred remaining Jewish families.
Fortunately the shul wasn’t hard to find. Located at the end of a shady street lined with crumbling colonial mansions, the building would have been more at home in a New Jersey suburb, save for a bright blue arch that towered over the front entrance, giving it the appearance of a tropical McDonald’s.
Our only contact at the shul—our only contact in the entire country, for that matter—was Adela Dworin, the head of the library and vice president of the official Cuban Jewish community. We found the Biblioteca, a narrow, windowless, book-filled room in the synagogue basement, but to our dismay, Adela wasn’t there. “Donde está Adela?” we asked one of the half dozen people in the room (contrary to what we had read in the tour books, almost no one in the country spoke English, and our Spanish was limited to what we had been able to cram from a phrase book the night before). “In a meeting,” we were told. We waited, ten, twenty, forty minutes, until Adela finally appeared, accompanied by Dr. José Miller, the seventy-eight-year-old president of the Jewish community—the man who had stood in the way of our removing Yiddish books three years before.
This time we tried to soften the opposition by bearing gifts: expensive books in English, CDs of Jewish music, videos of classic Yiddish films, and more. But as we slowly laid them out, we received our first lesson in the harsh realities of daily Cuban life. Adela picked up one of the brand-new books we had brought—Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Kitchen—and asked with a sad smile, “So tell me, did you happen to bring the ingredients to go with this?” Gabe and I shrugged sheepishly. We agreed to speak again that afternoon, after we had had a chance to examine the library’s Yiddish holdings.
Over the years, I had heard rumors that there were “thousands upon thousands” of abandoned Yiddish books in Cuba. If that was true, we didn’t find them. According to Adela, most were probably lost when Castro confiscated Havana’s Zionist Center in 1978 and turned it over to the local Arab League. No one knows for sure what the new tenants did with the center’s Yiddish books, but Adela felt certain that the few hundred volumes in the synagogue library were all that remained.
I picked a random volume off the shelf—a copy of Habana lebn (Havana Life), a Yiddish magazine—and, just leafing through the pages, began to understand how rich Cuba’s Jewish life had been before the Revolution: Yiddish schools, libraries, publishing houses, literary journals, lectures, cultural centers, and three kosher restaurants, one of which went by the irresistible name of Moyshe Pipik’s (Moses Belly-button’s). Was it really possible, forty-three years after the Revolution, that of that whole rich, teeming Jewish life, only these few hundred books survived? And if so, imagine how valuable they must be!
With Adela’s help, Gabe and I squeezed between the stacks and set to work. I’d like to report that Cuba’s few hundred remaining Yiddish books were in good shape. They weren’t. Relegated to the bottommost shelves, many had grown farshimlt, covered with mold from the heat and humidity of the Caribbean climate. Stuck to one cover was a dead cockroach the size of a mouse. It wasn’t long before Gabe and I were sneezing from the dust and spores, our hands black, our clothes filthy, our backs and knees aching.
But it was worth it. Some of the volumes were the same New York imprints we had seen a hundred times before: Yehoash, Sholem Asch, Sholem Aleichem, even a Yiddish translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But there were also rare books we had never seen: an 1872 imprint from Stuttgart, and another from Palestine dated 1947; a Yiddish translation of Isaac Babel’s short stories published in Odessa in 1925; Holocaust memoirs published in various D.P. camps right after the war; and just as we’d hoped, hard-to-find Latin American imprints, including three printed in Havana before the Revolution. By the time we had finished, we were more eager than ever to get these precious volumes back to the States.
Ober vi kumt di kats ibern vaser? (How was the trick to be done?) Gabe and I discussed strategy over lunch, and that afternoon we presented Dr. Miller with what seemed to us a reasonable offer: Instead of actually taking the books, we proposed borrowing them long enough to digitize them. They were moldering anyway; in their place we would return brand-new, digitally generated, acid-free reprints.
Dr. Miller didn’t agree, exactly, but he didn’t say no, either. So that night Adela, who cared deeply about the books and wanted to see them saved, let us load two bags with the most valuable titles and take them back to our hotel. We returned the next morning, and this time the library staff not only greeted us warmly, they led us to a stash of additional Yiddish volumes hidden in a closet. But the key to success still lay in Dr. Miller’s hands. So at noon, we offered to take him, his wife, and Adela to lunch. In a country where good food is scarce, Dr. Miller didn’t have to be asked twice. He suggested we go to “the best fish restaurant in Cuba,” a waterfront establishment run by the Ministry of Fisheries that, outside of the tourist hotels (where Cubans were not allowed), was one of the most expensive eateries in the city. We were driven there in style, by a native Cuban driver in a brand-new van donated to the Jewish community by our good friends at the Kaplen Foundation of New Jersey. (Larry Kaplen, a young screenwriter and a trustee of the foundation, was a member of our board.) On each door of the van was a Jewish star, and on the back, in large block letters, the English words “Kaplen Van,” which apparently was the Cubans’ idea of an acknowledgment. “People think it’s Hebrew for ‘Hyundai,’” Adela quipped.
From the outside, with its large neon sign, Cuba’s “best fish restaurant” reminded me of the Cape Cod of my youth, but inside it was straight out of the Soviet Union: more waiters than customers, and huge, multipage menus with only a single item, red snapper, actually available.
“Why only one kind of fish?” I asked Adela.
“What does it take to go fishing?” she asked in return.
“I don’t know,” I answered, “what does it take?”
She raised an eyebrow, as though marveling at my naïveté. “It takes a boat!”
She didn’t have to spell it out: If the government started supplying boats, how long would it be before the entire Cuban fishing fleet was docked in Miami? So we settled for the snapper, along with lox, Coca-Cola, and ice cream—unimaginable luxuries in a country where even rice and beans can be hard to come by. When we returned to the library, Dr. Miller informed us that the books were ours. Adela sadly conceded that she was one of the last Yiddish-readers in all of Cuba, and she asked for nothing, not even reprints, in return.
Carrying two suitcases packed full of Yiddish books, we returned to the States the same way we came, unhindered by officials from either side. Regrettably, several hundred volumes had to be left behind (there was a limit on how many we could stuff into our luggage), but Adela graciously agreed to put them aside until we could send someone to pick them up. I wrote a letter to our members asking for help, and among the scores of responses was one on behalf of Jimmy Carter, who was planning to be in Havana in June, the first visit there by a former U.S. president since the Revolution. We were honored, of course, particularly in light of President Carter’s role in freeing Cuban prisoners. But other members and friends were able to go even sooner, and within a month of our return, every one of Cuba’s known Yiddish books was safe and sound in Amherst, ready to be digitized and shared with the world.