Outwitting History (3 page)

And so we began. Every Wednesday at 5
P.M
., when the academic buildings at UMass emptied out, we would file into Jules’s cramped office, slice the bread, uncork the wine, and set to work. Jules was an old-fashioned teacher: There were no games, no overhead projectors, no language labs. He believed that the only way to learn a language such as Yiddish, in which immersion was no longer practical, was by reading. We spent four weeks racing through the remaining chapters of
College Yiddish
—twice as much as we had covered during the whole previous semester. Fortunately, the task was not as difficult as it sounds, since Yiddish possesses only three tenses, three cases, and a fluid syntax that allows for remarkable subtlety of expression. Better yet, because it is, like English, a Germanic language, much of its vocabulary is sufficiently cognate to provide ready mnemonics. (For example,
unter
is “under,”
bukh
is “book,”
vaser
is “water,” and so forth.) What
was
difficult to learn was the cultural context, the specifically Jewish concepts that infuse so much of the language—and make it so worth learning in the first place.

After completing Weinreich, Jules decided to jump right into a full-length novel. We protested that we didn’t know enough yet, but he was insistent: “Do you want to spend your lives reading textbooks or do you want to read Yiddish?” He selected “the hardest goddamned book I could find”:
Der Sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray)
by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The 1935 novel was written in a somewhat arcane Yiddish, intended to evoke the language of the seventeenth century, the period in which the story took place—even though its deeper meaning, the repudiation of redemptive ideology, could not have been more current. For the next
year and a half we lived and breathed Bashevis Singer’s story about the aftermath of the Chmielnicki massacres and the failure of false messiahs in the shtetl of Goray, “the little town at the end of the world.” We worked
khevruse
style, meeting together during the week to prepare an assigned portion of text. At the beginning we had to look up every word in the dictionary, which was no small trick since modern Yiddish literature had emerged so recently—and its writers and publishers were so famously contentious—that standardized orthography was still not universally accepted, and we had to figure out for ourselves the spelling variant under which a given word could be found in the dictionary. Moreover, the newest dictionary at our disposal, the 1968
Modern English–Yiddish Yiddish–English Dictionary
by Uriel Weinreich, included only words that Weinreich believed were appropriate for
modern
Yiddish; words that he felt were archaic,
daytshmerish
(excessively derivative from modern German), colloquial, vulgar, or otherwise inappropriate were left out—thus eliminating a significant percentage of Singer’s lexicon.

When we couldn’t find a word in Weinreich, we turned to Alexander Harkavy’s
Jewish–English English–Jewish Dictionary,
a work first compiled in 1898. Here the problem was not so much Harkavy’s Yiddish as his English. An immigrant from Russia, Harkavy had been somewhat overzealous in his embrace of the Queen’s English, and not infrequently his English definitions sent us scurrying to an
English
dictionary to understand what he was trying to say. Here, for example, is a string of purportedly English words that appear under the letter “M” in the “English–Jewish” side of the dictionary: moxa, muchwat, mucid, mucidness, mucilage, mucilaginous, muciperous, mucours, mucus, mucusness. . . . And so forth. This was one Jewish immigrant who could give the
OED
a run for its money.

We persevered. On Wednesday morning we’d get together to review
the week’s text while Roger kneaded dough and kept an eye on the oven. Late in the afternoon we’d take a bus to the university, open our books, and begin.

“Nu, Yankl
,
leyen a bisl!
(Nu, Jack, read a little!)
”
Jules began each class, addressing Jack Jacobson, who invariably sat to the teacher’s right. We enjoyed this opening line so much that it became Jack’s nickname. Even outside of class, we took to calling him Yankl Leyenabisl.

We proceeded word by word, sentence by sentence, taking turns reading out loud and translating as we went. At Jules’s suggestion, we’d underline a word in the dictionary each time we looked it up, and it was seldom that we had to look up a word more than twice. It was an old-fashioned method, but it worked. After two years of kneading dough, sipping wine, and flipping through dictionaries, we not only finished
Sotn in Goray
but were able to make our way, slowly but surely, through almost any Yiddish text we could find.

If only we could find them.

A
MONG THE FIVE
colleges in and around Amherst, Massachusetts, only the library at the University of Massachusetts possessed any Yiddish books at all, and its holdings were eclectic at best. By the mid-1970s virtually the whole of Yiddish literature was out of print. The
Complete Works
of Sholem Aleichem, for example, the most popular and arguably the greatest work of Yiddish literature, was last published in the United States in 1928; The
Complete Works
of I. L. Peretz, consisting of plays, poems, essays, and stories by one of the most profound Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, last appeared in 1948. My fellow students and I tried ordering used books by mail from an old Yiddish publisher and book distributor in New York, but its selection was small, its business practices arcane, and more often than not the books never arrived. Occasionally we’d see a Yiddish title listed at an
exorbitant price in the catalog of a rare book dealer in Amsterdam; otherwise we had no idea where else to turn.

I tried. I scoured the used book stores of Cambridge; I got up at dawn to be first in line at the annual League of Women Voters’ book sale under a tent on the Amherst Common. But to no avail. Finally it was Jules Piccus who suggested a solution. “Don’t think the books are going to come to you,” he said. “If you want Yiddish books you’ve got to go to them. Drive down to New York, to the Lower East Side. That’s where Yiddish-readers used to live, that’s where you’ll find Yiddish books!” He paused for a moment, then, smiling through his white beard, he added, “And while you’re there you can stop at Guss’s Pickles on Hester Street and bring me back a gallon of half-sours.”

Dishes were clanging, trays banging, old people pushing, and just about everyone was yelling at once, the servers in Spanish and the customers in Yiddish. Roger, Kathy, and I had been studying Yiddish with Professor Piccus for almost a year now, and this, in the late spring of 1975, was the latest step in our determined but until now fruitless search for Yiddish books. Together with my friends Paul Novak and Laurie Radovsky, we had borrowed a van from Hampshire College and arrived in New York at about eleven o’clock on a beautiful April morning. I had been to New York just once before, to visit the World’s Fair in 1964, and never to the Lower East Side. Stepping out of the van I was amazed at how Jewish it still seemed. Guss’s was just one of several pickle emporia where workers in dirty aprons and rolled-up sleeves plunged their bare hands into big barrels of brine, coming up with half- and full-sour pickles, bright red peppers, fistfuls of sauerkraut, and heads of pickled cauliflower. Open barrels covered the sidewalk for half a block, and the entire street reeked of garlic, dill, and vinegar. Several blocks away the air turned heavy and sweet as we passed Shapiro’s House of Kosher Wines, whose startling logo featured a knife standing upright in a glass of wine, topped by the dubious claim
“The Wine So Thick You Can Almost Cut It with a Knife!” On still other streets we passed fading, peeling signs in Hebrew and Yiddish, advertising tiny basement stores where dusty old men sold
taleysim,
mezuzahs, and other religious articles. In some storefronts one could watch
soyfrim
at work: ancient scribes with long gray beards who used quill pens to hand letter the parchment scrolls of the Torah. On every block were synagogues and the one-room Hasidic prayer houses known as
shtiblekh
. At the end of East Broadway, towering above the entire neighborhood, was the headquarters of the
Jewish Daily Forward,
the socialist Yiddish newspaper that had dominated immigrant Jewish life in America for more than eighty years. And right next to the ten-story
Forward
building was the Garden Cafeteria, a culinary landmark where Yiddish writers, intellectuals, shopkeepers, and workers had been coming for years to
farbrengen
—to eat, talk, and argue. It was almost noontime, and we could see through the steamy windows that the place was full. Figuring that someone among all those elderly Jews would know where we could find Yiddish books, we opened the door and stepped inside.

“Tickets!” the cashier yelled as we entered, forcing little printed cards into our hands. The system, it appeared, was that every time you ordered a dish, you presented the card to the server, who punched a hole in a box for the appropriate amount. You kept amassing holes until, after a full afternoon of shmoozing and eating, you were finally ready to settle accounts on your way out the door.

We, for our part, were having trouble just getting
in
the door. While the cashier impatiently explained the system, other patrons were already pushing from behind. By the time we made it to the cafeteria line, we were being jostled from all sides at once:

“Hurry up! What’s the matter
mit
you?”

“Can’t you see you got hungry people here?”

“
Nu
already, for what are you dillydallying?”

The Spanish-speaking servers were holding their own in the multi-lingual shouting match. A bit unnerved, we ordered as best we could, piling our trays high with blintzes and sour cream, kasha varnishkes and mushroom gravy, varenikes with fried onions, matzo brei and several other
milkhig
(dairy) specials. Then we tried to find a table. It goes without saying that none of the five of us looked like your typical Garden Cafeteria customer: We were fifty years too young, we spoke English, and every one of us sported long hair and jeans. But no one seemed to notice. In fact, as we squeezed ourselves into five empty seats at one of the cafeteria’s long communal tables, the people already sitting there didn’t even look up: They were far too busy arguing, engaged in a passionate discussion of some heated subject beyond our linguistic reach, which is to say that they were all speaking in Yiddish and all speaking at once. Hands were waving, fingers pointing, sentences punctuated with heaping spoonfuls of sour cream. It was only when one particularly vociferous old man banged his cup on his tray in a dramatic bid for attention and sent hot coffee splashing in every direction that someone finally noticed the five young newcomers in their midst. The argument came to a sudden halt.

“Um,
sholem aleykhem,”
I said in tentative greeting, taking advantage of the silence to address the whole table at once. These were the first Yiddish words I had ever spoken outside of a university setting, and I could feel myself blushing.

“Aleykhem sholem,”
answered the woman closest to me, putting on her eyeglasses and looking me over from head to toe. Apart from the Hispanic servers and busboys, we appeared to be the only people in the restaurant under seventy-five.

“Zogt mir,”
said the man with the coffee cup, looking at the five of us in our best post-hippie finery,
“ir zent yidishe kinder?
(Tell me, are you Jewish children?)
”

“Vu den?
(What else?)
”
We then explained, half in English, half in
Yiddish, that we were college students studying Yiddish who had come all the way from Massachusetts to look for Yiddish books. As might be expected, this news elicited considerable excitement.

“Hey,
Moyshe, kum aher un ze vos tut zikh bay di hayntike kinder!
—Hey, Moyshe, come over here and see what the kids these days are up to!” We were scrunched together as the news spread and more and more elderly Jews sat down at the table or leaned over our shoulders, asking us a hundred questions that, in their impatience, they then answered themselves. There was a widespread tone of disbelief: Jewish children going to university to study Yiddish! Who ever heard of such a thing? By the time we finished our meal (no small accomplishment, given the size of the portions and the crowd at the table), we had been examined, cross-examined, hugged, kissed, smeared with lipstick, pinched, and blessed more times than any of us thought healthy. We were also given the names of three nearby booksellers who, we were told, were likely to have Yiddish books.

T
HE FIRST WAS
Rabinowitz’s, just a block away on Canal Street. This was a relatively modern establishment with a large stock of English Judaica. The store did most of its business on Sunday, when second- and third-generation Jews came in from the suburbs to buy gifts for weddings and bar mitzvahs. When we asked the Israeli clerk for used Yiddish books he gave us a blank look and called the boss. The boss, a much older man, explained that he hadn’t stocked Yiddish books for twenty years. He suggested we try Gottlieb just up the street, which happened to be the second name on our list. “Gottlieb’s got a whole attic full of Yiddish books!” the man at Rabinowitz’s assured us. “He’s bound to have what you’re looking for.”

We walked the few blocks up Canal Street. From the outside Gottlieb’s did not look promising. The building was old and decrepit, the display windows so caked with dust and grime we couldn’t see inside.
We opened the door with trepidation, stepped over the threshold, and were immediately swallowed up by must and gloom on that beautiful spring day. Packed from floor to ceiling were tottering shelves of
sforim,
weighty religious tomes in Hebrew and Aramaic. In the maze of narrow passageways between the shelves, bare lightbulbs hung from frayed cotton cords. The air was stale. As our eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, we could make out a half dozen black-coated Hasidim with long beards and
peyes,
ritual earlocks, rocking back and forth between the stacks as they leafed through their religious texts.