Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  At ten to eleven they let in the audience. They entered talking. Roger stood by a Grecian urn, handing out Yiddish Book Center brochures, while I, still fiddling with wires on the stage, was fending off a widening circle of well-wishers.

  “Mr. Lansky? Mr. Lansky? I have books for you back in Canarsie. When can you come get them?”

  “Excuse me, young man, maybe you have Jewish books in large print?”

  “Yungerman, yoo-hoo yungerman, I come from Cleveland, I read about you in Hadassah.”

  “Read, shmead, what does he care what you read? Mr. Lansky, do you know who I am? I’m Mrs. Simkin, I’m a member . . .”

  The din had grown deafening when, out of the corner of my eye, I spied a tall, tanned, vigorous man in his seventies striding from the wings and heading straight for me.

  “Which one of you is Lansky?” he demanded of the milling crowd— a foolish question, I thought, since I was the only one in the circle under seventy. “I’m Towers,” he announced, pumping my arm up and down, “Bob Towers. Welcome to the Concord. Now let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk business before you go on.”

  Wearing a brightly colored jogging suit, with a heavy gold chain around his neck, exuding health and good cheer, Mr. Towers led me past the throng to a small, curtained area at the side of the stage.

  “Okay, first things first,” he said with no further introduction. “How much did it cost you to get here?”

  I was scheduled to speak in five minutes and would have preferred to spend the time reviewing my notes, not discussing pecuniary details. “Actually, we drove here,” I said, “so it didn’t cost very much.”

  “Never mind!” he boomed. “When Bob Towers invites a guest, Bob Towers pays for him to get here. You know the Exxon station at the top of the hill?”

  “Uh, no, not exactly, it was pretty dark when we arrived.”

  “Dark, shmark, you may not know the Exxon station, but one phone call from me and that Exxon station will know you! You pull in there and tell ‘em Bob Towers sent you. They’ll fill you right up to the top— premium, high test, the best—whatever you want.”

  My car, a diminutive Honda Civic wagon, had a ten-gallon gas tank and was still half full, but I managed some small expression of gratitude as my fingers anxiously leafed through the folded notes in my pocket.

  “No, no, don’t thank me,” said Mr. Towers. “After all, you’re the speaker. You’re the star. You call the shots around here. Now tell me, how much do want for this performance?”

  “Performance?”

  “That’s right, no need to be shy. I’ve been in this business more than thirty years, I’ve seen it all. Now, how much is it gonna be?”

  I had received honoraria before, but the directness of the question, three minutes before I was scheduled to speak, caught me off guard. Before I could respond Mr. Towers had pulled a five-inch wad of cash from his pocket and was peeling off bills: “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty . . . “ He went on to $65. “That’ll do for now,” he said, folding the bills and deftly stuffing them into my jacket pocket. “We’ll talk again after the show.”

  The “show” was drawing nigh—two minutes to go—but Bob Towers wasn’t through yet.

  “Okay, how long are you planning to speak for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, probably about an hour, then time for questions—”

  “An hour? An hour? Kid, you’re new to this business; you don’t have the benefit of my thirty-plus years of experience. Take it from me, no one speaks for an hour. Let’s face it, we’ve got old people out there, their plumbing’s not what it used to be, it doesn’t matter what’s happening on stage, they can only sit so long before they’ve got to get up and scram—straight to the john. I’ve seen it happen to the best of them. They got up on Abba Eban. They got up on Bella Abzug. And let me assure you, young man, they’re gonna get up on you too if you try to speak for an hour. Remember what I’m telling you, keep it short, short is golden, short is beautiful. Okay, let’s go!”

  And with that he pushed me out of the wings and onto the stage. Not counting the Greek goddesses, there were about three hundred people in the room, and they were definitely not young. While I squinted into the spotlights, Bob Towers was already at the stand-up microphone (there was no podium), launching into his introduction:

  “Three weeks ago,” he thundered, enunciating every word like a boxing announcer at Madison Square Garden, “three weeks ago, I read an article in the New York Times. It was an article about a young man. A young man who knows Yiddish. The mame loshn!” At this first Yiddish utterance the audience was already laughing. Despite his admonition to me to be brief, his introduction went on for fifteen minutes. He covered the Old Country, Second Avenue, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Nobel Prize, and a rousing pronouncement that “Yiddish will not be consigned to oblivion!” before finally coming back around to me. “When I read the story in the Times, I decided to get in touch with this young man and bring him here to you. He was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, known to the history books as a famous whaling town, and as we say in Yiddish, Fun vanen kumt a yid? How does it happen that a boy from New Bedford, still young, still wet behind the ears, should become so enthused about Yiddish? Let’s let him tell us himself. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Aaron Lansky!”

  As I walked toward the microphone, Bob Towers reached out with another bone-crushing handshake, pulled me close, and whispered into my ear, “Go ahead, kid, knock ‘em dead!”

  Given the age of the audience, I was afraid to take his charge too literally. I lowered the microphone to my own height, looked out at the audience, and offered a tentative “Sholem aleykhem.”

  “Aleykhem sholem!” thundered the crowd in the proper Yiddish response.

  “Un ver redt a Yidish vort?” I continued in Yiddish. (“Who here speaks Yiddish?”)

  “Vu den? (What else?)” came the response, and already I had my first round of applause. This was clearly a different audience—and a different pacing—than I was used to. I spoke for forty-five minutes, showing slides and telling about my adventures on the road. I told about saving books from basements and Dumpsters, I told a lot of funny stories, but I also spoke seriously about historical continuity and cultural preservation, about the need to transcend nostalgia and lachrymose fixations and develop a practical program to convey historical consciousness to the next generation. I ended, of course, with an appeal for the Yiddish Book Center.

  The audience loved it. Before the applause could die down Bob Towers bounded onto the stage and grabbed the microphone from my hand. “Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen!” he yelled, hugging me to his side like a bar mitzvah boy. “Ladies and gentlemen, Aaron Lansky!”

  The crowd was going wild, Towers waving them on with his right hand while his left hand held me tight, my face pressed sideways against his nylon jogging suit. And then, when the applause finally subsided, he released me and stepped to the front of the stage.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been in this game we call show business for more than thirty years. Thirty years. I’ve seen the best of them, I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go. And I want to tell you that never—never—in all that time have I seen a performance like this one. No, not since a young man named Cha-im Weiz-mann spoke from this very stage here in the Cotillion Room. This is the real thing. This is culture. This is an undiscovered talent.” He paused to catch his breath. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve known you for a long time now, and I don’t mind telling you—this young man just knocked me on my arse!”

  Again the crowd was clapping, louder and louder, and then some of them were on their feet. I thought it was a standing ovation until, one by one, they turned around and began pushing one another in a mad dash for the door. Bob Towers was right. These were old people; they had to go to the bathroom.

  The lunch that followed my lecture almost defied description. There were five full courses, each with a half dozen selections. When I hesitated in choos
ing my “cold fish” appetizer—I couldn’t decide between the pickled herring, smoked herring, matjes herring, herring in cream sauce, gefilte fish with horseradish, smoked sable, and pickled white-fish in aspic—the woman next to me jumped in and ordered for me. “He’ll have one of everything,” she instructed the waiter, “and while you’re at it you can bring two more plates of gefilte fish for the table.” I was just digging into my second dessert, stewed prune compote topped with six inches of whipped cream, when the voice of Bob Towers came bellowing over the PA.

  “Today, three hundred people were in the Cotillion Room for a lecture by a certain young man,” he informed the assembled diners, “and two thousand and three hundred others were cheated. Cheated! I don’t mind telling you: this young man was squandered here at the Concord this morning.”

  As though to make amends, after lunch Mr. Towers packed me and Roger into his Cadillac Eldorado and took us to see Murray Posner, the owner of a nearby resort. I thought I was there to ask Mr. Posner for a contribution; he thought he was interviewing me for a new act.

  “Where else have you performed?” Murray asked me from behind a copy of Variety.

  “Well, I don’t perform, exactly,” I answered, “but I have spoken at synagogues, and I lecture from time to time at colleges and universities—”

  “Universities?” Murray sputtered. “Did he say universities? Worst audience in the world. I spoke at a university once. They invited me to speak about the hotel industry. Believe me, I’ve got a pretty good routine on this, I’ve used it many times before, and I know where I’m supposed to get reactions: chuckles, laughs, applause. Son of a bitch, I stand up there and it’s a grim audience! All these young people in jeans and sneakers. I opened it up for questions. These bastards are dead serious—they’re taking notes! I realized later, they weren’t an audience, they were students. They take notes and get grades. They’re not there to laugh. Who wants to perform for an audience like that?”

  “Look, Murray,” said Mr. Towers, “he didn’t come here to listen to your sob stories. Give him a chance to talk.”

  “Bob, will you shut up. I know you’re in pain, but I’m conducting this interview. Let me do it my way. Okay, Lansky, you’re on, tell me some stories.”

  I took a deep breath and began describing some of the collection adventures I had related that morning at the Concord, in hopes they would underscore the urgency of collecting books and the need for stable funding.

  “Tell him the Philadelphia story!” shouted Towers, asking for a particular tale from the morning’s repertoire.

  “The Philadelphia Story?” said Murray. “Wait a minute, wait a minute . . . Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Wasn’t Jimmy Stewart in that one too? I thought so. Forget The Philadelphia Story, I already saw the movie. What else you got?”

  I earnestly related story after story, hoping to convince Murray of the importance of the cause. When I finished, rather than pulling out his checkbook and making a contribution, he turned to Roger, whom he assumed was my writer, and offered a long list of suggestions. “Overall it’s great material,” he said. “I like the realism, the detail, but you’re going to have to play it up more for our audience. You know, a little flourish, a little polish, a little shmaltz. Take that Bronx routine for example: Your timing’s good, but maybe you could introduce another character to . . .”

  I did my best to set things straight, but I don’t think he or Bob Towers ever really understood. As we were leaving, Murray followed us to the door. “I have just one more question for you,” he called after me, “What’s all this about collecting Yiddish books? I mean, the stories are good, it’s definitely a new act—but can’t you find an easier way to get your material?”

  It was quiet when we got back to the Concord. The couches outside the dining room were full of snoring guests too ongeshtupt from lunch to make it back to their rooms for an afternoon nap. Presumably when they awoke four hours later they would be first in line for dinner.

  For our part, we decided to head down to the health club to work off our lunch before starting for home. This was the Borscht Belt idea of exercise: one weight machine, two stationary bicycles, and four cavernous shvitz baths: two steam and two sauna.

  The particular steam bath we chose was crowded, so we had to settle for seats on the lower bench. Above us, on the much hotter upper bench, a tough old Jew with a big smile and a great overhanging belly sat stark naked, presiding over an endless round robin of off-color Jewish jokes, most of them about the sex lives of Yiddish-speaking Jews in their eighties. Before each one, the unclothed impresario would look at me and Roger and a few other younger men on the lower bench and proclaim, “Now, you young fellas aren’t gonna understand this one.” Every time the door opened and a new person entered, someone would yell, “Er iz an antisemit, redt Yidish! (He’s an anti-Semite, speak Yiddish!)”

  At the end of the day, as the bellhop was loading my rucksack into the Honda, the Concord’s owner approached me. He wanted me to sign a contract to perform every Jewish holiday—six times a year. “You’re new, you’re refreshing!” he assured me. “No one else is doing this particular material.” I was flattered, but I also knew that if I spent my yonteyvim at the Concord I wouldn’t stay refreshing for long, so I politely declined, explaining that my real work was rescuing Yiddish books. The owner nodded, but before I drove away he called after me, “We’ll be in touch!”

  He was as good as his word. Every February for the next several years he called to invite me back for Pesakh. Each time I said no, and each time he responded, “No problem, I understand, you already have a booking for Pesakh.”

  Even if I had agreed, my show-business career would have been short-lived. In 1998 the Concord, like the other giants before it, closed its doors as a Jewish hotel. (It later reopened as a golf resort.) Still, I’m grateful to Bob Towers for the chance to speak there when I did. I went expecting to see Jews denigrating Yiddish, and instead I found them reveling in it: on stage, in the shvitz, at meals, in a thousand private jokes and conversations. They enjoyed dropping Yiddish words the way they enjoyed stuffing themselves with flunken and ptsha (jellied calves’ feet): It was a forbidden pleasure, a chance to come out of the closet, if only for a week, to be themselves in a mountain redoubt where there were no goyim to hear. True, the Concord shvitz was hardly the reading room of the Bodleian, and there’s a difference between laughing at Yiddish jokes and reading Yiddish books. Still, here among their own, these English-speaking Jews seemed to enjoy Yiddish a lot more than I expected. On the ride home I started thinking, What if those who proclaimed the death of Yiddish were wrong? What if the patrons of the Concord weren’t the only ones? What if all across America there were Jews who still held a closeted affection for Yiddish? All I had to do was figure out a way to reach them, and I just might stand a chance of signing up enough members to save the world’s Yiddish books after all.

  20. Kaddish

  If it took a certain optimism to think I might find support for Yiddish among the denizens of the Concord shvitz, at the home of Sam and Leah Ostroff the language remained as natural as breathing. Through the first half of the 1980s, as the pace of book collection quickened, Sam and Leah remained our staunchest allies. Every few weeks we made the pilgrimage to Sea Gate for a ten-course breakfast, followed by a busy day of zamlering. When I’d phone ahead to ask what we could bring, Sam always gave the same answer: “The holes for the bagels.”

  We weren’t the only ones to enjoy the Ostroffs’ hospitality. In the summer of 1983 a young New York Times reporter named Doug McGill was assigned to accompany me and Sharon on a day of book collecting in New York, and we agreed to begin with a 7:00 A.M. breakfast at the Ostroffs’ home. Poor Doug: twenty-nine years old, not Jewish, recently transplanted from Minnesota, he never knew what hit him. After welcoming him with kisses, the Ostroffs immediately launched into a heated discussion about his name. In Hebrew the word dog (or dag) means fish. “I just don’t understand,” Mrs. Ostroff
said, “such a nice-looking boy, he doesn’t look like a fish, why do they call him Dog?” Once we cleared up the confusion Doug tried to pull his notebook from his pocket in order to ask a few questions of his own, but the Ostroffs were aghast. “Oh no, mister,” said Sam, “a car doesn’t go without gasoline, a reporter doesn’t go without eating. First you’ll eat, then we’ll talk.”

  The Ostroffs led us into the living room, where they had laid out their usual repast, only this time it wasn’t just a meal, it was an ethnographic experience. Sam started from square one. “Now, Doug,” he explained, “this first dish, you probably don’t have it in Minnesota, it’s called lox, L-O-X. It comes in two kinds, Nova and regular, we bought both today, you should be able to try them. You eat it with this hard roll with the hole in the middle, that’s called a bagel. Some people like to shmear a little cream cheese first. Me, I’m a Litvak, that means I come from Lithuania, so I put on a little onion too—okay, Leah’s right, maybe a lot of onion—but you don’t have to if you don’t want to, as long as you take plenty of lox.”

  Doug was game, sampling everything from the matjes herring with onion to the cucumber, scallion, and radish salad with sour cream. But Mrs. Ostroff still wasn’t satisfied. When she cleared the table and saw there was a little food left on Doug’s plate, she shook her head and said in Yiddish, “It’s no wonder they call him Dog—he eats like a fish!”

  After breakfast Sam, Doug, Sharon, and I climbed into the van to begin the day’s rounds. Mrs. Ostroff stayed home to cook the next meal. Sam had phoned everyone the day before to let them know when we’d be coming, which gave them all ample time to prepare their own “real Jewish meal” in Doug’s honor. Surprisingly, they took his presence for granted: After all, they were handing over their Yiddish libraries, a lifetime of books, so why shouldn’t the Times send a reporter?