Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky

Author:Aaron Lansky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2003-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

18. “Hitler’s Fault”

Ten years after we recovered books from the old Atran House, we were invited to the new Atran House. An improbably narrow building on East Twenty-first Street, it had almost no windows, as though the old organizations—most were still there—had turned their backs on the outside world for good.

We had come to meet with officials of the Congress for Jewish Culture, which was one of the world’s younger Yiddish organizations, having been founded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Subsidized by German reparations money, the CJC had published many extremely important Yiddish titles, including the eight-volume Lexicon of the New Yiddish Literature, Simon Dubnow’s ten-volume World-History of the Jewish People, and Yehoash’s masterful, two-volume Yiddish translation of the Tanakh, the complete Hebrew bible. Unfortunately the organization’s refugee leaders had proved themselves more adept at editing and printing than at marketing and distribution. Their titles were beautifully printed and bound, yet a huge number of brand-new copies remained unsold.

Which is why we were there. Despite the truckload of books we had carted away from their old location almost a decade before, the Atran House was still teeming with books, most of which belonged to the Culture Congress, which had overflowed its allotted space, taken over the offices of its neighbors, and spread throughout the building. There were books everywhere—on shelves and desktops, inside file cabinets, in corridors, closets, and bathrooms. Stacked boxes were used as partitions, and tottering piles leaned against every wall.

The CJC leadership had recently changed, and two of the new heads of the organization—Yonia Fain, a respected Yiddish writer and artist, and Manny Goldsmith, a personable American-born rabbi and scholar whom I had known for years—were eager to do something about these stockpiles. So they sat down with me and my colleague Jeffrey Aronofsky (who was even younger than I) and made us an offer: For the nominal cost of $2 a volume, they would give us every book in the place.

Under ordinary circumstances I would have rejected their proposal out of hand. We never paid for books. Even if we were willing to pay, where would we get the $80,000 needed to pay for the CJC’s estimated forty thousand volumes?

But these were not ordinary circumstances. Not only had the books taken over every office in the building, they—together with most of the irreplaceable archive of the Jewish Labor Bund—had spilled over into the basement as well. Manny and Yonia gave us a tour. From floor to ceiling, the cellar was a solid mass of boxes extending to within four inches of what can only be described as a Byzantine web of pipes: cast-iron sewer lines, hot and cold water pipes, sprinkler mains, and steam pipes covered with ripped asbestos that was raining down on the boxes below. My stomach lurched. Twelve years before, when the Yiddish Book Center began, we had temporarily stored several hundred recently collected books in a similar space, a subbasement storeroom beneath the press room of the Forward on East Thirty-third Street.

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