Manhattan, NY – Shop That Speaks Yiddish Needs a Rich Man’s Help

Manhattan, NY – Every few months news seems to arrive of another nail in the coffin of Yiddish — the death of another poet or actress, the shuttering of another socialist or anarchist office, the failure of a century-old literary magazine to publish for yet another year.

Now the latest woeful news is that the only secular Yiddish bookstore in New York is losing its home on East 21st Street, the one spot where among the huddled, dusty shelves you could schmooze about Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer with a salesman who spoke the language.

Of course, the store, with flinty Yiddish contrarianism, has been selling its 55,000 books, new and used, from a space that isn’t exactly a store — the third floor of a nondescript office building. The shop also bears the decidedly uncatchy name of the nonprofit Central Yiddish Cultural Organization (CYCO, pronounced TSI-ko). The location and brand name do not exactly entice impulse shoppers breezing by.

Indeed, the store, founded in 1937, is open only by appointment on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, sometimes hinging on whether the director, Hy Wolfe, has his regular basketball game at the McBurney Y. Still, in three rooms of double-stacked shelves, it has Yiddish gems like a three-volume set of “The Origin of Species” by Darwin, stories by Maupassant, a 28-volume collection of Sholom Aleichem from 1910 and a private library of the actor Joseph Wiseman (Dr. No in the first James Bond film). There are also many of the 275 books CYCO published on its own, including novels by Singer and Chaim Grade (both writers are sold out).

“If we published 250 copies,” Mr. Wolfe lamented, “that was a best seller.”

The survival of Yiddish in America is an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand story. Yiddish, once the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, is undoubtedly moribund, with its last full-throated speakers, Holocaust survivors, now well into their 80s and 90s. (A smattering of their children speak it through sheer willpower whenever they can buttonhole a comprehending ear, but some, like this writer, grew up nagging parents to speak English and regrettably saw their first language wither.)

On the other hand, the language is booming among Hasidim, for whom it is a lingua franca, mushrooming so prolifically that by some estimates the ultra-Orthodox will form a majority of American Jews by century’s end.

Nonetheless, the tales that inspire heartbreak are those that certify the shrinking of the culture of Lower East Side immigrants. One reason CYCO must move by December is that its foundation patron and landlord, the Atran Center for Jewish Culture, is liquidating three floors, including the bookstore, and downsizing to a home PC. But another is that, with not many more than 50 sales appointments a year and occasional book events, the shop makes too little — $11,220 last year — to support its laughably cheap monthly rent of $550 and Mr. Wolfe’s annual $9,982 salary. He hasn’t paid himself since June.

Things have gotten so dire that Mr. Wolfe’s companion in the quixotic hunt for a new home is Shane Baker, a 41-year-old Episcopalian from Missouri who fell in love with Yiddish and leads a sister organization that stages folk-singing coffeehouses. (The Yiddish world may have more organizations than people to run them.) Mr. Baker is fighting to breathe life into the store because “a little part of New York dies if this bookstore goes away.”

By contrast, the 50-ish Mr. Wolfe was raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with Yiddish’s lilt and kvetch. “Everybody in Brownsville had a number on their arm and you spoke Yiddish,” he recalled. Earning his living as a weekend retailer, he has run the bookshop for 11 years out of an office crowded with postage scales and yellowed triple-carbon receipts. He does not despair. People still come by to browse — Yiddish students, Russian immigrants, even Hasidim — and they are the future.

Mr. Wolfe shamelessly admits that he is praying for a white knight to offer him free space. He wouldn’t object if that savior demanded his head in the deal.

“I’m the wrong person for this job,” Mr. Wolfe admitted. “They need someone who knows what he’s doing on a computer. I can’t type. I only know Yiddish literature.”

But no one is banging down the door for Mr. Wolfe’s job. And the writing is on the wall — or more precisely in the shelves — for wistful enterprises like his. In the stacks there is an eight-volume “lexicon” of biographies of hundreds of past Yiddish writers. If such a Who’s Who were compiled of current writers, it would be drastically smaller.

“There may be 50 today,” Mr. Wolfe said.