Jacob's Cane_A Jewish Family's Journey From the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore by Elisa New

Author:Elisa New [New, Elisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography
Goodreads: 6798040
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
Published: 2009-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

One of my greatest regrets is that at some point in the 1970s, when I was already an avid reader myself, I didn’t visit and perhaps take a few souvenirs from my great-grandfather’s library.

It makes me wince and also, I admit, brings out my own intolerance, my snobbishness, that in contrast to all the goblets and ramekins saved for me and others, no thought was given to saving Jacob’s books. Would I not trade, I’ve said to myself, the set of six flowered dessert dishes or the pink vegetable bowl, the green painted scene of a Chinese girl bending under a willow tree, or the nut or pickle forks (still wrapped in plastic) for just a few of the moldy books? Salt cellars, parfait dishes, cake servers I have in quantity, but not one book from my great-grandfather’s fabled library, books floor to ceiling, which even my mother, age four when he died, remembers.

Of the large collection he amassed over forty or fifty years all I’ve seen are his Morocco-bound Bible, in which he kept the notice of his firstborn son Edward ’s name change, and one other book—an illustrated Don Quixote—now possessed by Aunt Myrtle ’s granddaughter Carol. And that is all. A picture of him holding a copy of The Call, the organ of Morris Hillquit ’s Socialist Party of America; copies of the election results of November 1914, Jacob Levy, Socialist candidate for the Third Ward; and certain pungent letters on the rights of landlords and workers are all I have to tell me what he read, to give me a picture of the ideas he entertained.

It vexes me, frustrates me, and makes me blame myself for not catching on sooner, for not getting myself to the factory annex where, from 1939 till 1979, my great-grandfather’s books remained unread and unloved, until they were carted away to a dubious destination after the Philadelphia plant was closed in favor of new ones in the suburbs and in North Carolina. I feel not only frustrated but angry that I failed to realize the value of that library in time, that I’ve had to go to some lengths to retrieve my great-grandfather’s personal catalog by other means.

At a certain stage of my quest I thought I might get help from librarians at some of the branches where he’d gone to quiet his nerves with a day of reading. But my inquiries won me only a rebuke; the librarian I spoke with was unwilling even to entertain the idea of sharing a borrower’s reading record. What was a public library, she reminded me, but a bulwark of intellectual freedom and privacy? Would I want someone seeing what I’d checked out?

This failing, I’ve spent more than one afternoon lost in various historical collections, my interest not just in the ideas of Chernechevski, Lasalle, Sorge, and Hillquit, but in the imprints of 1899 and 1903, whose bindings I’ve fingered lovingly, thus creating on the floor the virtual library he would have read. I’ve

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