Outwitting History (15 page)

“After we finished building the road near Bialystok they sent us to build roads in the Ukraine. That’s where the front was. One day the medical corps, German doctors, came through to vaccinate us against typhus and cholera. They needed help giving shots to so many people, so they asked, ‘Who can read German?’

“I raised my little finger. The doctor says, ‘I see that little finger there. Come on.’

“They taught me to call out the names, to wash the arms with alcohol, then to cross the names off the list. The doctor liked me and asked me if I wanted to become his assistant. He called me Mr. Shmuel. He said, ‘Mr. Shmuel, it’s going to be dangerous.’

“I told him, ‘Professor, it’s less dangerous than being here. Here you
suffer from hunger, you get swollen up, and then you die. From a bullet you just die one-two-three.’ So for four years I was the doctor’s assistant, on the front, in the hospitals. I saw bombings, shrapnel, bullets, terrible things. There was one attack in particular, a medic I worked with was killed, I was hit with shrapnel but I survived.

“After the war I was still with the Germans. The doctor took me to Berlin, he got me into medical school, I should become a doctor. I studied for several months. Then in 1919 the German Revolution broke out. I was walking down a big parkway, under the linden trees, on my way to class, when suddenly a man walks in front of me, pulls out his revolver and shoots another man.

“I thought, that’s nothing new for me. I’ve seen so much killing in my life: on the Russian front, the French front. I lived through the Russian Revolution. Now I have to live through the German Revolution. So I said, ‘Enough. If I’m going to die it’s better I should die among Jews.’ So I left medical school, I left everything, I went back home to Zabludow.”

When Sam returned home he found Zabludow in ruins. The streets were full of orphaned children, and crime and violence were rampant. After four years with the German army Sam had forgotten Yiddish, and he had to work hard to relearn it in order to communicate with his family. He worked part-time at a Yiddish school and helped to open a local Yiddish library, but most of his energy was devoted to reopening the family business, a restaurant. He renovated the building, added hotel rooms, and kept the dining room open twenty-four hours a day. Within two years the business was thriving and he and his mother were making good money for the first time in their lives.

“We worked so hard, but the Poles wouldn’t leave us alone. One day they came, they told us we had to keep the door closed because we were too close to a church. So I had to go to Grodno, the capital, to get papers to keep the door open.

“I took the train. I carried with me a revolver, I was a businessman,
I had a permit. There comes into my car an old Jew, a
khosid
with a long beard and
peyes,
and he sits down near me. Then a little while later some Polish soldiers come into the car and they say, ‘Where are the Jews?’

“I was sleeping. They woke me up and they said, ‘Are you a Jew?’

“I told them ‘Yes’ and I took out my revolver. Once they saw the gun they got scared and they moved away. It was dark—there were no lights in the car because of the war with the Bolsheviks. Next morning the old Jew creeps out from behind my seat. He tells me, ‘If you didn’t have that revolver they would’ve killed us.’

“When I got back to Zabludow I told my mother, ‘Mama, I don’t care what you’ll do. I will not stay here. I’m going to leave Poland.’

“She said, ‘Look what you’re doing. You’re throwing away gold, you’re going to go look for crumbs.’

“I said, ‘Mama, I’ll beg in America, but I don’t want to be in Poland.’

Sam had a brother in the United States who was able to arrange a visa. He and his mother sold the restaurant and arrived in New York on May 1, 1921.

“I was free, and I was very proud of it. I went to evening school, I should learn English. And I started to learn a trade.

“Then one day I read in the
Forverts,
the Jewish paper, that there’s going to be a strike in the needle trades. [Many immigrant Jews were employed in the garment industry, usually under deplorable conditions.] I never saw a picket line before and I was interested to go see. So I took a ride to New York [Manhattan], to Broadway. I look—there’s the picket line. And then the police come. What I saw the police do to those girls, with the sticks over the head, the ears, it was terrible. I got so disappointed that time. That night I went to evening school, it was just before graduation and the principal gives us a lecture. He talks about the freedom of the United States, what a beautiful thing we have here.

“So I got up. I said, ‘And what I saw today, for a policeman to take a
stick and knock a girl over the head and drop her to the floor and step on her, is that freedom, too?’

“He says to me, ‘You’re a Bolshevik, I’m going to have you deported, I’m going to send you back to Europe.’

“My friends pushed me out the door, they were afraid for me. I had to quit school, and I never got my diploma. So instead I became a plumber. In Germany I was going to be a doctor, here I became a plumber, but I’ll tell you the truth, it’s pretty much the same thing.”

Sam and Leah met at a dance sponsored by their
landsmanshaft,
an organization of immigrants from the same region in Europe. Leah remembers:

“At first I looked down on Sam on account of I was from Vilna and he was from a shtetl. But then I said to myself, ‘Look, you’re in America now, you can’t be too fussy.’”

They were married four years later.

Sam mastered his new trade and entered the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, working primarily on new construction. As we traveled together through Brooklyn he would point proudly to various buildings he helped build: the Wabash Houses, Luna Park, the Coney Island Aquarium. During World War II he was the only Jewish member of a construction crew sent to work on government projects in New Mexico.

Sam and Leah shared a passionate commitment to culture and to learning
l’shma,
for its own sake, for the simple joy and ennoblement of knowledge. Their after-work hours were devoted to literature, theater, music, and ideas. In this sense they represented a tradition common among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe:
halb-inteligentn,
homegrown intellectuals for whom learning was not the exclusive province of the academy but the fountainhead of the home, the activity that gave dignity and purpose to everyday life. After their son was born, they became active in the Sholem Aleichem Folks-Institute, a network of non-partisan Yiddish afternoon schools for children. Sam still recalls his role with pride:

“I was the volunteer plumber for all the Yiddish schools in New
York. I was always on call. Maybe it’s eight o’clock in the evening, we’re all dressed up ready to go to a show. It doesn’t matter. If they called that a toilet is broken at the Sholem Aleichem School in the Bronx, I got on the subway and went to fix the toilet. By me education always came first.”

Some wonderful people joined the Center’s staff in those early years. Nansi Glick, the wife of my college teacher, offered to help us run a small printing press scavenged from an old Yiddish school in New York, and she stayed on, as a printer, editor, writer, and administrator, for the next eighteen years.

And then there was Sharon Kleinbaum: a smart, feisty, and acutely political young woman whom I happened to pick up hitchhiking one day outside of Amherst.

“Excuse me,” she said as she hopped into the van and noticed the open boxes of books in the back, “but aren’t these
Yiddish
books?”

“You read Yiddish?” I replied, raising an eyebrow in the rearview mirror.

“
A bisl.
A little. I studied at Columbia for two years while I was a student at Barnard.”

I took her to the Center and we continued talking the whole afternoon. Her father was the head of the Jewish federation in Bergen County, New Jersey, where she had attended a modern orthodox high school. She had just left a job at the War Resisters League and was looking for a new position—“a new cause” is the way she phrased it—where
she could direct her considerable energy. I offered her a job and she immediately accepted, with one proviso:

“I’d love to start working tomorrow, but there’s a problem.”

“Really, what’s that?”

“Well, I won’t be available for another six months. First I have to serve.”

“Serve?” I thought maybe she had taken a summer job as a waitress on the Cape.

“No, no,” she corrected me, “I mean
serve,
as in federal prison.”

Two days later she reported to Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women, in West Virginia, where she spent the next six months repaying her debt to society for having tried, together with several thousand other women, to wrap the Pentagon in yarn. When she got out she joined the staff of the Yiddish Book Center, well rested and ready to fight.

Which was a good thing, because by that point there was plenty of fighting to do. Not two weeks after Sharon’s arrival, I received a call from a young staff member at the Newark Public Library, in New Jersey. The library had been in disarray since 1969, when, in the aftermath of the Newark riots, a newly elected administration targeted it as an elitist white institution and tried to shut it down. Philip Roth, who had spent much of his childhood in the Newark Library, wrote a powerful defense in the
New York Times:

When I was growing up in Newark we assumed that the books in the public library belonged to the public. . . . In the forties, when the city was still largely white, it was simply an unassailable fact of life that the books were “ours” and that the public library had much to teach us about the rules of civilized life, as well as civilized pleasures to offer. It is strange (to put it politely) that now, when Newark is mostly black, the City Council (for fiscal reasons,
we are told) has reached a decision that suggests that the books don’t really belong to the public after all, and that what a library provides for the young is no longer essential to an education. In a city seething with social grievances there is, in fact, probably little that could be
more
essential to the development and sanity of the thoughtful and ambitious young than access to those books. For the moment the Newark City Council may have solved its fiscal problem; it is too bad, however, that the councilmen are unable to calculate the frustration, cynicism, and rage that this insult must inevitably generate, and to imagine what shutting down its libraries may cost the community in the end.

In the face of scathing criticism from both blacks and whites, the city council relented. But only barely. By the early 1980s chronic under-funding, long-standing hostility from local officials, and the Reagan budget cuts all conspired to bring the orderly operation of the library—such as it was—to an end. Experienced librarians were laid off, professionals who resigned or retired were not replaced, and the institution was reduced to a skeletal staff, with front-line tasks handled largely by sullen teenagers who were given little adult supervision. According to our informant, these young people often discarded returned books rather than reshelve them, and when shelf space was needed, they just cleared off whole collections and wheeled them to the Dump-ster. The library’s excellent foreign-language collections had been especially hard hit. He believed its three thousand Yiddish books, many of them extremely rare, were in immediate danger, and he urged us to get to Newark as soon as we could.

Sharon and I arrived two days later. The rest of the city looked like a third world country, but the Newark Public Library and its neighbor, the Newark Museum, stood like Greek temples commanding a broad boulevard. The person who summoned us was well prepared. He directed
us to a service entrance around back, where we were greeted by one of the library’s senior administrators and the chief custodian, an elderly black man. The administrator, a white-haired woman, confirmed everything we’d been told. All public libraries periodically cull their collections, she explained, but in this case unsupervised workers were indiscriminately discarding as many as two thousand books a day. The most valuable books—the oldest and rarest—were often the first to go. Nearly one third of the Yiddish collection had been lost already, and those books that remained would soon be discarded unless we could remove them first. “There are few Jews left in Newark,” she explained, “and the Yiddish books are rarely read. That’s why we phoned you. We have to work quickly and quietly. We have a very big job ahead of us.”

We followed the administrator up a maze of cast-iron stairways, along heavy glass floors, until we reached a mezzanine section where the foreign-language books were stored. The Yiddish collection was the largest, occupying an entire wall. We had been given Yiddish books by public libraries before, mostly in small New England factory towns such as Lowell and Fall River, but they were usually limited to literature popular among Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century: proletarian poetry, inexpensive pirate editions, and Yiddish translations of world literature, including Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dickens. Such books were represented here as well, many in sturdy library bindings with romanized titles on their spines. But there were also more recent and more sophisticated titles I wouldn’t have expected in a public library: fiction from interwar Warsaw and Vilna, and more recent titles by Chaim Grade, Avrom Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and others. What really caught my eye, though, were several hundred prewar imprints from the Soviet Union, scholarly studies in history, folklore, linguistics, and literary criticism published by research academies in Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa, which were among the
rarest books in all of modern Yiddish literature. Most of them, the staff member explained, had come from a single donor, a prominent Newark intellectual who had made several trips to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and brought these rare books and brochures back with him specifically for the Newark Library. It was heartbreaking to note that at least two shelves of these Soviet treasures were empty, their contents already trundled off to the Dumpster.