Outwitting History (24 page)

“Universities?” Murray sputtered. “Did he say universities? Worst audience in the world. I spoke at a university once. They invited me to speak about the hotel industry. Believe me, I’ve got a pretty good routine on this, I’ve used it many times before, and I know where I’m supposed to get reactions: chuckles, laughs, applause. Son of a bitch, I stand up there and it’s a grim audience! All these young people in jeans and sneakers. I opened it up for questions. These bastards are dead serious—they’re taking notes! I realized later, they weren’t an audience, they were
students
. They take notes and get grades. They’re not there to laugh. Who wants to perform for an audience like that?”

“Look, Murray,” said Mr. Towers, “he didn’t come here to listen to your sob stories. Give him a chance to talk.”

“Bob, will you shut up. I know you’re in pain, but
I’m
conducting this interview. Let me do it my way. Okay, Lansky, you’re on, tell me some stories.”

I took a deep breath and began describing some of the collection adventures I had related that morning at the Concord, in hopes they would underscore the urgency of collecting books and the need for stable funding.

“Tell him the Philadelphia story!” shouted Towers, asking for a particular tale from the morning’s repertoire.

“
The Philadelphia Story
?” said Murray. “Wait a minute, wait a minute . . . Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Wasn’t Jimmy Stewart in that one too? I thought so. Forget
The Philadelphia Story,
I already saw the movie. What else you got?”

I earnestly related story after story, hoping to convince Murray of the importance of the cause. When I finished, rather than pulling out his checkbook and making a contribution, he turned to Roger, whom he assumed was my writer, and offered a long list of suggestions. “Overall it’s great material,” he said. “I like the realism, the detail, but you’re going to have to play it up more for our audience. You know, a little flourish, a little polish, a little shmaltz. Take that Bronx routine for example: Your timing’s good, but maybe you could introduce another character to . . .”

I did my best to set things straight, but I don’t think he or Bob Towers ever really understood. As we were leaving, Murray followed us to the door. “I have just one more question for you,” he called after me, “What’s all this about collecting Yiddish books? I mean, the stories are good, it’s definitely a new act—but can’t you find an easier way to get your material?”

It was quiet when we got back to the Concord. The couches outside the dining room were full of snoring guests too
ongeshtupt
from lunch to make it back to their rooms for an afternoon nap. Presumably when they awoke four hours later they would be first in line for dinner.

For our part, we decided to head down to the health club to work off our lunch before starting for home. This was the Borscht Belt idea of exercise: one weight machine, two stationary bicycles, and four cavernous
shvitz
baths: two steam and two sauna.

The particular steam bath we chose was crowded, so we had to settle for seats on the lower bench. Above us, on the much hotter upper
bench, a tough old Jew with a big smile and a great overhanging belly sat stark naked, presiding over an endless round robin of off-color Jewish jokes, most of them about the sex lives of Yiddish-speaking Jews in their eighties. Before each one, the unclothed impresario would look at me and Roger and a few other younger men on the lower bench and proclaim, “Now, you young fellas aren’t gonna understand this one.” Every time the door opened and a new person entered, someone would yell,
“Er iz an antisemit, redt Yidish!
(He’s an anti-Semite, speak Yiddish!)
”

At the end of the day, as the bellhop was loading my rucksack into the Honda, the Concord’s owner approached me. He wanted me to sign a contract to perform every Jewish holiday—six times a year. “You’re new, you’re refreshing!” he assured me. “No one else is doing this particular material.” I was flattered, but I also knew that if I spent my
yonteyvim
at the Concord I wouldn’t stay refreshing for long, so I politely declined, explaining that my real work was rescuing Yiddish books. The owner nodded, but before I drove away he called after me,
“We’ll be in touch!”

He was as good as his word. Every February for the next several years he called to invite me back for Pesakh. Each time I said no, and each time he responded, “No problem, I understand, you already
have
a booking for Pesakh.”

Even if I had agreed, my show-business career would have been short-lived. In 1998 the Concord, like the other giants before it, closed its doors as a Jewish hotel. (It later reopened as a golf resort.) Still, I’m grateful to Bob Towers for the chance to speak there when I did. I went expecting to see Jews denigrating Yiddish, and instead I found them reveling in it: on stage, in the
shvitz,
at meals, in a thousand private jokes and conversations. They enjoyed dropping Yiddish words the way they enjoyed stuffing themselves with
flunken
and
ptsha
(jellied calves’ feet): It was a forbidden pleasure, a chance to come out of the closet,
if only for a week, to be themselves in a mountain redoubt where there were no
goyim
to hear. True, the Concord
shvitz
was hardly the reading room of the Bodleian, and there’s a difference between laughing at Yiddish jokes and reading Yiddish books. Still, here among their own, these English-speaking Jews seemed to enjoy Yiddish a lot more than I expected. On the ride home I started thinking, What if those who proclaimed the death of Yiddish were wrong? What if the patrons of the Concord weren’t the only ones? What if all across America there were Jews who still held a closeted affection for Yiddish? All I had to do was figure out a way to reach them, and I just might stand a chance of signing up enough members to save the world’s Yiddish books after all.

If it took a certain optimism to think I might find support for Yiddish among the denizens of the Concord
shvitz,
at the home of Sam and Leah Ostroff the language remained as natural as breathing. Through the first half of the 1980s, as the pace of book collection quickened, Sam and Leah remained our staunchest allies. Every few weeks we made the pilgrimage to Sea Gate for a ten-course breakfast, followed by a busy day of zamlering. When I’d phone ahead to ask what we could bring, Sam always gave the same answer: “The holes for the bagels.”

We weren’t the only ones to enjoy the Ostroffs’ hospitality. In the summer of 1983 a young
New York Times
reporter named Doug McGill was assigned to accompany me and Sharon on a day of book collecting in New York, and we agreed to begin with a 7:00
A.M
. breakfast at the Ostroffs’ home. Poor Doug: twenty-nine years old, not Jewish, recently transplanted from Minnesota, he never knew what hit him. After welcoming him with kisses, the Ostroffs immediately launched into a heated discussion about his name. In Hebrew the word
dog
(or
dag
) means fish. “I just don’t understand,” Mrs. Ostroff said, “such a nice-looking boy, he doesn’t look like a fish, why do they call him Dog?”
Once we cleared up the confusion Doug tried to pull his notebook from his pocket in order to ask a few questions of his own, but the Ostroffs were aghast. “Oh no, mister,” said Sam, “a car doesn’t go without gasoline, a reporter doesn’t go without eating. First you’ll eat, then we’ll talk.”

The Ostroffs led us into the living room, where they had laid out their usual repast, only this time it wasn’t just a meal, it was an ethnographic experience. Sam started from square one. “Now, Doug,” he explained, “this first dish, you probably don’t have it in Minnesota, it’s called lox, L-O-X. It comes in two kinds, Nova and regular, we bought both today, you should be able to try them. You eat it with this hard roll with the hole in the middle, that’s called a bagel. Some people like to shmear a little cream cheese first. Me, I’m a Litvak, that means I come from Lithuania, so I put on a little onion too—okay, Leah’s right, maybe a
lot
of onion—but
you
don’t have to if you don’t want to, as long as you take plenty of lox.”

Doug was game, sampling everything from the matjes herring with onion to the cucumber, scallion, and radish salad with sour cream. But Mrs. Ostroff still wasn’t satisfied. When she cleared the table and saw there was a little food left on Doug’s plate, she shook her head and said in Yiddish, “It’s no wonder they call him Dog—he
eats
like a fish!”

After breakfast Sam, Doug, Sharon, and I climbed into the van to begin the day’s rounds. Mrs. Ostroff stayed home to cook the next meal. Sam had phoned everyone the day before to let them know when we’d be coming, which gave them all ample time to prepare their own “real Jewish meal” in Doug’s honor. Surprisingly, they took his presence for granted: After all, they were handing over their Yiddish libraries, a lifetime of books, so why
shouldn’t
the
Times
send a reporter?

At six foot three, Doug towered over these elderly Jews, but that didn’t stop them from addressing him in the diminutive:
“Nu tatele
(So, little father),” they’d say, “maybe just one more piece of
kugl
?”

Presumption knew no bounds. “McGill, McGill,” mused one old man when they met, “there used to be a writer for the
New Masses
, A. B. Magill, maybe you’re related?”

At the next apartment Doug took out his notebook. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions?” he politely inquired.

“You want to ask
me
questions?” the hostess replied. “First I have to ask
you
a question: Do you want your cake with ice cream or with whipped cream from the can?”

“Neither, please,” said Doug, “you see, we just ate—”

“Nonsense,” the woman interrupted, “a big boy like you, you need to eat! Now
zets zikh,
sit!”

Doug remained standing. The woman, who barely came up to his waist, grabbed his belt and pulled him down hard onto a dining room chair. “Such a big boy,
kaynehore
(no evil eye), for you I’ll give both: the ice cream
and
the whipped cream!”

At the next apartment, in a high-rise building on Coney Island, our hostess greeted us not only with food but with song. As soon as we walked in the door she dropped the tone arm on her record player, launching a full-blast rendition of
“Di grine kuzine
(My Greenhorn Cousin)
”
by the Barry Sisters:

“S’IZ BAY MIR GEKUMEN A KUZINE . . .”

The sound was deafening.

“EXCUSE ME,”
Sharon shouted over the music,
“But it’s a little LOUD! Maybe you could turn it down so we can talk?”

“OH NO,”
the woman shouted back,
“a reporter from the
New York TIMES
is here, it’s important he should listen to our Yiddishe music, he’ll write about it in the paper, everyone should know how GOOD it sounds!”

Doug didn’t need to write about it in the paper—the music was so loud they could hear it in Manhattan.

Only one woman was unprepared for our arrival.

“GEY AVEK!
(GO AWAY!)
”
she yelled.

“I think you don’t understand,” I politely explained to the closed door. “We’re here for the books, the Yiddish books.”

“Vos? Vos vilstu fun mir? Ganovim! Gazlonim! Gey avek fun danet!
(What? What do you want from me? Thieves! Robbers! Get out of here!)
”

“Yiddish books!” I repeated, more loudly this time.

“Gey shoyn avek! Loz mikh tsuru!
(Go away! Leave me alone!)
”

“Maybe she doesn’t speak English,” Sharon suggested.

“Let me try,” said Sam, whereupon he began pounding on the door and yelling at the top of his lungs,
“Bikher! Mir kumen far di bikher! YIDISH-E BI-KHERRR!”

Up and down the hall people were peering out through the chained doors of their apartments. Suddenly the door before us swung open.

“Yidishe bikher?”
said a frail-looking woman in a quiet voice. “So why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

Doug remained patient and good-natured through it all. He listened respectfully, looked at albums of family photographs, and even helped carry books. When Sam invited him and his girlfriend to return a week later for dinner, he accepted on the spot. Sam asked his girlfriend’s name, so he could make her a pin of her English name in Hebrew letters, cut from an old silver spoon.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Doug confided at the end of a long day of shlepping. “I’m a young reporter, I usually get the worst assignments. They send me to New Jersey because someone’s dumping toxic waste, and when I get there no one wants to talk to me. But today . . . today every person I interviewed fed me first and kissed me afterward. It’s an experience I’ll never forget.”

I
T WAS MIDWINTER
when Sam summoned us to the Beth Am building, an old Labor Zionist center in Brighton Beach. The organization had fallen on hard times in recent years and was forced to sublet its space to an ultraorthodox yeshiva. When the yeshiva moved in,
the first thing the teachers did was to remove every last one of the eighteen thousand Yiddish books in the Beth Am library and throw them down the cellar stairs, locking the door behind them! No doubt they thought they were doing a mitzvah, a good deed, protecting their students from the corruption of modern literature. Luckily the building’s custodian, a recent Soviet Jewish immigrant, did not share their sentiments: Having tipped us off, he was now on hand to let us in and help us remove the discarded books.

The basement was filled with huge, untidy piles of books, like coal heaps in a bunker. Many had landed with their covers bent backward. We borrowed a shopping cart from a nearby grocery store and set to work. When the
rosh yeshiva,
the principal, and his teachers arrived, they didn’t apologize for what they had done; instead, they stood at the top of the stairs and glowered at us:
“Apikorsim!
(Heretics!)
”
they muttered as we passed,
“Shkotsim!
(Non-Jews!)
”