The Weekend Not in Scotland, Part III

I've already posted two installments of the not-in-Scotland October weekend without describing the trip's core mission:  attending the "Community Open House" of the National Yiddish Book Center, following a postcard invitation and the cancellation of our Scotland plans.   Aplologies.  Over six or seven weeks, this task has languished, stopping up the flow of at least four potential posts. 

The main room of extra copies of rescued
Yiddish books at the Center -- waiting for homes

Anyway, the Yiddish Book Center's mission -- propelling Yiddish into present and future generations -- is clear as a bell and visibly passionate, even before you cross its threshold in that apple orchard up in Amherst.  Before going through the front door, you cross a little bridge. The bridge is labelled "Brik."  Instantly I'm reminded of the song I learned so many years ago, "Dortn dortn," whose first line has the words, "ibern vasserl, ibern brik"; over the stream, over the bridge.  Here's a word to keep, before you even get inside.

I love this place for bringing all this Yiddish back to me from long-term storage.  The old books on the rows of shelves, extra copies waiting to be bought and read, are a perfect physical analog to the dormant vocabulary in my head waking up and getting exercised. And all brought back from a time I looked like the young romantics here, except perhaps for the purple hair.

Can you make out the "shrekliche" disaster 
reported on here? No peeking on the bottom!

While I've earned my special affinity by virtue of courses taken decades ago,  the Center also tries very hard to draw in those who don't speak the language a bit.  There are exhibits tucked in among the books; an exhibit of great Jewish moments in popular films and TV shows; front pages of the Yiddish press on historical news days, with translated headlines; old Yiddish linotype machines and their histories; stories behind the translations of great works; pictures and old home movies of an ethnomusicologist's travels through Eastern Europe.    There's also the huge original crate, pried opened with (replaced) books spilling out in a prominent place on the floor, which was sent from the evaporating Jewish community of Zimbabwe.

Who knew? 

There's a sandbox of sorts for playing with Yiddish; a table set with labeled objects and a Yiddish menu.  A phone with recorded phrases to converse with. There's also shelves of good Jewish picture books for children, in English, and comfortable space to read them in.

Exhibits educate the Yiddish deprived.

I love this place for transplanting Yiddish into progressive New England, a place whose trees and fields might resemble the Galicia of my grandparents, but whose sensibility is so modern and world-embracing.   As Yiddish was once, too. A language too rich to starve in ossified Hasidic enclaves, the only place it's natively spoken now.

Once inside, a Yiddish, entre-nous (tsvishn unz)  sense of humor permeates the place along with its eagerness to teach; one of the rest rooms is labeled Vu Der Kaiser Gait Alayn.*

Yiddishist-in-training giving a tour beside
the crate of books from Zimbabwe.

I spend time reading the spines and sometimes even the contents of the shelves, and read the posters and understand a good deal of the song sheets and film clips, even without the subtitles.

I love this place for  memorializing its poets and playwrights on slate squares, in Yiddish and English, over engravings of leaves, among the outside plantings.

The Writer's Garden

English-to-Yiddish is in the works

Beyond the main room of books, there's an auditorium where Dr. Harry Bochner and Professor  Solon Beinfeld, sixty- or seventy-something editors of the new Comprehensive Yiddish-to-English Dictionary, are being interviewed on stage by young Josh Lambert, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and visiting English Professor at nearby U  Mass.  The dictionary, the first since Uriel Weinreich compiled his back in 1968, has just been published.  These philologists are describing how it differs from its predecessor.  For starters, it has 50 percent more words.  The editors got a great leg up on their project through the efforts of a new Yiddish-French dictionary, whose authors Yitskhok Niborski and Bernard Vaisbrot  created the large corpus of Yiddish words. They say it's also easier to use, without all the cryptic abbreviations.

This volume also includes words Weinreich simply didn't like; his dictionary is famous, for example, for leaving out the dirty words and even "tuchis," one of the best-remembered Yiddish words that ever lived.  It also includes words with the German-type spellings that were favored by socialists.  Adamant secularists, they didn't want speakers to have to refer back to their religious educations to know the original vowel-free spellings of Hebrew words, which keep their original forms when passing into Yiddish.

Linotype machine

The Forward newspaper put up some of the funding for the verterbuch, with the understanding that this lexicon would be used to help readers understand their Yiddish online edition. Some also came from the University of Indiana, whose press is the official publisher. 

The day proceeds with campus tours, including descent into the climate-controlled archive in the basement.  Oddly, they tell us that everything to be digitized is schlepped to Israel for this process and then schlepped back.  And Hebrew-character OCR and indexing, performed pro bono by Assaf Urieli, a computational linguist in the French Pyrenees, will ultimately render the Center's whole collection of books searchable online.

The day ends with a Q and A with Aaron Lansky in the bigger auditorium, followed by a great performance by klezmer duo Debbie Strauss on violin and accordion and Jeff Warschauer on guitar and mandolin. They don't do the Yiddish standards, but gems I've never heard before.

Aaron Lansky

On the way out I buy, for eight dollars apiece, part II of Sholem Aleichem's wonderful Motel, Peysi the Cantor's Son in the original, a Workmen's Circle Yiddish children's textbook from the sixties, and a book of poems in Yiddish and Hebrew. I also buy a copy of the dictionary, just to show support.  Did they know my Rutgers teacher, writer Wolf Younin?, I ask, while they sign the book. Dr. Bochner says he had heard of him.  Later that evening, in downtown Amherst, we bump into him with friends at Moti's, the local middle eastern restaurant. We try to cozy up, even peripherally, with the few families who constitute the Yiddish pillars of Boston. 

*    "Where the Kaiser goes alone." 

The Weekend Not in Scotland Part II

As noted previously, my last-minute Hotwire booking gamble landed us at the Springfield, Mass. Sheraton, next door to the Marriott, and extremely convenient to Route 91. This interstate parallels the Connecticut River up through what the guidebooks call the Pioneer Valley; that part of western Mass. east of the Berkshires, two hours yet from Boston, and full of college students.  With this young, transient population in mind, the signs all up and down 91 beg drivers to ride with a designated non-drinker.

The college towns of Amherst, Holyoke, and Northampton are adorable, in October full of mums and hosta plantings, memorials to famous local long-dead poets, bicycles and cars with reassuringly politically blue-ish bumper stickers, and book stores dispaying similarly inclined, local-author books.  Musicians play at the entrances to their mews, pedestrians wait at every ADA-compliant traffic light. Their storefronts trade fairly in hemp clothes, crafts, body lotions and bubble tea within the solid, ornate, red brick and granite buildings raised around the turn of the previous century by more staid,  carnivorous and vocationally tangible Yankees.

Like I said, we didn't stay in any of these towns. We stayed in Springfield, where our first sight upon parking near the old town center was the annual Zombie Walk. Sporting grievous wounds, young zombies filled the green between city hall and steepled church, where  a band was playing the boomer music that had first drawn our attention. The walk raised funds for good causes, but the sight of all these people applying stage makeup and latex appliances to appear convincingly stabbed, shot, and diseased just creeped me out.  It did turn kind of amusing, though, when a newly married or about-to-be-married couple appeared on the steps of city hall with their wedding party for photographs, and the zombies proceeded to zombie-walk across the street and pose with them.  The new couple took it in good humor.

Springfield has at least two tourist attractions: the Basketball Hall of Fame and the Dr. Seuss sculpture

garden (All his best-beloved characters are there, from Horton to Who, life-size or more, in bronze. So is a bronze Theodore Geisel himself.)  Aside from that, the town is just another largely abandoned  shell of its former industrial, industrious Yankee self. Its downtown has ornate red brick buildings of another era, just like Amherst, but none of the life or refinement.  Where in famously lesbian-friendly Northampton  the old corner banks are given over to jewelry and design galleries, in Springfield they tend to house social service agencies if they're occupied at all.  

At night we walked a few blocks to a place the hotel receptionist assured us was teeming with restaurants.  There was hardly anyone else on the street. The cars that raced down Main Street blared in-your-face, thumping rap lyrics in a vibe diametrically opposed to Northampton's.  We did find the recommended (and expensive) restaurant, though -- 350 Grill on Worthington Street, next to a strip club  --  and the food was good.  We ordered tapas, which were generous.  The waitress was oddly even more generous -- she comped us our wine and dessert.  She assured us that management knew.  

Then there's the breakfast we caught the next morning in the Esselon Cafe, just off 91 in Amherst en route to the National Yiddish Book Center.  A free-standing building with a weatherproofed outdoor area, its clientele's bicycles artfully bolted standing on their hind wheels, it looked promising. We weren't disappointed; in fact, it was obviously THE place the weekending Upper West Side was taking its student children to for brunch. We got there at 10:20, in the nick of time to order and take our number back to a waiting table. Fifteen minutes later the line snaked all around the room and out the door. 

Esselon has coffees and lattes from around the world, colorfully chalked on the wall-sized blackboard behind

the busy barristas.  Vegan and gluten-free options, of course.  A shining, patterned, copper-colored ceiling and gleaming wooden tables, caned and beaded chairs.  Singles at laptops, opened to urban plans and sound files. Couples with Sunday Times in hand. Tow-headed toddlers wearing Red Sox caps, carried on hip. 

Just ahead of us in line, a young man with a neat beard and bright eyes wore a baseball cap with a "Jewish Farming" logo.  "This is the place," he said, congratulating us on locating the independent, beating heart of the visiting parent brunch scene. "And this," he said, pointing to the muffin with what looked like pumpkin seeds on top, "is the muffin." We struck up an immediate conversation, triangulating our eco-contacts until we overlapped on some of our kids' nature camp sites and nature staff personalities.

When our $13 breakfasts came they filled the plates like charming little dioramas; the fresh eggs plumply snuggled in two concentrated bulls-eyes against the avocado-topped salad, the multi-multi-grain bread toasted in two biscotti-shaped slices, the pancakes and berries generous, the yoghurt dressing in its little stainless steel pitcher and the coffee in its logoed white mug perfect.  We'd lost the head start on our pilgrimage, but we didn't care. 

The Weekend Not in Scotland

So we were supposed to go to Scotland.  Why Scotland?  It's never been high on my bucket list.  What do I know from Scotland?  I like bagpipes.  I liked Brigadoon.  I liked Nova Scotia, which means "New Scotland," and where descendants of the original Scotsmen still play bagpipes. I like Pendleton wool plaid.

On the other hand, I hated Braveheart. And for sure, I have no use for Mel Gibson, although I imagine he has no real claim on Scotland.  No, the real reason we picked Scotland was that we wanted to go somewhere, we hadn't done any particular research or planning, and our daughter, who had been there not long before, said that Scotland was "magic."   Our neice, who had spent a semester at Edinburgh, was equally encouraging.  And I figured I had all these other years with which to check off places, at least the high ones, on my bucket list.

I'm a bit less sure about that last part now, because it turns out I didn't go to Scotland; instead, I developed a very painful knee a few weeks before the trip and hobbled around on crutches for a while, convinced I had torn cartiliage and needed arthoscopic surgery.  Turns out I probably don't need surgery now -- just NSAIDs and physical therapy -- but I cancelled the trip to Scotland.

Instead, as a consolation prize, we took up the invitation of a postcard we'd gotten just this past week, to the Community Open House of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.  A mailing with so little notice that it couldn't possibly have drawn anyone from as far away as New Jersey, unless those people just happened to have cancelled other plans for that week.

Now the National Yiddish Book Center was a place on my bucket list, and cheaper to reach than most -- just about three and a half hours away by car.  So I fired up the old seach engine to find the nearest hotel with at least a couple stars that we could stay in for under $130.  It being peak foliage season, that turned out to be the Springfield Sheraton. That's where I'm blogging from tonight, after a beautiful autumn day at the center, which sits in an apple orchard next door to Hampshire College.

Built in 1997, I think, the architecture of the National Yiddish Book Center evokes the low wooden roof peaks of a shtetl.  But the sensibility, while thoroughly Jewish, is also thoroughly northeastern liberal artsy.  The interior is light and airy, the buildings that give an appearance of forming a village are really all interconnected, and the rescued Yiddish books -- the extra copies that you can buy -- sit in a huge library space with the light and colored banners and light-colored Danish modern woods and staircases that bring to mind the late-model children's science museums you take the kids to on vacation in New England.

For those who don't know, the National Yiddish Book Center is the brainchild and life's work of Aaron Lansky, who describes its founding in the wonderfully written Outwitting History.  Go. Get. Download. Read. It tells the story of a 23-year-old grad student who, upon realizing a serious shortage of Yiddish books with which to study for his advanced degree, puts out a call for local Jews to call him before dumping or abandoning their Yiddish libraries.  And how this leads to whole apartment buildings full of Jews entrusting to him the books their children cannot understand or appreciate, and how he has to sit down to a glass of tea, cake and conversation with most of them, and how it eventually leads to a network of dedicated collectors and the amassing of 12 times the Yiddish books that anyone thought were ever in existence, from NYC, and then from Boston, and eventually Buenos Aires, and Zimbabwe, and azoy vayter (etc.)

To avoid a) bringing his parents' house down under the weight of so many books and b) the infighting among Yiddishist academics that prevailed in New York City, Lansky eventually relocates his collecting enterprise to bucolic Amherst, where his undergrad alma mater, Hampshire College, sells him the apple orchard parcel of campus on which the center gets built.

Lansky, who I've tremendously enjoyed reading and also heard once or twice in person at NJ venues, has come to share this mission with a couple generations of new Yiddishists by now, as well as the older generations that sent him or called up his dedicated zamlers to give their books a home or rescue others  from dumpsters.  Steven Speilberg and others have donated the funds to digitize a large percentage of the works and make them available over the web, so that now anyone can make a page or a whole story of Sholem Aleichem or hundreds of other Yiddish writers come out of their very own printers, in Yiddish, on regular printer paper.  20 years ago, this took a trip to a specialized library, to borrow or just read there a book too old and delicate to subject to a copier glass.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I can make up for weeks of not blogging with this one goldene weekend, so I'm going to see if I can post this with my mouseless iPad before ikh gey shlufn, and save the rest for later.