Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky Read Free Book Online Page B

the end of the semester I loaded my now formidable personal library onto a U-Haul truck and headed south, where untold Yiddish books—and a very different sort of Yiddish education—awaited.

PART TWO
On the Road

5. A Ritual of Cultural Transmission
    Dear Mr. Lansky,
    I thank you for your interest in Yiddish books. I hope you are interested in Hebrew also as I have books in both languages to give away. I am a very old man and I am afraid that after I will be gone they may throw them in the trash. Please do help me out.
    Your Respectfully,
Norman Temmelman
    In late July of 1980, I emptied my bank account, packed my ruck-sack, rented a van, and set out on the road for the first time. My plan was to begin with Mr. Temmelman in Atlantic City, then make additional stops in Philadelphia and New York. I figured that if I left Amherst early enough, I could do it all in a single day.
    As I soon discovered, just scheduling such a trip was a workout. My knowledge of East Coast geography was imperfect, and when I phoned people to get directions and set a time for pickup, they were often so eager to talk, they wouldn’t let me off the phone.
    All except Mr. Temmelman. He, it turned out, didn’t have a phone.So I sent him a telegram letting him know when I’d arrive. On the appointed day I left Amherst early and made it to Atlantic City by noon. Mr. Temmelman’s address turned out to be a high-rise building for the Jewish elderly just off the boardwalk, a block from one of the city’s sprawling new casinos.
    I entered the lobby and was immediately approached by a very old man wearing a heavy, dark wool suit on this steaming summer day.
    “Mr. Lahnsky?” he asked in an unmistakable Yiddish accent.
    “Mr. Temmelman?”
    He smiled and shook my hand. “I’ve been waiting here in the lobby since seven this morning, I didn’t want I should miss you.” He took me firmly by the arm and led me up the elevator to his fifth-floor apartment. He lived in a single room. In one corner were a narrow bed and a metal nightstand piled with bottles of pills, in the other were a sink, a hot plate, and a kitchen table covered with stacks of bills and papers. The rest of the room was taken up with bookcases and cardboard boxes filled with hundreds of Yiddish and Hebrew books.
    Mr. Temmelman put a kettle on the hot plate and set out a bowl of sugar cubes and two glasses for tea.
    “Have you lived here long?” I asked.
    “Oh no, we had a regular house. But three years ago my wife,
olehasholem
(may she rest in peace), died, and I had to move here, for the elderly. I left the furniture behind, but the books I brought with me.” He was eighty-seven years old, he told me, and was about to leave on a trip to visit relatives in Israel. At his age he might not return, and he wanted to make sure his books were taken care of before he left.
    I had figured book collection meant picking up boxes, carrying them out to the truck, and
fartig,
you’re done and it’s time to move on to the next stop. Instead, Mr. Temmelman insisted I join him at the kitchen table, where, for what seemed like hours, we sipped tea, sucked on sugarcubes, and talked. When it came time to part with his books, his eyes welled with tears as he began handing them to me, one volume at a time.
    “This book,” he recalled, pulling a handsome volume of Zishe Landau’s
Lider (Poems)
from a cardboard box, “this book I bought in 1937. It had just come out, it was a very important book, my wife and I we went without lunch for a week we should be able to afford it. And
this
book,” he said, holding aloft a yellowed copy of
Ven Yash iz geforn (When Yash Set Forth),
Jacob Glatstein’s powerful account of his travels in interwar Europe, “have you read this book?”
    “Well, no, actually I haven’t,” I conceded.
    “In that case, I want you should sit down right now and read this book.”
    It was a long afternoon. Every book he handed me had its story. This wasn’t at all what I