Leaves Bleter Part 1 Transcript

Bleter fun geshikhte (Leaves of History): The Yiddish Libraries of the Jewish Left in Toronto by Miriam Borden PART 1: One Man’s Trash Jess Pollock: “My name is Jess Pollack. We were in school together, of course—we both did our Masters in Yiddish. I think you texted me something that was like, ‘Hey Jess, the Winchevsky Centre has a few boxes of Yiddish books that they don’t know what to do with, do you wanna help me go through them,” and I was thinking, okay, y’know, what kind of books are we talking here, but I don’t think anyone really knew…We just sort of showed up, and found that massive closet of all the books.” The Morris Winchevsky Centre is a white brick building from the 1950s. Jess Pollock: “I think—they had the name written in Yiddish on the front right? It was quite fitting for what we were doing, really.” It’s on Cranbrooke Avenue, near the intersection of Bathurst Street and Lawrence Avenue in midtown Toronto. Around the corner, there’s a small synagogue that doubles as a beys midresh, a house of Jewish study. On another corner, a yeshiva for boys, and not far away, one for girls. It’s one of the most densely Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Toronto today, the heart of a thriving Haredi community. So it’s somewhat of an odd place to find the headquarters of an ardently secular leftist Jewish organization. But once, before the Haredim settled there, the Winchevsky Centre was just one of several secular Jewish institutions in the area, each housed in mid-century modern buildings that were new when they were built, contracted specially for these organizations. A couple blocks from the Winchevsky Centre, there had been the Jewish Public Library. Just one block away, there was the Workmen’s Circle building, which also had its name on the front in Yiddish letters, like the Winchevsky Centre. But today, the secular Jewish landscape exists only in memory. The library building is now a church. The Workmen’s Circle building was sold last year, in December 2019. The Orthodox yeshiva next door purchased it. They’re expanding, while the Yiddish spaces in the city are shrinking. I asked Jess what she knew about the Winchevsky Centre before we showed up one day. Jess Pollock: “I mean, I didn’t know much. I had heard of them…y’know, all things Jewish left. I knew it was still active, but I knew it was bigger back in the day.” I knew about as much as Jess did. And maybe one more thing: my grandparents, who spoke Yiddish and were fairly apolitical people, referred to groups like this as, simply, linkes, Lefties. In my house it wasn’t meant as a compliment. © Miriam Borden 2020 Jess was the first person to go through the boxes with me. Jess Pollock: “Well they were all very different, obviously, in terms of content, but also the condition that they were in, how old they were…You could tell some had maybe been opened and read a couple times, and some had obviously been passed around from student to student or household to household. And I loved that some of them actually had the old library cards in them, and you could see who took them out, when—they had all the dates and everything.” Other books were in far worse condition. Some had peeling spines, others had tattered covers, others had titles so faded that you had to actually open the book to find out what it was. And sometimes when you did that, the book just came apart. Some of the books were more than one hundred years old. As you picked them up and put them back down I realized that the old, parched leather binding came off like dust on my hands. And then there was the actual dust. Jess Pollock: “Oh my gosh, the dust…yeah, I—couldn’t wash it off, really! [laughing]” As we unpacked box after box, we found an incredible range of material. There were the great works of Yiddish literature, books by Sholem Aleichem, Y.L. Peretz, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Joseph Opatoshu, H. Leyvik. There were classic literary masterpieces and literature for the popular market. There were histories of the world and histories of the Jews. There were books on popular science, written for a general audience. There were Yiddish translations of Henryk Ibsen, Romain Rolland, Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, Upton Sinclair, Homer’s The Odyssey. There were plays; poetry; textbooks for children; memoirs, biographies. Some of these had a specific political bent. Jess Pollock: “I think we had what, twenty copies of Stalin’s biography? [laughing] It was— every time I’d open a box it’d be—oh, there’s another—y’know, another Stalin.” In addition to the biographies of Stalin, there about a dozen copies of writings by Lenin, and another dozen copies of Das Kapital in Yiddish. Some books had inscriptions on the inside covers; these were legible to varying degrees. Jess Pollock: “It was always worth the headache to trying to read the handwriting…maybe not [laughing] maybe not always worth it, but it was uh—yeah, I loved the personalized notes; it just really gave you a feel of y’know, who and what these books were there for.” We could not wrap our heads around the idea that books that were once so precious that they contained personal inscriptions were now disintegrating in a storage closet. They pointed to a lost © Miriam Borden 2020 world of Yiddish books in Toronto. And we just kept imagining, what was that world like, and then the bigger question was, what do we do with these books now? Rachel Epstein was the one who first reached out to me about the books. I asked her how she discovered them in the first place. Rachel Epstein: “Well, I became the Executive Director in 2017, and as you can imagine, this is an organization with a very long history, and the previous executive director, as she says, was very much a ‘paper person’…plus, this is an organization that existed for most of its history without computers, right, so we have a lot of paper files and a lot of paper in the office. And so part of my mission was to try and deal with some of this paper. And then in our building we have a meeting hall, and there’s a storage closet that goes off of the meeting hall, and the person who helps us with the building said, ‘Well, ya know, there’s a whole bunch of Yiddish books’—or ‘there’s a bunch of books,’ I’m not even sure he knew they were Yiddish books—‘in the back there that you might want to take a look at. And so, it was like, you open the closet doors and there was some boxes, and I calculated, ‘cause I remember when I first emailed you—I said, ‘Hey Miriam, we have maybe ten or fifteen boxes of Yiddish books, would you be interested in them,’ and you wrote back I think quite quickly and said yes. And what I had been told was that, we also have like, a library in our office, and I had been told that the books — the Yiddish books — that we had had been gone through, and that the ones that we thought were te most interesting ones we had kept in the office, and the ones that were in the boxes in the closet were the not so interesting ones.” As I would soon discover, the boxes in the closet were interesting, very. And I wasn’t the only ones who thought so. Rachel Epstein: “There were novels, there was poetry, there was theory, there was geography, there was all kinds of books. And so as you—all of you—became more interested in it, I think it just—just became really interesting. And then it turned into this project, that was really— amazing.” The project Rachel is referring to is the cataloguing. I wrote to a handful of people I knew who could help me with this. Some showed up with laptops, others with pen and paper. We each grabbed a box and found some space at a table, or on the floor, and began to unpack the books inside. For each book, we recorded the basic information: title, author, publisher, and date and place of publication. We also recorded anything notable, like library stamps, inscriptions, and notes about the condition of the book. Rachel Epstein: “My first thought was, What am I gonna do with all these books? Like — [laughing] So I have very, very, very fond memories of you all gathered—and there was probably five, six, seven of you at some points—in the hall, surrounded by books, going through them one by one…And they all kinda contained in them their history. And there was such a range of kinds of books. For some reason, the one that stands out in my mind is Bambi, I don’t know why. It © Miriam Borden 2020 was like, oh wow, who would have ever thought that someone would translate Bambi into Yiddish.” Bambi is actually a perfect example of a book that would be translated into Yiddish. It was published in German in 1923 by Felix Salten, an Austrian author and literary critic living in Vienna. The full title is Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde, or Bambi: A Life in the Woods.

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