last”—
Whap!—
“you rush over to him and ask him for his Yiddish books!”
Whap! Whap! Whap!
Stuart was aghast. “Mr. Berger, if you think I’m going to walk into a hospital and—”
“Why not? You’ll be doing these old Jews a favor! You’ll take a load off their chests! They can die easy, knowing someone will take care of their books after they’re gone!”
The strategy was unsettling at best, and it was some time before I could restore order and bring the discussion around to my original ifadmittedly less sensational plan of canvassing apartment buildings and hanging posters in Laundromats, synagogues, and senior centers. After the meeting, Stuart, Roger, and I stayed behind to clean up. When we finally made our way to elevator, Mr. Berger was waiting for us. He pushed the Lobby button with his walking stick.
“Do you want to know what the real problem is?” he asked as the elevator descended.
“The real problem is that people are dying today who never died before!”
With that he donned his straw hat, turned smartly on his white loafers, and tapping with his pearl-handled walking stick, proceeded calmly into the winter night.
Mr. Berger must have returned to Florida, because we never heard from him again. But notwithstanding his pessimism, the zamler network proved successful. More than two hundred people signed up, from Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard to Nome, Alaska. Where we could, we set up drop-off points: In El Paso, Texas, it was the Ave Maria Religious Store, where the proprietor, Jules Novick, advertised “Crucifixes, Wholesale and Retail” and set aside room in the back for Yiddish books.
For many of our zamlers, saving Yiddish books became their life. Sorell Skolnik, for example, was a resolute woman in her seventies who lived in the Mohegan Colony, a community of anarchists and other progressive Jews just north of Peekskill, New York. The first time we visited Sorell was in 1981. Pat Myerson, Fran Krasno, and I arrived cold and tired at the end of a particularly trying day. We had been drinking caffeinated tea and eating sugary cakes at the homes of older Jews since early morning, and we cringed at the idea of having to force our way through the frosting of one more Entenmann’s. What a surprise, then, when we entered Sorell’s house at the end of a beautiful country lane and inhaled the aroma of simmering chickpea soup! The meal she served us was an organic feast, with homemade bread, and herbs and vegetables picked fresh from her own garden.
Sorell and her husband, Nathan, had been living at Mohegan since the 1920s, shortly after they arrived in this country from their native Russia. Nathan was a garment worker who commuted each day to New York; Sorell was a dressmaker who worked at home. There, amid the pines, they and their neighbors had fashioned a rich Jewish cultural life with weekly study groups in Russian and Yiddish literature, a communal Passover seder, and an annual event to raise scholarship money for young people to study Yiddish each summer at Columbia. (I myself had been a recipient, the summer before I headed off for grad school.)
Sorell proved an amazingly energetic zamler. She had an old Dodge Dart, which she drove to pick up books all over Westchester County. She’d take them back to her house, and we’d come with a truck every three thousand volumes or so to transport them to Massachusetts. We became close friends in the course of these frequent visits. When we launched our annual summer program in Yiddish culture in 1984, we enlisted Sorell as one of our teachers, a position she held with distinction until she was in her late eighties. Her husband died shortly after our first meeting; she herself had a stroke several years back and is now confined to a wheelchair, living in her own apartment near her daughter on Long Island. But she retains every bit of her dignity and determination. As I write she is almost a hundred years old, and though her zamler days
Whap!—
“you rush over to him and ask him for his Yiddish books!”
Whap! Whap! Whap!
Stuart was aghast. “Mr. Berger, if you think I’m going to walk into a hospital and—”
“Why not? You’ll be doing these old Jews a favor! You’ll take a load off their chests! They can die easy, knowing someone will take care of their books after they’re gone!”
The strategy was unsettling at best, and it was some time before I could restore order and bring the discussion around to my original ifadmittedly less sensational plan of canvassing apartment buildings and hanging posters in Laundromats, synagogues, and senior centers. After the meeting, Stuart, Roger, and I stayed behind to clean up. When we finally made our way to elevator, Mr. Berger was waiting for us. He pushed the Lobby button with his walking stick.
“Do you want to know what the real problem is?” he asked as the elevator descended.
“The real problem is that people are dying today who never died before!”
With that he donned his straw hat, turned smartly on his white loafers, and tapping with his pearl-handled walking stick, proceeded calmly into the winter night.
Mr. Berger must have returned to Florida, because we never heard from him again. But notwithstanding his pessimism, the zamler network proved successful. More than two hundred people signed up, from Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard to Nome, Alaska. Where we could, we set up drop-off points: In El Paso, Texas, it was the Ave Maria Religious Store, where the proprietor, Jules Novick, advertised “Crucifixes, Wholesale and Retail” and set aside room in the back for Yiddish books.
For many of our zamlers, saving Yiddish books became their life. Sorell Skolnik, for example, was a resolute woman in her seventies who lived in the Mohegan Colony, a community of anarchists and other progressive Jews just north of Peekskill, New York. The first time we visited Sorell was in 1981. Pat Myerson, Fran Krasno, and I arrived cold and tired at the end of a particularly trying day. We had been drinking caffeinated tea and eating sugary cakes at the homes of older Jews since early morning, and we cringed at the idea of having to force our way through the frosting of one more Entenmann’s. What a surprise, then, when we entered Sorell’s house at the end of a beautiful country lane and inhaled the aroma of simmering chickpea soup! The meal she served us was an organic feast, with homemade bread, and herbs and vegetables picked fresh from her own garden.
Sorell and her husband, Nathan, had been living at Mohegan since the 1920s, shortly after they arrived in this country from their native Russia. Nathan was a garment worker who commuted each day to New York; Sorell was a dressmaker who worked at home. There, amid the pines, they and their neighbors had fashioned a rich Jewish cultural life with weekly study groups in Russian and Yiddish literature, a communal Passover seder, and an annual event to raise scholarship money for young people to study Yiddish each summer at Columbia. (I myself had been a recipient, the summer before I headed off for grad school.)
Sorell proved an amazingly energetic zamler. She had an old Dodge Dart, which she drove to pick up books all over Westchester County. She’d take them back to her house, and we’d come with a truck every three thousand volumes or so to transport them to Massachusetts. We became close friends in the course of these frequent visits. When we launched our annual summer program in Yiddish culture in 1984, we enlisted Sorell as one of our teachers, a position she held with distinction until she was in her late eighties. Her husband died shortly after our first meeting; she herself had a stroke several years back and is now confined to a wheelchair, living in her own apartment near her daughter on Long Island. But she retains every bit of her dignity and determination. As I write she is almost a hundred years old, and though her zamler days
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