Outwitting History (32 page)

The young students, of course, had no such memories—most had never seen Yiddish books before—but they were no less enthusiastic. They crowded around as I went from pile to pile, introducing each title in turn. Many of the books came from the former Sholem Aleichem Schools, the only politically independent Yiddish schools in America; we had retrieved them, in brand new condition, from the basement of a Queens apartment building several years before. There were also new Yiddish primers and song books donated by the Workmen’s Circle, and
dictionaries and reference works donated by the YIVO. But the books that made the biggest impression were the reprints we had carried with us across the border: Dubnow’s
Jewish History for School and Home,
originally published right there in Riga. The author, Simon Dubnow, was murdered in the city in 1941, and as far as anyone knew, no copies of his book had been seen there since. For the teachers the title’s return to Riga was a vindication; for the students it was history come alive.

By now we were all happily conversing in a mélange of languages. I told the students about Yiddish literature and the history of Jews in their own city, and they reciprocated with an impromptu concert of Yiddish and Hebrew songs. When our work was finally done, the students celebrated by taking handfuls of Styrofoam packing bubbles, an American novelty that they had never seen before, and throwing them into the air as confetti. They made a big mess, but even the teachers agreed it was worth it.

O
UR LAST STOP
was supposed to be Vilna. Although tensions had eased somewhat since the declaration of independence in March, gasoline was still embargoed and entry by foreigners forbidden. Our applications for special visas, submitted to the Soviet Embassy in Washington before we left, had been rejected, and now here we were, stuck in Riga with twelve hundred Yiddish books bound for new Jewish schools in Vilna and Kovno (Kaunas) and no way to enter Lithuania to deliver them.

Our contact in Lithuania, Emanuel Zingeris, was, at thirty-two, the chairman of the Jewish Cultural Association, a member of the newly formed Lithuanian parliament, and the head of the nascent government’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Zay ruik, zay ruik, Lahnsky
(Calm down, calm down, Lansky),” he repeatedly admonished me during 2
A.M
. phone calls in advance of our trip,
“Alts iz in ordnung
(Everything is under control).
”
Sure enough, just hours before we were scheduled
to leave Riga for Vilna, his personal courier showed up with an official letter of passage written on the letterhead of the as yet unrecognized Lithuanian Parliament, and signed and sealed by none other than Zingeris himself. I placed a hasty call to Vilna.

“
Fraynt
Zingeris,” I began, “what are we supposed to do with this letter?”

“
Zay ruik,
Lahnsky,” he replied. “Just show it to any Lithuanian policeman who stops you. They will respect the authority of the Lithuanian Parliament.”

“And what if the policeman is not Lithuanian? What if we get stopped by the Red Army or the KGB?”

To this Zingeris had no answer. Fortunately Kenny Turan, who as a reporter was more experienced in such matters than I, insisted we check with the U.S. Consulate in Leningrad before trusting ourselves to Zingeris’s safe conduct. By the time Kenny got off the phone he was shaking his head.

“What did they say, what did they say?” I asked.

“They said that Zingeris’s letter is a one-way ticket to the gulag,” he replied.

Salvation comes from unexpected quarters. Our phone calls and subsequent conversation took place in the office of the head of the Riga Jewish community, an elderly woman named Esther Rapina. We had assumed she couldn’t understand us, but after Kenny spoke she stepped forward and said in perfect English, “I think perhaps I could be of assistance.” She explained that there were sometimes ethnic Latvians working in the local office of the Soviet Interior Ministry. “They hate the Russians so much they might be willing to help.”

With that Mrs. Rapina picked up her cane and led us to an impressive government building, past a prominent sign that said Closed (
“Blote!
Mud!” she opined as she pushed her way inside), and proceeded straight to the office of a high Latvian official she thought might be sympathetic to our plight. She guessed right. “I do not have the authority
to give you a visa to Vilna,” the official explained, “but I can issue a visa to Minsk in Belarus, which will grant you a one-day transit through Lithuania. As long as you can deliver your books and be out in twenty-four hours, you will not be arrested.”

We phoned Zingeris to make the final arrangements. He promised to have forty liters of bootleg gasoline waiting for us, so that
“ir vet nisht darfn blaybn in Vilne af eybik
(you won’t have to remain in Vilna for eternity).
”
He also agreed to dispatch two
shtarkers,
tough Jewish bodyguards, on the overnight train to Riga, who would meet up with us first thing in the morning and return with us by truck.

We left on schedule, the
shtarkers
asleep in the back of the van. Shortly after noon, ready for lunch, we pulled off the road into a small Lithuanian city called Ukmerge, seventy kilometers north of Vilna. Our
shtarkers
were awake by now, and the larger of the two, Sasha, who spoke halting English (but no Yiddish), explained that before the war Ukmerge was a shtetl called Vilkomir, which was home to more than seven thousand Jews. The birthplace of M. L. Lilienblum, an important nineteenth-century Hebrew writer, the town once boasted a well-known yeshiva, secular Hebrew and Yiddish high schools, a Jewish trade school, numerous synagogues, study houses, and a full complement of Jewish social and religious institutions. The rabbi, who was born in Palestine, was considered one of the leading Jewish scholars in Lithuania. Driving down the main street, it was possible even now to imagine that nothing had changed: tin-roofed houses, goats tethered in the yards, chickens underfoot, women washing their laundry by the river, and horse-drawn wagons passing us on the street. Yet as much as we wanted to think otherwise, Ukmerge was not the town that time forgot: Though the streets were full of people, no matter how hard we looked there was not a single Jewish face to be seen.

It’s funny. In America people sometimes think I’m Irish; in Eastern Europe they could tell from a hundred yards away that Kenny, Janice, and I were Jews, and as a result no one in Ukmerge wanted to talk to
us. They were afraid, Sasha explained, that we were descendants of the town’s earlier inhabitants, come to reclaim the empty homes their neighbors had expropriated after the war.

And where
were
the Jews of Vilkomir? Dead, dead, every man, woman, and child, rounded up and shot by German soldiers on a single summer day in 1941. The only remnant of Jewish life we could find was the old cemetery, an empty field on the outskirts of town, overgrown with weeds, with a children’s playground at the far end. Strange, but there was only one
metseyve,
one tombstone, marking the graves of the tens of thousands of Jews who must have lain buried there. It bothered us, and we asked about the missing grave markers later that afternoon, when we arrived in Vilna.

“Until last month there were no
metseyves
at all in Vilkomir,” our host told us. “The one you saw, we put it there as a memorial.”

“And what happened to the rest?”

“Kumt mit mir
(come with me),” said our host, and he drove us to the base of a monumental stone staircase leading to an imposing Soviet building called the Palace of Trade Unions. Looking closely at the stairs, we could just discern carved Hebrew letters. The entire staircase—like retaining walls, streets, and other staircases throughout the Soviet Union—had been made of Jewish
metseyves
. Not enough that the Nazis murdered the Jews of Europe; after the war, the Soviets were determined to eradicate the memory that they had ever lived.

But that was later in the day, in Vilna. We were still in Ukmerge, in Vilkomir, and next to that lone
metseyve,
the Jews of Vilna had placed a boulder on which they carved a Jewish star and below that a simple inscription in Lithuanian and Yiddish: “The Old Jewish Cemetery: Hallowed Is the Memory of Those Who Died.” I tried to read the Yiddish out loud, but my voice choked with tears before I could finish. Kenny put down his notebook, Janice her camera, and for the only time during all our travels, the three of us stood there and wept. We wept, of course, for the forgotten dead—Jews no different than ourselves
except that our grandparents had had the prescience or the
mazl,
the blind luck, to leave when they did, and theirs did not. But even more, I think, we wept out of futility, for the lost illusion that the Yiddish books in our little van, parked at the curb, could somehow make amends for Vilkomir and a thousand other cities and
shtetlekh
like it, where, like memory itself, even the
metseyves
are no more.

Humbled, we delivered our books in Vilna. Zingeris did not have the gasoline he promised, and, at two
A.M
., with no other choice, we turned to the head of the Vilna underworld for help. Not much older than I, he spoke fluent Yiddish, and eight hours later, just as he said he would, he showed up in the parking lot of our hotel with three jerry cans of purloined fuel. When I asked, not without some trepidation, how much we owed him, he waved his hand with all the noblesse oblige of Isaac Babel’s Benya Krik.
“Gornisht,
nothing,” he said. “Consider it my small contribution to the cause.”

Two days and eleven hundred kilometers later we were back in Tallinn, where we reboarded the
Nord Estonia
for the start of our long journey home. The ship’s whistle sounded, and the tugboats, puffing great black clouds of smoke, pushed us into open water. I stood on deck for a long time, reflecting on all we had seen and done. Hundreds of eager Jewish students now had Yiddish books, and I’ll never forget the wonder and delight with which they received them. Still, it was only a matter of time before most of those students left for Israel or the States, where for better or worse they would have new languages to learn and new books to read. As long as Yiddish books were needed in the Soviet Union, we would continue to send them (with Communism gone, we now do so via UPS). But that night, standing alone at the taffrail as the Old Country dropped astern, it was as achingly clear to me as it had been to my grandparents eighty years before that the future waited across the sea.

It was a ramshackle life I was living: half my time on the road and the rest at the Center, working fourteen hours a day, eating leftover rice and beans, sleeping on a cold futon, and waking early each morning to start again. True, there was Shabbos off, friends, and sometimes girlfriends, but working for peanuts, I was too broke even to think of settling down.

Then late one day in 1989, while fund-raising in New York, I stopped at a pay phone to check in with my office and learned that Adele Simmons, the outgoing president of Hampshire College, soon to be installed as the new president of the MacArthur Foundation, wanted to see me in Amherst first thing the next morning. “She says she wants to introduce you to a big donor,” my assistant, Maria Magliochetti, explained.

So at the end of the day I raced back to New England, arrived home at midnight, slept as long as I dared, skipped breakfast, and had time to iron just the two front panels of my Oxford shirt; I’d be okay as long as I kept my jacket on. I then sped up the highway in my sorry Civic wagon, grabbed a handful of brochures from a stash in back, and, right on time, rang the doorbell of President Simmons’s gracious country home.

“Do come in,” she said, leading me to the living room. “I’m so glad you could make it on such short notice. The person I’d like you to meet will be with us shortly. But first there’s another matter I’d like to discuss. The board of the MacArthur Foundation met yesterday, and they’ve asked me to inform you that you have been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.”

My jaw dropped. The MacArthur—commonly known as a “genius grant”—is awarded to fewer than thirty people a year, President Simmons explained. You can’t apply for it. The nominators are anonymous. And although the amount of the grant is (or at least was) determined by age—and I would be one of the youngest recipients— I would still receive almost $250,000, payable over the next five years.

My head was spinning. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then a dozen of my closest friends and colleagues, summoned under the strictest secrecy by our former board chair, Penina Glazer, came streaming in from a side room, along with a public relations officer from Hampshire College, who stood there, pen at the ready, to record my reaction. I’m afraid I disappointed her: My mouth remained open, but not a single sound came out.

Oh, what a difference that grant made! It bestowed much needed credibility on the nascent Yiddish Book Center—and on Yiddish itself. It opened closed doors. It paid off a mountain of personal debt accumulated during the nine years I had worked for next to nothing. And, slowly, it made settling down seem not quite so inconceivable after all.

I think it was two months later that my former teacher, Leonard Glick, handed me a small sheet of paper with a handwritten name and phone number. “I met this young woman at a book group at her parents’ house,” he explained. “I think you know them: Arnold and Anita Sharpe, lovely people. Their daughter Gail was home for the weekend. She’s pretty, she’s fun, she’s single, she’s Jewish, what more do you
need? So I asked her parents if I could give you her number, and they said it would be okay.”

“And what did
she
say?”

“She?” Len stammered, “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure. ‘Yes,’ I think she said ‘yes.’ And I almost forgot—she’s about to move to California, so you’d better call her right away.”