Outwitting History (8 page)

As news of our efforts spread, the number of letters and calls increased exponentially. The staff of the local post office was learning more about the extent of Yiddish literature than most Jews in America would ever know. And we were learning more than many truck drivers knew about the intricacies of interstate highways and New York City streets.

I had four regular traveling companions now: my college friend Roger Mummert, whose Second Avenue apartment became our “crash pad” in New York; Fran Krasno, a writer and archivist from Northampton who would soon become the Center’s assistant director; Pat Myerson, a freelance radio producer from Amherst with an interest in oral history; and Noah Glick, the son of my teacher, a strong, good-natured seventeen-year-old available only during school vacations.

It wasn’t long before I was on the road more than I was at home. True, we were often exhausted, but we were also energized: Every day was a new adventure, a new opportunity to meet amazing people, discover great books, and—a privilege granted to few—to watch as a historical epoch passed before our eyes.

We made hundreds of trips over the next ten years. Here, taken from our truck logs and my memory, is a more-or-less typical day:

Fran Krasno and I came down by train the night before and slept in sleeping bags on the floor of Roger’s apartment. We got up at six, roused Roger, and walked together to the Bowery to pick up a truck. Our regular rental company, Hittner, was the cheapest in town—and for good reason. The clerk sat in a grimy office behind a cloudy sheet of bulletproof glass, with a gun beneath his jacket and a German shepherd at his side. A sign behind him read In God We Trust—All Others Pay Cash. We paid $300 up front, with the balance to be returned when we returned the truck in good condition.

Of course, “good condition” was a relative term. There wasn’t a truck in Hittner’s fleet that wasn’t dented or covered with graffiti. The
one-ton Chevy van we rented that day was pretty much par for the course: The turn signals didn’t work, both side mirrors were broken, and someone had repaired a gaping hole behind the passenger’s seat by welding a stolen city street sign (Trucks Keep Right) to the floor. It could have been worse; two weeks earlier, reaching under the driver’s seat of a Hittner truck to silence a rattle, I came up with four empty beer cans and a six-inch kitchen knife with a sharpened tip.

It was 7:15 before we were finally under way, leaving us just enough time for a quick breakfast at the B & H Dairy Restaurant on Second Avenue. An old
milkhig
haunt, the B & H had no waiters, just a short-order cook in an egg-stained apron who leaned across the counter and yelled, “Wha’dya want?” There were no menus either, just hand-painted signs Scotch-taped above the counter:

Gefilte Fish—
Mit dem Yiddishn Geschmack
—Try It with Some Delicious Horseradish!

Chopped Herring: Say No More—The
Best
!

Really and Truly Fresh Fruit Salad: Pure and Unadulterated!

Vegetable Roast: To Your Health!

Chopped Eggplant: Try It, You’ll Like It!

We opted for the French Toast (3 Inch Thick Slices of Chalah Bread!) and Orange Juice (Of Course It’s Fresh, We Squeeze It Ourselves!). While we waited we reviewed a clipboard on which Fran had posted a typed copy of the day’s itinerary, and then we consulted a stack of street maps to plan our route.

Our first stop that morning was supposed to be the “Editorial Office” of
Zayn (To Be),
a quarterly Yiddish literary journal. The office turned out to be a one-room residence in a down-at-the-heels SRO (single-room-occupancy) building occupied by Mr. Rosoff, the magazine’s editor and publisher.

“
Kumt arayn, kumt arayn,
come in, come in, so many young people,
it’s so good to see you,” Mr. Rosoff greeted us as he herded us into his tiny room. It was a tight fit, since, in addition to his furniture, the single room was filled from floor to ceiling with tottering piles of back issues of
Zayn
.

“A few of the issues didn’t sell so well, so I stored them here in my apartment,” Mr. Rosoff explained. “But I’ll tell you the truth, they’re not getting any younger and neither am I. It’s not good they should sit here with me collecting dust. That’s why I called you—maybe you can find young people who will want to read them?”

Most young people I knew weren’t exactly waiting in line, but we promised to store the volumes carefully, list them in our catalog, and try to get them into libraries. A gentle man, Mr. Rosoff said he couldn’t ask for more. Since he had no boxes, we had to load the dusty, paper-bound issues loose onto handtrucks and roll them out to the truck. The more recent the dates, the higher the piles of unsold copies. We understood all too well: the higher the piles, the fewer the subscribers who remained.

We loaded the issues of
Zayn
as carefully as we could into the back of the van and headed back downtown to our next stop, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Rosenberg. According to the clipboard the Rosenbergs had two thousand books for us. But after double parking, offloading the handtrucks, and wrestling them through a revolving door (almost strangling a poor Chihuahua in the process), when we showed up at the Rosenbergs’ apartment there were no books in sight.

“Excuse me,” I asked, rechecking the clipboard, “but where are the two thousand books?”

“Why, in a warehouse, of course,” answered Mrs. Rosenberg.

“So why did you give us this address?” asked Fran, who had scheduled the pickup herself.

“Why? So my husband and I could look you over before we trust you with such a treasure.”

They led us into a tastefully furnished den, poured tea (in fine china), and proceeded to discuss with us Jewish history, Yiddish literature, and our plans for the Center. They were interesting, erudite people, and apparently we passed the test, because after a half hour they finally brought the conversation around to the books.

“You understand, of course, that the books we have are brand new. In fact, they’re still packaged in the publisher’s original cartons,” Mr. Rosenberg told us.

“Brand new?” I asked. How often did one find two thousand brand new Yiddish books in 1980?

Mrs. Rosenberg explained that the books had been written by her father, Mendl Osherowitch, a well-known Yiddish scholar. Osherowitch’s magnum opus was a two-volume work entitled
Yidn in Ukrayne (Jews in the Ukraine),
an anthology that included contributions by Max Weinreich, Eliyahu Cherikover, and other leading historians of the day. Because of the author’s untimely death in 1965, just as the second volume was coming off the press, the books were never properly distributed. Instead they were stored in a friend’s warehouse in the Fulton Fish Market, where they remained for the next fifteen years. Now the Rosenbergs were ready to turn them over to us, so we could distribute them, albeit belatedly, to libraries around the world.

Having grown up in New Bedford, the country’s largest fishing port, I was familiar with the smell of fish. But nothing could have prepared me for the olfactory assault that greeted us twenty minutes later when we arrived at the Fulton Fish Market. Developers had not yet transformed the area into the tourist Mecca it is today, and frankly, it could have used a bit of gentrification. The address Mr. Rosenberg gave us was a dry-storage warehouse almost directly underneath the Brooklyn
Bridge. Roger, Fran, and I hopped onto the loading dock and were greeted by a warehouseman in his early sixties wearing a quilted blue jacket.

“What can I do you for?” he asked, leaning back on a wooden chair.

“Well, I hope this is the right place. Mr. Rosenberg sent us. We’re here for the books, the Yiddish—”

The warehouseman was on his feet. “Hey, Smitty,” he yelled into the building, “c’mere! You ain’t gonna believe this, some kids have finally come for them Jewish books we got upstairs!”

Smitty, a big man carrying a metal hook with a well-worn hardwood handle, emerged from the darkness. “You bullshittin’ me?”

His partner assured him that we were for real, and giving us strict instruction to “Wait right here!” the two of them disappeared into the darkness. Standing on the dock, we had time to look around at what could have passed as a stage set for
On the Waterfront.
Forklifts bounced along the cobblestones, pallet jacks clashed, roughnecks cursed, workers in rubber boots plied their hoses, and everywhere, trucks moved back and forth, leaking fish guts as they went. When the two men finally reappeared, they were using their hooks to pull ancient wooden dollies piled high with big, sturdy boxes lashed together with sisal twine. It was obvious that the boxes had never been opened; they still bore the stencils of the Yiddish printer.

We cut the twine and started loading them onto our truck. As we did so the warehousemen chuckled to themselves. “Hey, don’t get me wrong,” said the man in the quilted jacket. “I mean, I like Jewish people and all. But I’m gonna tell you something, them books have been a regular pain in the neck. ‘Long as I been here—never mind how many years—we gotta step over ‘em, move ‘em around, pull ‘em outa the way. I’m glad you kids can do something with ‘em, ‘cause just between you, me, and the wall, I’m glad to see ‘em go.”

Smitty agreed. “Good riddance!” he yelled, smiling and waving as we
loaded the last box, secured the door, and pulled away from the dock. “Good riddance—and good luck!”

Next stop Brooklyn. We headed over the bridge, asked directions several times, and eventually made our way to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Kirshenbaum. Well into their eighties, the Kirshenbaums were moving to a Maryland suburb to live with their daughter. The daughter, a well-dressed woman in her fifties, was with them when we arrived. The apartment was upside down, furniture covered, closets emptied, the possessions of a lifetime packed into movers’ boxes. Only the kitchen table was still uncluttered, an oasis amid the chaos, and Mrs. Kirschenbaum insisted we sit down first, apologizing because all she could offer was instant coffee.

“My parents don’t want to leave,” their daughter told us while her mother filled the kettle. “But they have no choice. My mom is going blind; she can’t take care of the house anymore. My father is still active, but what kind of a neighborhood is this for him? Last month he went to a Yiddish poetry reading near the house, a mugger steps out from under the El and hits him over the head, he could have been killed. At least at my house they’ll be safe, they’ll have the grandchildren to talk to—”

“The grandchildren?” her father interrupted. “The grandchildren who are so busy
mit
the television and the sports and the making their parents drive them everywhere, the grandchildren are going to have time to talk to their old
bobe
and
zeyde
? Oh no. You want to know what we’ll do there? We’ll sit by ourselves in the den and
tsiter
(tremble) all day, we shouldn’t be in the way. You call that a life?”

It was apparent that he and his daughter were reenacting, for our benefit, the final act in a long-standing argument. What made Mr. Kirschenbaum’s point of view so poignant was that, as he explained, he and his wife had always been activists. They were leaders in the Bund, the Jewish labor movement in their native Poland. They survived the
Holocaust. After the war they fled to Argentina, where together they established a socialist Yiddish day school. Later they came to the United States, where he worked as a Yiddish teacher and they were both active in cultural and educational organizations. He was still the secretary of the local branch of the Workmen’s Circle. “All right, it’s true, our health isn’t what it used to be, maybe the neighborhood isn’t what it used to be either, but at least we have our friends here, we have our cultural life, our discussions, our meetings . . .”

His wife patted his hand. “All our lives we’ve fought. But now we’re old. There comes a time you’re too tired to fight anymore.”

We spoke for another hour before they were ready to give us their books. Like so many of the people we met, they were home-grown intellectuals, and they had a large and impressive library, including rare Yiddish imprints from South America. Many of the writers had been personal friends. “
Ay, tayere bikher, tayere fraynt
(precious books, precious friends),” Mrs. Kirschenbaum sighed as we carried the boxes out the door. “It’s a shame my eyes are going, I can’t read them anymore.”

“It’s a shame we won’t have room for them in Maryland,” added her husband.

We wheeled hundreds of volumes out to the truck. But as he emptied the last bookcase, Mr. Kirshenbaum had a change of heart and decided to keep three well-worn sets for himself: the collected works of I. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and Avrom Reisen. “They’re my favorite writers,” he said, almost apologetically, his eyes beginning to well with tears. “True, I’ve read them a hundred times already, but at least this way I can read them out loud for my wife. She’s right: They’re old friends, these books. We’ll take a few along; maybe when we get to Maryland we won’t feel so lonely.”

It was neither the first time nor the last in the course of our travels that I had to fight back tears of my own. I, too, loved Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, and not all that long before, I had even read Avrom Reisen—once
one of the most popular Yiddish writers in America, now largely forgotten. I recalled a particular story called “
Dem bruders koyl
(My Brother’s Bullet),” which takes place during World War I. A Jew, living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, takes a job in a defense plant making bullets, while his brother, living on the other side of the border, is pressed into service in the tsar’s army. The factory worker, increasingly distraught, begins pocketing first one, then another and another bullet, certain that each time he is saving his brother’s life. No wonder Mr. Kirschenbaum would want to hold on to books like that.

But there was little time for either tears or reflection as we piled back into the van, already several hours behind our carefully typed schedule. We stopped only long enough for Fran to phone our next appointments from a graffiti-covered pay phone, letting them know we’d be late, while Roger ducked into a nearby bodega in search of lunch. Returning with bread, cheese, and seltzer, he made sandwiches atop a box of books in the back of the van as we sped off to the Jewish Geriatric Center in Coney Island.