Too Many Books?

Alex Vadukul writes in the NY Times (archived) about a man who feels like a younger version of me, if I had been a yeshiva bokher:

For a young Jewish scholar and writer named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge.

Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside.

“I’m always reading,” Uminer, 31, said. “I’m reading to extract knowledge. Every book I own, I need. My library is my manual for life.”

He worked as a freelance Hebrew translator and used the apartment as the headquarters for his fledgling literary journal, Notarikon Review, hosting parties that gained a reputation among quarters of New York’s literary underclass. Striving writers drank beer among the teetering stacks while arguing over foreign affairs and Greek poetry.

The stacks kept rising as Uminer added his hauls from thrift shops, book dealers and eBay deliveries. “I don’t think of myself as a hoarder,” he said, “but I guess my building did.”

This past winter, he received a notice from building management. “You are violating a substantial obligation of your tenancy,” it began. “You are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books in the Premises.” […]

One afternoon last month, Uminer stood amid the leaning towers, savoring his unruly paradise while he still could. As klezmer music played from his phone, he ran his hand across the spines of “The Russian Theater after Stalin” and “The Kurdish Question in Iraq.” He tenderly held up a book of poems by Abraham Reisen, a Yiddish writer he was smitten with.

“Sure, maybe I’m a little bit different,” he said. “And I know my library might seem excessive to some. But it’s not as excessive as people might think. In a rabbinic household, no one would blink twice at a library like mine. Reading is part of my culture.” […]

Raised in a Hasidic enclave of Crown Heights, Mendel grew up speaking Yiddish with his grandparents, listening to the teachings of his bearded Lubavitcher rabbi uncles and attending troika dances in banquet halls. His father, a pious real estate broker named Isaac, relished studying the Torah with him. But the boy craved literature. At 12, he was reading Dostoyevsky.

In his teens, Uminer attended rabbinical seminary, where he embraced Talmudic study. Lessons began at 7 a.m. and ended with nights of vodka-fueled argument with the rabbis.

“My days were spent studying texts in Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish, and I sometimes went a whole year without seeing a woman’s face, but I was also disobedient and incorrigible,” he said. “I was always reading what I wanted to read, not only what they wanted me to read. But that’s where you assert yourself. Where you form your opinions. Where you make your own sense of the world.”

“If I form an opinion, and there are books saying the opposite, I need to read them all, to know if I’m justified,” he continued. “If I’m not convinced, I should let my conviction go.”

In his early 20s, as he grew engrossed in Ovid and Rousseau, he befriended writers at Caffe Reggio in Greenwich Village and found himself browsing more at the Strand than at the Judaica emporiums of south Brooklyn. One year before his ordination, he turned away from the path set out for him.

“It dawned on me I wasn’t as much of a true believer as I thought I was,” he said. “Maybe it upset my grandparents, but I decided I should just go do what I wanted to do, which was enter the modern liberal cultural society of New York. I didn’t want to be drunk on medieval piety anymore.” […]

After putting away his kipa, Uminer enrolled at Columbia University to study film and philosophy. Outside the classroom, he interned at Tablet magazine. After graduating at 27, he met a young woman from Paris. He soon ventured to her home city, where the romance came to an end.

“She kicked me out of her apartment, but I stayed in Paris until I spent my last dollar,” Uminer said. “I smoked Gitanes in the Marais. I got robbed in the subway. They had the best politics journals and literary magazines. Paris changed me.”

He spent hours at the book stands along the Seine. Reading journals like Nouvelle Revue Française and Connaissance des Arts, he found his vocation.

“These French journals had people making arguments in ways that really mattered,” he said. “So much of our writing here is about, ‘You must choose a lane.’ Theirs has a comfort with controversy, a precision in argument, a sense of historic consciousness, that we need more of.”

Back in New York, Uminer decided to start a publication of his own, Notarikon Review, an eclectic journal that will “publish people who don’t agree on everything,” he said. Some of the writers he has recruited are former social media adversaries. The debut print issue, scheduled to come out later this year, will include fiction by Julia Kornberg, an essay by Hayley Jean Clark about the artist Anna Weyant and a translation of a Yiddish short story by Abraham Reisen. Uminer conducted his first editorial meeting, over pizza and beer, on the floor of his Upper East Side studio.

You’ll be happy to know he found a new place (“I heard he’s found a bigger apartment,” Danziger added. “So that means, more books.”), and there’s a charming description of how his friends helped him move. There are also photos of his bookshelves, and I swear to you, every book I see is either something I have (Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia; Pound and Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry) or something I’d love to read. If I lived in NYC, I’d go visit him; as it is, I’ll have to check out his magazine, whose prospectus reads:

Our house organ, the Notarikon, will begin publication late in 2026. A print quarterly of arts and letters, it will contain fiction, poetry and criticism. The first issue will include a series of essays on Portuguese and European literature by Fernando Pessoa, originally published in 1912 and never before translated into English, as well the opening chapters of In The Flat World, a novel by the art historian Thomas Brown.

The translation from the Yiddish of The Critic, a vignette by Avrom Reisen, serves as a thematic preface. Reisen’s tale is the internal monologue of a theater critic whose sycophantic habits backfire; self-preservation forces him to resurrect traces of sincerity from the graveyard of his unconscious. The story is the first offering of a project to translate Reisen’s fictional oeuvre.

In tribute to Adam Mickiewicz’s aborted daily, La Tribune des Peuples, an English edition of the poet’s lectures on Slavic literature, delivered in Paris in the 1840’s, is in development and will debut in our second issue. Mickiewicz’s Tribune and its more respectable cousin, the Buloz-era Revue des Deux Mondes, predate the cinema and all but the earliest stages of photography, yet serve as a model for our quarterly, which is not confined to promotional film matter or seduced by the temptations of topical specialization, partisan allegiance or other strategies of refuge.

Notarikon is “a Talmudic method of interpreting Biblical words as acronyms,” or as the website has it:

The Aramaic notarikon is a late antique portmanteau of the Latin for notice or notation and the Greek for image or imitation. A notarikon is an acronym, code or insignia, a word transformed into image or a sign invested with text.

I presume the surname Uminer is from Uman, once a center of the Jewish community of Podolia, but if you do a Google search you find suggestions like Myheritage.com’s “The name is believed to derive from the word umina, which translates to to be skilled or to have knowledge,” which sounds like a wild guess to me. At any rate, more power to him, and may his books increase! (Thanks for the link go to Eric and Bonnie.)