Outwitting History (28 page)

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.

O
UR 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.

I
F
E
UROPEAN-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.