Outwitting History (18 page)

I’d been working twelve hours a day, six days a week for many months when I decided to take a rare Sunday off to accompany my friend Andrea Kurtzman to her cousin’s wedding in Nyack, New York. The meal was over and I, woozy from champagne, had just retreated to my hotel room for a much needed nap when I noticed the message light flashing on my phone.

“Hmmmph?” I muttered into the receiver.

“Hello, Mr. Lansky?” said the operator. “I have a message for you from a Mrs. Langert in the Bronx. She says it’s urgent. She says, ‘They’re tearing apart the library.’ She wants you to call her right away. She says she’s sitting by the phone. She says she won’t move until she hears from you. Do you want me to give you the number?”

Under the circumstances, my head spinning already, Celia Langert was the last person I wanted to talk to. A forceful woman in her late seventies, she was our zamler in the Coops, a complex of Gothic red-brick apartment houses at the corner of Bronx Park East and Allerton Avenue. The buildings were built by a cooperative of Yiddish-speaking communists in 1927, and two of my former professors had grown up there: Andy Rabinbach, who taught German intellectual history at
Hampshire, and Eugene Orenstein, who taught Yiddish literature and the history of the Jewish labor movement at McGill. The Coops had fallen on hard times in recent years. The cooperative itself went bankrupt, leaving the buildings to a succession of private landlords. What was once a Jewish housing project was now mostly black and Puerto Rican. Almost all the Jews who remained were elderly, and by the early 1980s they were either dying or moving out at an alarming rate— which kept our resident zamler extremely busy. Over the years, Mrs. Langert had summoned us on half a dozen occasions to pick up books from one or another soon-to-be-vacant apartment, and among the thousands of volumes we retrieved were a large number of monographs and periodicals published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s—generally considered to be among the most valuable imprints in all of modern Yiddish literature.

But I also knew from experience that as much as Mrs. Langert cared about Yiddish books, she cared even more about the old Yiddish left and was not above a certain well-intentioned duplicity to further her political agenda. Sitting on the hotel bed in Nyack, my head between my hands, I thought about the last “urgent” phone call I had received from Celia Langert, barely a year before. At that time she had called me at home—after 11
P.M
., naturally—to tell me she had books that needed to be picked up. As it happened we were planning to be in New York with a truck later that week, and I suggested we stop by on Thursday afternoon.

“Oh no, not Thursday,” Mrs. Langert replied. “Thursday is too soon.”

Unsuspecting, I offered to come on Friday instead.

“No, no, Friday is also no good. Tell me, maybe you young people could come on Sunday?”

We hadn’t planned to be in the City that Sunday, but Mrs. Langert was insistent. “Please, these books are so important, you simply must come on Sunday. Monday could be too late already. Sunday is the only
time, Sunday or never.”

I reluctantly agreed. “Okay, Mrs. Langert, you win, Sunday it is. We’ll be there at two in the afternoon.”

“Oh no, two is too late. You must come earlier—more like eleven in the morning. I’ll be waiting for you in the lobby at eleven sharp. Don’t be late.”

Fran Krasno and I hastily rescheduled the rest of our trip. Early Sunday morning we drove from Massachusetts to the Bronx in my big secondhand station wagon, intending to rent a truck once we got to Manhattan. When we pulled up to the Coops a little before eleven, Mrs. Langert was waiting for us in the lobby. We should have known something was up right then and there, because instead of her usual no-nonsense book-shlepping clothes she was wearing a satin dress, nylons, high-heeled shoes, a long coat, and a hat that had probably been the height of fashion in 1955.

“Sholem aleykhem!”
I greeted her.
“Avu zenen di bikher?
(Where are the books?)
”
I expected her to lead us to some recently abandoned, book-filled apartment, as she had done so many times in the past. Instead she pointed to three plastic shopping bags sitting forlornly on the lobby floor. They couldn’t have contained more than twenty volumes between them, mostly commonplace imprints from the
linke
Yiddish publishing house in New York.

“Dos iz gor?”
I asked, astonished that she, who knew better, had made such a fuss over such slim pickings. “That’s all?”

“Well, that’s all in terms of
books,
” Mrs. Langert replied. “But as long as you’re here, there
is
one other thing you could do for me. Maybe, if it’s not too much trouble, you wouldn’t mind giving an old lady a ride to Manhattan?”

Aha,
azoy kokht men lokshn
(so that’s the way you cook the noodles), I thought as we carried the three bags to the station wagon, with Mrs. Langert following close behind. She slid into the front, between me
and Fran, and it didn’t take long before the full truth was out. Our zamler’s destination was the Roosevelt Hotel, where, “it just so happens,” they were holding the
yerlekher banket,
the annual banquet of
Jewish Currents,
the English-language magazine of the Yiddish left. Mrs. Langert, a loyal subscriber, had never missed a
Jewish Currents
banquet before, she said, and she was not about to miss this one, either. “The person who usually drives me, he died last year. So I thought, the young people from Massachusetts, they have to come to see me anyway to pick up books. What would be so terrible if they came by on Sunday and gave me a ride?”

The ends justify the means. Fran and I, her unwitting fellow travelers, knew we had been duped, but Mrs. Langert was in such high, festive spirits, regaling us with stories of strikes and demonstrations and political triumphs, that it was hard to hold a grudge.
“A bisele gikher, zay azoy gut!
(A little faster, please!)
”
she cajoled. “Pass that car. No, don’t turn here, the next exit is better!”

Nature, however, has its own designs. Not a mile from Manhattan the skies opened up. I reached down, turned on the windshield wipers—and nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. With the rain coming in torrents and visibility nil, I barely managed to bring the car to a stop in the breakdown lane. And there we sat: crowded in the front seat of an old station wagon with an iron-willed Yiddish-speaking communist, forty feet above one of the worst neighborhoods in New York, the rain pounding on the roof, the windows steaming up, traffic whizzing by, the roadway shaking under the weight of passing tractor-trailers, and Mrs. Langert oblivious to everything but “the
banket
—we must get to the
banket
!”

As Mrs. Langert continued her exhortations, I scrunched down on the floor, reached under the dashboard, pulled the fuse from the cigarette lighter, and exchanged it with the wipers’. No luck. As I later learned, the wipers’ transmission (I didn’t even know they
had
a transmission)
had given way, and it was impossible to fix without a skilled mechanic and $80 worth of new parts—neither of which was available up there on the Major Degan Expressway. But we did have a coil of manila rope (which we carried to secure loads in the rental trucks). I found a jackknife, cut off a twenty-foot length, opened my window, getting splashed by passing cars in the process, and tied one end with a Boy Scout’s bowline to the metal arm of the left wiper blade. I then passed the other end of the rope over Mrs. Langert and handed it to Fran, who in turn opened her window and tied it to the right wiper. Mrs. Langert marveled at what she called the
makherayke,
the contraption, and it worked: I pulled one way, Fran the other, and sure enough, the wipers moved back and forth and visibility was restored. The only problem, I realized, was that I couldn’t pull and drive at the same time.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Langert,” I said, “do you think you might be able to hold one end of the rope and pull together with Fran?”

“
Pull together
? I’ve been pulling together all my life! Now
gey shoyn
(go already), onward to the
banket
!”

And so we proceeded down the highway, Fran and Mrs. Langert pulling back and forth on the rope like lumberjacks on a cross-cut saw. We made fairly good progress through the downpour until, halfway across a bridge, the rope, which had been chafing against the window frame, suddenly snapped in two. Again I couldn’t see a thing, and in order to avoid the cars in the next lane I allowed myself to drift ever so slightly to starboard. But with zero visibility the distance was difficult to judge, and I ended up brushing the right fender against a concrete abutment, sending what was undoubtedly a superfluous piece of chrome molding plummeting into the abyss. It didn’t matter to Mrs. Langert: By the time I managed to grope my way to a stop at the far end of the bridge she was already cutting a fresh length of rope. We affixed this in turn and resumed our journey, arriving at the Roosevelt just in time for the banquet to begin. The hotel doorman in his caped raincoat
barely raised an eyebrow as he glanced at the rope snaking through the window, opened the front door, and watched as Fran stumbled out cradling a sore, soaking-wet right arm, followed by a damp but unflappable Mrs. Langert. She straightened her coat, brushed the water off her hat, and fell in with her comrades, having made it to the
banket
at last.

In light of that experience—and the fog of champagne that still suffused my Nyack hotel room—I was understandably reluctant to return Mrs. Langert’s call. But if I had learned anything from collecting books, it was that
you never know
. So I splashed cold water on my face and dialed her number.

She answered on the first ring, and even through the champagne I could tell from the sound of her voice that this time the emergency was real. The Coops, she explained, used to have a large cooperative library. Although it hadn’t been used much in recent years, it was there all the same—or at least it had been there until two weeks ago, when a new owner bought the buildings. He came in, saw the library, realized no one was paying rent for the space, and without a word to anyone decided to clear it out and lease it as office space. For an entire week, unbeknown to the residents, workers had been unceremoniously dismantling the Coops library, pulling shelves off the walls and dumping thousands of Yiddish books into a big pile on the floor. Mrs. Langert had just discovered the demolition—and what’s worse, she’d found out that a dump truck was scheduled to arrive the very next day to haul all the books to the dump. That’s why she had tracked me down at the wedding in Nyack: to make sure we got there first.

Suddenly sober, I found my friend Andrea (as a young girl she had studied Yiddish at the Peretz School in Montreal) and then phoned Noah Glick, who together with his friend John Stevenson agreed to take a late-night train and meet us in New York. We also enlisted Josh Stillman, a friend of Andrea’s, and Sidney Berg, our ever-ready board
member from Great Neck. Andrea and I rented a large Ryder truck. At 7:30 the next morning, a hot, humid, summer day, we all rendezvoused on the sidewalk in front of the Coops library, where Mrs. Langert and several neighbors were waiting for us. In one of the library’s dusty windows, facing the street, a big printed sign read Office for Rent.

Not surprisingly, Mrs. Langert took charge, leading us around the side of the building to the library entrance. A faded, hand-lettered Yiddish sign locked in a glass case announced
“Aktivitetn fun klub
(Activities of the [Yiddish] Club),” followed by a long list of weekly events, including “Tuesday, 3
P.M
.:
Leyenkrayz
(Reading Circle),” “Wednesday, 2
P.M
.: Discussion Group,” and “Thursday, 7:30
P.M
.: Film,” and at the bottom of the sign, in Yiddish and English: “Library Open Every Day, 8
A.M
.–5
P.M
.” It was clear that it had been a long time since the Yiddish Club had last met, and longer still since the library had kept anything resembling regular hours. As we pushed open the door we saw the short flight of stairs leading down into the library, cluttered with debris: a snow shovel, a shattered light fixture, children’s toys, and a broken mirror. But that was nothing compared to what awaited us in the library itself. A large, L-shape room, it once held reading tables and chairs surrounded by floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases; now everything lay in ruins. In the center of the room almost ten thousand volumes were buried beneath the rubble of smashed shelves and huge chunks of plaster and laths pulled from the ceiling and walls. We had to keep a sharp lookout to avoid stepping on rusty nails.

Apparently the wrecking crew hadn’t yet finished, because at the far end of the library, in the short leg of the ell, several thousand additional volumes were still on the walls. We recognized many of the titles: multiple copies of the collected works of Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, and Avrom Reisen; ten copies of Abraham Cahan’s two-volume
History of the United States
(in Yiddish, of course); immigrant
novels by Chaver Paver; Mark Schweid’s
Treyst mayn folk (Take Comfort, My People),
a biography of Peretz; and Yiddish translations of Zola and Balzac. There was also an unlikely mix of books in Russian, German, and English:
Co-op,
by Upton Sinclair;
Das Kapital,
by Marx;
The Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson;
a paperback edition of
Peyton Place;
and right next to it
The Six-Year Plan for the Reconstruction of Warsaw
. On the floor were remnants of fifty years of cultural activity: a dented coffee urn, three big aluminum tea kettles, a broken podium, a coat rack with four wire hangers, a box full of brand new, unsold copies of Yiddish humor books by Sam Liptzin, cans of food, a ripped movie screen, a jimmied strong box (apparently used for ticket sales); framed pictures of Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Moyshe Olgin (the founding editor of the
Freiheit
), and Abraham Lincoln; a faded reproduction of Picasso’s
Guernica;
and strewn everywhere, playing pieces from chess, checkers, backgammon, and Chinese checkers.