The Apostle Paul (the only apostle not to have known Jesus face to face) would boldly say to those he encountered, men and women seeking the Scriptures, "Do you seek a proof of Christ speaking in me?," knowing that since he had read the Word, the Word was now lodged inside him, even if he had not met the Author; that he had become the Book, the Word made flesh, through that little bit of the divine that the craft of reading allows to all those who seek to learn the secrets held by a page. This is the wisdom of the Essene sect, the devout people who gave us, so many centuries ago, the Dead Sea scrolls: "We know that the body is corruptible and the stuff of which it is made impermanent. But we also know that the soul [and I, the scrolls' future reader, will interject, "the book,"] is immortal and imperishable."
THE LIBRARY
AS SURVIVAL
"I lived off art, I lived off love, I never harmed a living soul. . . . Why then, Lord, Why do You reward me thus?"
Puccini, Tosca, Act II
Like the Dead Sea scrolls, like every book that has come down to us from the hands of distant readers, each of my books holds the history of its survival. From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
A few years ago, in a stand at the Berlin flea market, I found a thin black book bound in hard cloth covers that bore no inscription whatsoever. The title page, in fine Gothic lettering, declared it to be a Gebet-Ordnung fur den Jugendgottesdienst in derju.difich.en Gemeinde zu Berlin (Sabbath-Nachmittag) [Order of Prayer for Youth Service in the Jewish Community of Berlin (Sabbath- Evening)]. Among the prayers is included one "for our king, Wilhelm 11, Kaiser of the German Realm" and his "Empress and Queen Auguste-Victoria." This was the eighth edition, printed by Julius Gittenfeld in Berlin in 1908, and had been bought at the bookstore of C. Boas
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The German prayer book printed in Berlin in 1908.
Nachf. on Neue FriedrichstraBe 69, "at the corner of KlosterstraBe," a corner that no longer exists. There was no indication of the name of the owner.
A year before the book was printed, Germany had refused the armament limitations proposed by the Hague Peace Conference; a few months later, the expropriation law decreed by Reichskanzler and PreuBischer Ministerprasident Furst Bernhard von Bulow authorized further German settlements in Poland; in spite of hardly ever being used against Polish landowners, this law granted Germany early territorial rights that in turn, in June 1940, allowed the establishment of a concentration camp in Auschwitz. The original owner of the Gebet- Ordnung probably bought or was given the book when he was thirteen years old, the age at which he would have his bar mitzvah and be permitted to join in synagogue prayers. If he survived the First World War, he would have been thirty-eight on the birth of the Third Reich in 1933; if he stayed on in Berlin, it is likely that he was deported, like so many other Berlin Jews, to Poland.253 Perhaps he had time to give the prayer book to someone before being taken away; perhaps he hid it, or left it behind with other books he had collected.
After the Nazis began their looting and destruction of the Jewish libraries, the librarian in charge of the Sholem Aleichem Library in Biala Podlaska decided to save the books by carting away, day after day, as many as he and a colleague could manage, even though he believed that very soon "there would be no readers left." After two weeks the holdings had been moved to a secret attic, where they were discovered by the historian Tuvia Borzykowski long after the war ended. Writing about the librarian's action, Borzykowski remarked that it was carried out "without any consideration as to whether anyone would ever need the saved books":254 it was an act of rescuing memory per se. The universe, the ancient cabbalists believed, is not contingent on our reading it; only on the possibility of our reading it.
With the emblematic book-burning in a square on Unter den Linden, opposite the University of Berlin, on the evening of 10 May, 1933, books became a specific target of the Nazis. Less than five months after Hitler became chancellor, the new propaganda minister of the Reich, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, declared that the public burning of books by authors such as Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Freud, Zola, Proust, Gide, Helen Keller and H.G. Wells allowed "the soul of the German people again to express itself. These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new."255 The new era proscribed the sale or circulation of thousands of books, in either shops or libraries, as well as the publishing of new ones. Volumes commonly kept on sitting-room shelves because they were prestigious or entertaining became suddenly dangerous. Private holdings of the indexed books were prohibited; many books were confiscated and destroyed. Hundreds of Jewish libraries throughout Europe were burnt down, both personal collections and public treasure-houses. A Nazi correspondent gleefully reported the destruction of the famous library of the Lublin Yeshiva in 1939:
For us it was a matter of special pride to destroy the Talmudic Academy, which was known as the greatest in Poland. . . . We threw the huge talmudic library out of the building and carried the books to the market place, where we set fire to them. The fire lasted twenty hours. The Lublin Jews assembled around and wept bitterly, almost silencing us with their cries. We summoned the military band, and with joyful shouts the soldiers drowned out the sounds of the Jewish cries.256
At the same time, the Nazis decided to spare a number of books for commercial and archival purposes. In 1938 Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal Nazi theoreticians, proposed that Jewish collections, including both secular and religious literature, should be preserved in an institute set up to study "the Jewish question." Two years later, the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage was opened in Frankfurt am Main. To procure the necessary material, Hitler himself authorized Rosenberg to create a task force of expert German librarians, the notorious ERR, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.257 Among the confiscated collections incorporated to the institute were those of the rabbinical seminaries of Breslau and Vienna, the Hebraica and Judaica departments of the Frankfurt Municipal Library, the Collegio Rabbinico in Rome, the Societas Spinoziana in The Hague and the Spinoza Home in Rijnsburg, the Dutch publishing companies Querido, Pegazus and Fischer-Berman,258 the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Beth Maidrash Etz Hayim, the Israelitic seminary of Amsterdam, the Portuguese Israelitic seminary and the Rosenthaliana, Rabbi Moshe Pessah in Volos, the Strashun Library in Vilna (the grandson of the founder committed suicide when ordered to assist with the cataloguing), libraries in Hungary (a parallel institute on "the Jewish question" was set up in Budapest), libraries in Denmark and Norway and dozens of libraries in Poland (especially the great library of the Warsaw synagogue and of the Institute for Jewish Studies). From these vast hoards, Rosenberg's henchmen selected the books to be sent to his institute; all others were destroyed. In February 1943 the institute issued the following directives for the selection of library materiaclass="underline" "all writings which deal with the history, culture, and nature of Judaism, as well as books written by Jewish authors in languages other than Hebrew and Yiddish, must be shipped to Frankfurt." But "books in Hebrew script (Hebrew or Yiddish) of recent date, later than the year 1800, may be turned to pulp; this applies also to prayer books, MemorbUcher, and other religious works in the German language."259 Regarding the many Torah scrolls, it was suggested that "perhaps the leather can be put to use for bookbinding." Miraculously, my prayer book escaped.