Outwitting History (33 page)

The match hardly seemed auspicious. I crumpled the paper and stuck it in the pocket of my jeans. Eventually it ended up in a basket on top of my bureau, and I didn’t give it a second thought until six weeks later when, on a bleak November night, I returned from a long trip to a stone-cold house where the wood stove was out, not a single light was burning, and the few edible items in the fridge were covered with mold. “This is no life,” I remember thinking as I dragged my suitcase upstairs and wriggled out of my traveling clothes. And there it was, on top of my bureau, that crumpled piece of paper with Gail Sharpe’s phone number. So I called her in Boston and explained who I was (she had completely forgotten about Len’s intervention). She was different from other women I had gone out with: not political, but forthright and funny, and after twenty minutes of conversation we agreed to get together in Boston on Saturday night. The day arrived cold and rainy. She met me at the door of her apartment with permed hair, red fingernails, and a short skirt. I was momentarily encouraged by a framed Diego Rivera print on the wall behind her, until I learned that it belonged to her roommate. I, for my part, was admittedly no paragon of sartorial splendor: an army surplus parka (still sporting a hole from the battery acid spilled the day we saved the books from the Dumpster in New York), a well-worn Harris Tweed sport jacket sticking out below the parka, corduroy pants smooth in the knee, and a visored wool stocking hat (left over from the Korean War) that barely contained my untamed hair. Standing there, facing each other across the threshold, neither of us could keep from staring. “Oh my God,” we each
thought, “I’m about to spend the evening with a date from another planet.”

If Gail was put off by the
hefkeyres,
the chaos, of my car—books, papers, brochures, empty juice bottles, beach rocks and shells—she was too polite to say. She chose a funky Italian restaurant in the North End. Unpretentious—I liked that. She ate more than I did—I liked that, too. We sipped Chianti and talked and talked and talked, until halfway through the spumoni I was thinking, This woman is great! and then, So how come I never meet women like this in
my
world?

We went back to her apartment and talked till two. For people from different planets, we seemed to have an awful lot in common. I floated the hundred miles back to Holyoke. The next morning I split a cord of firewood, then sat down and wrote Gail a letter, inviting her to join me for Thanksgiving weekend. She did, and we had a great time. Okay, we had a GREAT time. My mother once told me that the reason I should marry a Jewish girl was so she would get Jewish jokes. I told Gail a Jewish joke and she laughed and laughed, all the way from her sparkling blue eyes to her glossy red toes.

But to what avail? I was leaving in two days for my first, month-long trip to the Soviet Union, and Gail was already packed, set to depart in ten days for Marina del Rey.
Bashert iz bashert,
the saying goes: what is meant to be is meant to be. The night before I left for Russia I phoned her and, on the basis of an Italian meal and a single weekend, asked her to postpone her move out West until I returned. She agreed. I wrote her a half dozen very long letters from Russia. On Christmas eve I returned. The airport was empty—except for Gail, who, to my delight, had come out to meet me. She later told me that she probably wouldn’t have recognized me were it not for the fur hat and balalaika. A friend had given her a key to my house, and when we got home there was a fire in the woodstove and a festive meal on the table. That was Christmas eve. We were engaged on New Year’s eve and got married three
months later. Smart, spirited, resourceful, Gail was immediately swept up in the swirl of Yiddish books, and in that and so much more we’ve been partners ever since.

I
T WASN’T BY
choice that the Yiddish Book Center became, in the words of
Esquire
magazine, “the most grassroots Jewish organization in America.” We were too young, and Yiddish was perceived as too marginal, to raise money any other way.

I tried the conventional route first. Shortly after starting the Center I went to Brooks Brothers, bought a suit on credit, and took the train to Chicago to meet with a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce who had grown up in a Yiddish-speaking home. Maybe it was my vegetarian canvas boots or my bandana handkerchief that gave me away, or maybe it was his own ambivalence about his Yiddish past. Whatever the case, the first words out of his mouth were, “You dress like my son.” Apparently it was not a compliment, because I left empty-handed. In that and so many other encounters, I was reminded of the eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who characterized his native Yiddish as “a wild and barbarous tongue that contributes not a little to the impropriety of the common Jew.” For many Jewish philanthropists, Yiddish was worse than dead; it was a specter, an unwelcome reminder of the immigrant culture they had worked so hard to forget.

Fortunately there were other donors who enjoyed Yiddish precisely because it did foster impropriety, because it stood outside both the Jewish and non-Jewish mainstream. Arnold Picker, for example, was the former head of United Artists and number one on Nixon’s “enemies list.” When I went to see him and his wife, Ruth, in Florida, they greeted me with open arms, invited me to dinner, assured me they never spoke anything
but
Yiddish with their friends in Hollywood (“Take Edward G. Robinson—oy, could he speak a good Jewish!”), regaled me with Yiddish jokes, and offered to help in any way they could.

“Don’t you want to visit first so you can see the books for yourself?” I asked.

“Why do I need to shlep to Massachusetts to see the books?” Arnold answered, “I can see them right here in your eyes!”

There were other major donors in those early years: Joe Newman was a real estate developer in New York who loved to read Yiddish poetry. Harris Rosen was an ex-Marine who grew up on the Lower East Side and became one of the most successful hotel owners in Orlando, Florida. Working out of a modest office and driving an old Ford Taurus, he funded innovative educational programs for the poor and helped support student interns at the Book Center.

These were people who “got” Yiddish, who understood in their bones what we were trying to do. Others took a bit more persuading. I once paid a cold call on a Florida businessman who promptly informed me that he wasn’t going to give me a penny. “This isn’t the time to save Jewish books,” he insisted. “Whatever money I have I send to Israel for guns and bombs. Let’s take care of survival first. Then we can worry about books.”

I responded by telling him a story I’d read about a prominent physicist who testified before Congress in support of a new particle accelerator. A sympathetic senator asked about its defense application. “It has nothing to do directly with defending our country,” the scientist replied, “except to make it worth defending.”

The donor was amused but unmoved. But I didn’t give up. When I returned home I sent him a note quoting a passage from a two-thousand-year-old Hebrew text called
The Ethics of the Fathers:
“
‘Im eyn kemekh eyn toyre,’
the rabbis taught, ‘Where there is no bread there is no learning.’ But then they continued,
‘Im eyn toyre, eyn kemekh
. Where there is no learning, there is no bread.’” His response came by return mail: “You win. I surrender. My check for $500 is enclosed.”

The trouble was that large donations were few and far between,
while our expenses—staff, truck, rent, heat, phones, computers— were growing fast: $50,000 in 1980, $500,000 in 1985, $1 million in 1990, $3 million today. I tried public speaking to drum up support, hitchhiking from city to city and speaking at every synagogue that would have me. I lectured in old urban shuls that looked like Moorish temples and new suburban ones that looked more like spaceships. In one synagogue the rabbi pushed a button on the bimah and the doors of the ark slid open with a soft
whoosh,
as surely as if we’d been standing on the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise
. At another, in front of eight hundred people, the rabbi’s podium was so imposing I had to stand on the stool usually used by bar mitzvah boys just to see over the top. Once, during a lecture in Sarasota, Florida, the electricity went out; I kept on speaking while the congregants surrounded me with every menorah and candelabrum they could find, until I finally had to say, “
Genug
—enough, I’m starting to feel like Liberace up here.” In the course of twenty-four years I delivered well over a thousand lectures, sometimes (especially in Florida) speaking as many as four times in a single day. I became a popular speaker, I took standing ovations in stride, but only rarely did applause translate into significant financial support.

“How about direct mail?” asked my coworker Sharon Kleinbaum. “You know, write a letter, mail it to all the Jews in the country, tell them what we’re doing. They won’t be able to send their checks fast enough!”

Maybe, but how? In the early 1980s we were a small staff, still typing and stuffing our envelopes by hand. There was no way we could produce and mail hundreds of thousands of appeal letters on our own. A professional direct mail company offered to help, but they wanted $100,000 up front plus a hefty monthly retainer. That’s when we met Ken Coplon. Then in his mid-thirties and living in Santa Monica, California, Ken jokingly referred to himself as “the direct mailer of the fringe Left.” Smart, forceful, funny, honest, and utterly unpretentious, he had, at the time,
no particular interest in Jewish culture or Yiddish books—but he did have two adopted children living in our area and he was looking for a local client so he could deduct the airfare when he came out to see them. In short, it was strictly a marriage of convenience.

But it took. The first time we met, in 1983, Ken confirmed what the other company had told us: Returns on “prospect mail,” the mass appeals that most of us know as junk mail, are usually less than 1 percent, which is why it typically takes three years just to recoup costs. But Ken is a gambler by nature, and there was something about the Book Center that he found promising. “The mantra of direct mail is ‘Life-Death-Urgent,’” he explained. “You’ve got all three, except that instead of saving people you’re saving books. If you can make your case you’ve got a good chance of cracking one-and-a-half percent, and if you do that you’ll actually make money on the prospecting, which will give you a large membership that you can rely on for ongoing support. If you’re willing to take a chance, so am I.” Naturally we had no upfront money of our own, so Ken raided his kids’ college fund and put his own $30,000 on the line, then persuaded an elderly non-Jewish couple he knew to lend us another $5,000. Our old friend from Greenwich Village, Sonya Staff, always the visionary, gladly wrote a check for the rest.

Ken hired a professional writer living on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay, to write the initial appeal. I had assumed the letter would be signed by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was then the honorary chairman of our board. Instead, it began, “My name is Aaron Lansky. I’m 29 years old, and I urgently need your help.” When I protested, Ken quickly put me in my place. “Relax,” he said, “you’ve got a good story, so the writer decided to use you. It’s nothing personal—for him you’re just another can of soup.”

Flattering. Meanwhile Ken was busy tracking down lists: Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Publication Society and
Moment
magazine,
along with lists of donors to liberal causes (back then, one could still assume that most Jews were liberals). Ken ran these against a “Jewish dictionary,” a computer program that identified Jewish-sounding names. Our first test consisted of 108,000 pieces, and I was alone in the office when the first returns arrived. I opened the envelopes and
s’iz mir gevorn finster far di oygn
(the world went dark). Instead of checks, they were stuffed with hate mail: anti-Semitic tracts and handwritten diatribes, festooned with swastikas and crosses. My hands shaking, I dialed Ken in California.

“Don’t worry,” he assured me, “sometimes the Jewish Dictionary has a hard time distinguishing between Jewish names and German ones. The anti-Semites have nothing else to do, so they’re always the first to respond. Give it another day or two, you’ll start seeing checks.”

He was right. By the second day the checks and the hate mail were running neck and neck. By the third day the checks were in the lead, and by the fourth the anti-Semites were through and the post office was delivering our mail in trays. By the time the first test was complete we had received almost two thousand contributions, more than doubling our existing membership. More important, we had reached an astonishing 1.8 percent return—thereby turning a profit on our prospecting, just as Ken had wagered. We identified the lists that had performed best and continued mailing. Those who responded stuck with us. Unlike most organizations, which hire professional letter writers to compose their routine “house” appeals, I insisted on writing subsequent letters myself, breaking every rule of direct mail fund-raising in the process. Who was it that said “Forgive me for writing such a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one”? Instead of short, punchy letters with loads of underlining, indentions, and bullets, mine generally ran four to six pages, single spaced. I spoke to our members as friends, letting them know what we were doing and why. In addition to
an annual renewal letter there were frequent emergencies: to recover those eighty-five thousand folios of forgotten sheet music, to preserve the world’s last Yiddish Linotype, to hire interns, or to rescue the latest treasure trove of Yiddish books in the Soviet Union, Argentina, Mexico, or Cuba. Our members broke every record in the generosity of their response. Along with their contributions they’d send personal notes about their children or their health; Nansi Glick and I would try to answer every one personally.

It’s now twenty-one years since Ken and I met. He’s become one of my closest friends, and the Center’s membership has reached 35,000. Not long ago, in New Bedford, a friend approached my father at shul. “You know, Sid,” he said, “when most kids need money, they write home to their parents. When your kid needs money,
he
writes to
everyone
!”