Outwitting History (26 page)

I promised to see what I could do. While Sharon stayed with the Ostroffs, I went off to find a social worker, who explained that there was nothing to be done, since these were the only beds they had.

“How about if I drive back to Sea Gate and bring their old double bed?”

“No, I’m afraid not, old beds are made of wood, and wood isn’t sanitary.”

“Well, what if I buy a new double bed that’s made out of metal?”

“No, that won’t do either, all the sheets in the home are standardized for single beds. I’m afraid your friends are just going to have to adjust.”

I returned to the Ostroffs’ room to convey the bad news, but by now Leah had a new worry.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You and Sharon are our first guests,” she said softly in Yiddish, her eyes filling with tears. “This isn’t like in my apartment. Here I have no stove, no pots and pans, no table, no dishes. How can I welcome you to our new home if I can’t give you what to eat?”

S
AM DIED LESS
than two months later. It was his son who called with the news and who invited me to deliver a
hesped,
a eulogy at his funeral. Sharon and I drove down together, stopping along the way to pick up Gella Fishman, a prominent Yiddish educator who had first met the Ostroffs when she was a young teacher in Sea Gate almost forty years before.

“The Ostroffs were like my parents,” she said. “Leah was always
eydl
(refined), but Sam was a true
folksyid
. His hands were rough and strong, the hands of a worker. He reminded me of Chaim, in the story by Peretz.”

It was the perfect tribute. In Peretz’s story
“Sholem bayis
—Peace in the Home,” Chaim is a
treger,
a poor Jew who makes his scanty living hauling heavy burdens on his back. One Shabbos an itinerant preacher speaks in the study house, extolling the virtues of
Oylem habo,
the World to Come. Chaim is enthralled.

“Tell me, Rebbe,” Chaim beseeches after the sermon, “what can
I
do to earn a place in Paradise?”

“Study Jewish Law, my son,” answered the teacher.

“I can’t.”

“Study the commentaries, religious legends. . . .”

“I can’t.”

“Recite the Psalms!”

“I haven’t time!”

“Pray with devotion!”

“I don’t know what the prayers mean!”

The teacher looks at him with compassion:

“What are you?” he asked.

“A street porter.”

“Well then, do some service for the scholars.”

“I beg pardon?”

“For instance, carry a few cans of water every day toward evening into the house of study, so that the students may have something to drink.”

“Rabbi,” he inquired further, “and my wife?”

[The rabbi answers in accordance with Jewish tradition.]

“When a man sits on a chair in Paradise, his wife is his footstool.”

Chaim thinks about this. He is very much in love with his resourceful and virtuous wife, Hannah. When he gets home and sees her reciting “God of Abraham,” the Yiddish woman’s prayer at the end of Shabbos, he decides to disregard tradition and take matters into his own hands.

“No Hannah.” He flung his arms around her. “I won’t have you be my footstool! I shall bend down to you and raise you and make you sit beside me. We shall sit both on one chair, just as we are doing now. We are so happy like that! Do you hear me, Hannah? You and I, we are going to sit in a chair together.
Der Riboyne-shel-oylem vet
muzn
bashteyn!—
the Almighty will
have
to allow it!”

In other words, when the dictates of justice collide with those of tradition, tradition must give way. Even the most humble Jew has the right and the responsibility to change the world, and if he acts justly—as Sam Ostroff surely did—even God will have to accede.

Sam’s funeral took place at the Parkside Chapel, a modern building on Flatbush Avenue near Avenue U. Fran and Roger were already there waiting for us. Although the rabbi was a cousin, he knew little about Sam’s life. Fortunately there were other speakers who did. Sam’s nephew, Harold Ostroff, was himself deeply immersed in the Yiddish world. He had spent years building union housing, and he was now a leader of the Workmen’s Circle and general manager of the
Forward
. He spoke at length about Sam’s character, his commitments and accomplishments, and informed us that at Sam’s request copies of the
Forward
and
Pakn Treger
(
The Book Peddler
), the Yiddish Book Center’s magazine, had been placed with him in the coffin. “I want I should have what to read when I get there,” Sam had told him.

I, too, spoke that day, sharing stories of our adventures together during the last five years of Sam’s life. And then, as the room hushed, his son got up to speak. To my surprise, he spoke movingly, respectfully, and most astonishingly he spoke in Yiddish—the first time he had done so in public, he said, since he was fourteen years old. We embraced each other afterward, and every unkind thought I had harbored since moving day melted away.
Gey zay a novi
—Go be a prophet. Go predict how things will turn out.

If it had been up to me, I would have buried Sam next to Sholem Aleichem, in the Workmen’s Circle cemetery in Queens. Sam was, after all, precisely the sort of Jew the great writer celebrated and for whom he wrote. But there was no room left in the Workmen’s Circle cemetery, so we drove an hour and a half to Paramus, New Jersey, for the interment. I helped carry the coffin and set it down by the open grave. The skies were gray, as it seems they always are over cemeteries. Three black crows circled overhead. Leah, looking frail, cried bitter tears. The cantor chanted the
“El moley rakhamim
(God of Mercy),
”
the rabbi led the family in the recitation of Kaddish, the ancient Aramaic prayer for the dead, and then the plain pine box was slowly lowered
into the ground. Since it was an orthodox service, only men were allowed the honor of shoveling dirt into the grave. I shoveled with all my heart, again and again and again. When I finally looked up, the rabbi was gone, the mourners had returned to their cars, and only Sharon and I were left. Without hesitating, Sharon took the shovel from my hands, dug into the soft earth and, in contravention of Jewish tradition, threw in a shovelful of her own.

“Sam would have wanted it that way,” she said firmly.

“Un der Riboyne-shel-oylem vet
muzn
bashteyn,”
I thought. “And the Almighty will
have
to allow it.”

When we first began collecting Yiddish books, in the early 1980s, 90 percent of the volumes we recovered came from the homes and hands of older, Yiddish-speaking Jews. Ten years later, most of our stops were in the suburbs, at the homes of American-born children and grandchildren who had inherited books they couldn’t read. A generation was literally passing before our eyes.

One day not long after Sam Ostroff’s funeral, we were summoned to a sprawling, modern mansion on Long Island. A West Indian maid in a black-and-white uniform answered the door, and not only did she not offer to feed us, she didn’t even invite us inside. Instead she directed us around back to a four-car garage, where, stacked inside built-in wooden cabinets, were several hundred Yiddish books. According to the maid, they had belonged to the mother of the woman of the house.

As we set to work, a sullen teenage boy, probably thirteen or fourteen years old, came out of the house and sat down on the stoop to watch. His manner was aloof, but eventually curiosity got the better of him and he asked what we were doing.

“Picking up Yiddish books,” we explained.

“No kidding,” he said. “Whose are they?”

“Your grandmother’s, apparently.”

“What are they about?”

We picked up a random pile and showed him. The titles were impressive: world literature in Yiddish translation, social history, political theory, ethnography, literary criticism. The teenager was amazed.

“My grandmother’s still alive, in a nursing home,” he explained, “but she speaks with such a heavy accent, I didn’t even know she could read.”

He vowed then and there to visit her, to ask her where she came from and try to understand what her life was all about.

Encounters like this inspired us to reach out more actively to young people. In 1986 the Center introduced a summer internship program for college students. Our motivation was not entirely altruistic. The mountain of unopened boxes in our Holyoke warehouse had reached alarming heights, and given the nature of the work—unpacking and sorting dusty books in the ninety-degree heat of an un-air-conditioned factory loft—we decided it was definitely a job for the young. Since it was virtually impossible to find young people with prior Yiddish knowledge, we decided to entice students with a combination of work and study: intensive early-morning classes in Yiddish language, followed by a full day of shlepping and evening seminars in Jewish history and Yiddish literature in translation.

The schedule was demanding, and the response was astonishing. That first year we received a hundred applications for eight positions. Once our Web site was up and running, the number of inquiries increased to almost a thousand. It was harder to become an intern at the Yiddish Book Center—to be allowed to spend one’s summer shlepping old books—than it was to get into Harvard. Why did so many students apply? “Because it’s the closest you can get to a junior year abroad in Yiddish,” one young man told us. “Because it’s like an archaeological dig,” observed another, referring to the thrill of excavating books from
boxes that had lain unopened for thirty years or more. Almost every student we accepted was inspired by the experience, and a remarkable number went on to further study, until today our alumni are among the most promising, up-and-coming leaders of the field. Jeremy Dauber, who came to us straight out of high school, went on to study Yiddish literature at Harvard, continued his studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, directed our Great Jewish Books program, and is now professor of Yiddish literature at Columbia. Naomi Seidman became a professor of Jewish literature at Union Theological Seminary, in Berkeley, and wrote a provocative first book called
A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Yiddish and Hebrew.
Sarah Benor completed a Ph.D. in Yiddish linguistics at Stanford. Caraid O’Brien, a non-Jew, staged a popular production of Sholem Asch’s
God of Vengeance,
an early-twentieth-century Yiddish play with lesbian themes that takes place in a bordello, and is now a leading authority on Yiddish theater. Andy Ingall studied Yiddish at Columbia and now runs the film and television program at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Leah Strigler earned degrees in Jewish education from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Bank Street College and now runs educational programs for a major Jewish foundation. Four former interns returned as members of our permanent staff: Jeffrey Aronofsky and Abra Greenberg were successive directors of our Yiddish Book Department. Lori McGlinchey, who wrote her Amherst College honors thesis on the Center, helped enlist thirty Hollywood actors and coproduced our thirteen-hour NPR radio series,
Jewish Short Stories from Eastern Europe and Beyond
. Gabe Hamilton, who began as an undergraduate fellow, became a Yiddish cataloger and, at the age of twenty-three, the director of our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, responsible for the electronic preservation of most of modern Yiddish literature.

But no matter how successful our alumni are today, I remember them best as they were when I met them: in their cut-off shorts and
T-shirts, steel-toed work boots, leather gloves, and colorful headbands, reporting for their first day of work at our Holyoke annex. What with intensive classes and hands-on experience, they learned Yiddish extraordinarily quickly, although not without a few snags along the way.

One day we set up pallets for each of the most prolific writers— Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Avrom Reisen, Sholem Asch—and left the students to open boxes and sort their contents accordingly. When I returned several hours later, I found a new pallet, piled to overflowing. “Guess what, Aaron? We discovered a really important writer that you didn’t even know about. He wrote so many books we had to set up an extra pallet just for him!” one of the students informed me.

“No kidding,” I said, “what’s his name?”

“Gezamelte Shriftn,” said the student.

It was an understandable mistake: With less than a week of Yiddish under their belts, the interns had set aside a tower of books by a new writer named Collected Works.

S
OMETIMES IT SEEMED
that Yiddish was a Rorschach test: Young people, especially, saw in it what they wanted to see. For atheists it was Jewishness without religion; for feminists, Judaism free from patriarchy; for those uncomfortable with Israeli politics, nationalism without Zionism; for socialists, the voice of proletarian struggle; for more contemporary radicals, a
shtokh
to the establishment. Although there was truth in each of these characterizations, they remained fragmentary at best; those who espoused them had rarely read deeply in what was, after all, an incredibly rich and multifaceted literature.

Not so our interns. Whatever their motivation for coming to the Center, they soon learned to appreciate Yiddish literature on its own terms, in all its unexpected glory. We trained them to spot especially valuable volumes, such as those published in the Soviet Union before World War II. The more Yiddish they learned, the more treasures they
found. One warm summer evening, for example, they brought me a massive tome entitled
Leksikon fun politishe un fremdverter (Dictionary of Political and Foreign Terminology in Yiddish),
edited by Dor-Ber Slutski and published in Kiev in 1929. Nearly eleven hundred pages long, the book was a scholar’s dream: a lexical snapshot showing exactly how Jews perceived the world around them at a moment of great social and political change. In fact, the book was so significant I couldn’t understand why I had never heard of it before. At that time, in the days before the Internet, we maintained duplicate card catalogs of two of the world’s most important Yiddish research collections: those of the YIVO Institute, in New York, and the Hebraic section of the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. I found no card for Slutski’s dictionary in either catalog. Next I searched the standard reference works. Nothing. It was well after dark before I finally found, in an obscure Yiddish volume, a mention of Slutski himself: “Slutski spent the entire decade of the 1920s working on a comprehensive dictionary of foreign and political terminology. The book was published in 1929. However, the authorities deemed it politically unacceptable and destroyed the entire print run. No copies survive.”