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.)
There is indeed “Umaner” in Beider’s dictionaries but nothing like Uminer
https://stevemorse.org/phonetics/beider.php?name=uminer&rawname=uminer&language=auto&archive=dgjs&archive=djsg&archive=djskp&archive=djsre&archive=djsp
there’s a big Uminer genealogy tree which makes them a branch of Huminers (Гуминер in Russian) of Minsk.
https://www.geni.com/people/Shlomo-Huminer/6000000000444267880?through=6000000017737573567
This surname even cropped up once in my searches (a certain Huminer was a pharmacist roommate of my pharmacist great grandfather Hertz Gonikberg / Honigberg , and was swept in a secret police search of their apartment).
I can ask Beider about the meaning of Huminer but it almost undoubtedly comes from гумно “threshing floor” and not from умный “smart” as MyHeritage’s folk etymology would have it
Very plausible! I just assumed Uminer was a variant of Umaner, but sounds like Huminer is more likely.
We just need a theory that “umina” is the etymon of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hummina
Jackie Gleason !! Not engrossed in Ovid and Rousseau.
Quite apart from the fire risk in his original apartment I would have thought that the floor loading should have been checked.
I’ve never heard of the Fenollosa book. Do you recommend?
To Peter Grubtal’s point, this online civil engineering discussion about the weight loads floors in a bookstore should be designed to handle notes that in the library context designers often distinguish between “reading rooms” (not so many pounds per square foot) and your actual “stacks” jam-packed with bookshelves up to the ceiling (substantially more pounds per square foot). This fellow’s apartment sounds more akin to the latter than the former. https://www.eng-tips.com/threads/bookstore-live-load.257635/
FYI the NYC building code thinks library stack rooms should be able to handle a load almost quadruple the minimum for private rooms in a multifamily residence.
There was a story in SF about a newspaper hoarder (back when that was possible) who, after decades, caused the supporting wooden cross-beams under his second-floor apartment to crack. The store below him had to close while they repaired the damage, and he had to part with his collection.
I’ve never heard of the Fenollosa book. Do you recommend?
Not unless you’re interested in the sources of Pound’s ideas. The ideas about how characters work are crackpot.
i barely know רײזען / reisen / reyzen‘s prose and dramatic work at all, but his songs (properly, i suppose, his poetry in various people’s settings) have had impressive staying power. among others, “di vant”, “shvimt dos kestl afn taykh”, “zog, maran”, and above all “hulyet, hulyet, beyze vintn” are still very much part of the core repertoire. a series dedicated to translating and publishing his fiction is exciting! (and no small undertaking – the link to his Leksikon entry can give you a sense of the scope!)
by sheer coincidence, earlier this afternoon i was looking at a bound volume of reyzen’s journal Dos Naye Land [maybe best rendered less literally, as the New World – or maybe not]. it’s part of a massive collection that CYCO will likely be receiving from the personal library of joseph landis, who founded the once-very-important jewish studies / yiddish studies program at Queens College (once, famously, offering a course titled “The Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer – With The Author Present”), edited the journal Yiddish, and was otherwise a major figure in mid- and late-20thC yiddish culture. some here may well have encountered his translations of The Dybbuk, The Golem, God of Vengeance, and Green Fields, which for a long time were the standard english versions (i like joachim neugroschel’s better for the ansky and leyvik, but there are people who disagree).
i mostly mention that-all here because it was a wonderland of exciting, rarely-seen books, very much in the On Panicking About Packing Up My Library tradition that the article on uminer contributes to. to speak only of things i’ve never before gotten to hold in my hands, the landis collection runs from the modernist poetry landmark Antologye Mitvest-Mayrev [anthology: midwest-westerly (the pun isn’t translateable)], to vanvild’s folklore collection-of-collections Bay Unz Yidn [among us jews], to the WPA / Yiddish Writers Union volume on the landsmanshaftn [hometown associations] of nyc, to evelyn/chava yehoash blumgarten’s gorgeous 1936 scroll edition of her father’s yiddish Megiles Ester (the only known yiddish megile scroll printed in the u.s.). we may need to invest in a glass-fronted cabinet bookcase.
The Notarikon page notes that a documentary about Uminer, directed by Julian Cosma, is in the works. Per Uminer’s Twitter feed (@Mendel), the movie is due early next year.
I’m not terribly interested in Pound (oddly — I tend to like his poetry when it comes in front of my eyeballs, but I’ve never felt moved to seek it out, much less read about him), so it sounds like I can give that one a miss!
Which is a good thing, given the theme of this thread. My wife and I had this exchange yesterday:
Me: “These books were quite cheap and I figured pretty small.”
Her: “And that’s how a shitton of books enters our house.”
(I have to admit that one of the books, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand was also rather larger than I expected. On the other hand, the historical atlas that was actually the reason I’d put in the order in the first place was much less hefty than I’d feared, so all’s well.)
This post also made me think of my favourite blog title, “Too Many Books and Never Enough”:
“The title of this blog refers to an exchange we had more than fifteen years ago, when Christina was still living in London and Wayne was there on a visit. Christina then had a large number of books in a small flat in Battersea, most of them on shelves but also many volumes stacked in piles on the floor. One evening, when Wayne was crossing from one end of the sitting room to the other, he tripped over one of the aforementioned piles and said: ‘Too many books!’ To which Christina replied: ‘Never enough!’
This became our unofficial motto. When Christina moved to America in 1995, her collection of some 6,000 volumes joined Wayne’s 5,000 books, from which we weeded a few hundred as duplicates or no longer wanted. Since then, we’ve proceeded to add books on a regular basis and what to some would be a terrifying pace. Today [i.e. 2009, when this post was written] we own roughly 15,000 volumes, plus hundreds of videos, DVDs, CDs, LPs, and magazines. In 2007 we undertook a long-needed and much-delayed renovation of our house, in the process adding some 600 linear feet of shelving, which we thought would give us plenty of room for acquisitions for years to come.
In fact, this work gave us very little room for growth: in our plans we had failed to take sufficiently into account how many books we had double-shelved or (here too) piled on the floor. The result gave us pause…”
https://wayneandchristina.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/welcome/
I have to admit that one of the books, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand was also rather larger than I expected.
I have that too! I first saw it on my then-girlfriend’s shelves half a century ago, read it with delight, and bought a used copy with equal delight when I found one.
Somewhat related may be this tale of removing (not looting, it was all supposedly on the up and up …) 180 lbs. of books in Yiddish from the Manhattan apartment of the recently-deceased fellow who had accumulated them. With bonus Borges reference/analogy you may or may not think apt. https://forward.com/culture/837143/what-i-learned-from-180-pounds-of-yiddish-books-one-interesting-and-complicated-jewish-man-and-jorge-luis-borges/
Bonus quote: “That? Oh, that’s the* Yiddish Kalevala. Naturally.”
*The definite article has for me some implicature that there’s only one published Yiddish translation of that work, but for all I know there are others …
CYCO has a few copies of that Kalevala – it’s a gorgeously designed and made book (i think 1960s/70s?), with ornamentation throughout. i don’t know of another translation, myself, but there certainly could be one.
shane baker, of the Kultur-Kongres (whose adoption and re-formatting of the online translated Leksikon made it massively harder to use), took exception to the borges invocation (and to the piece’s overall attitude) in his latest organizational newsletter. here are excerpts:
It’s no crime on the part of the writer that she didn’t know Hershl (here “Harris”) Saltzberg, but some simple inquiries would have shown that he was much more than his book collection. […] I used to eat with him at one table during the Workers Circle Trip to Yiddishland, where Hershl was also a bit of a refugee — in this case all the way from across Lake Sylvan. He had grown up going to Camp Kinderland*, where he studied dance with the legendary Edith Segal. That might have been what inspired him to work in dance therapy for children in later years. He was a kind and caring person with refined tastes.
The obituary-by-a-stranger did discover via some Google searches that Hershl was “often very funny,” but that doesn’t quite capture the nature of his whimsy. I regret that most of you will never experience his mock salute, like something out of Sergeant Bilko; or his pretend broygez un iberbetn zikh (getting angry and making up) in the course of a single sentence…
[…]
Lastly, I was put off by the reference to Borges’s The Witness, about the last living person to worship a particular idol. Yiddish literature is no wooden idol; and Hershl himself would agree that he was far from the last of its “acolytes.” We will miss Hershl, but he would not find it amiss to note that countless devotees of the Yiddish word remain, and many, many more will follow.
i wonder what was on saltzberg’s bookshelves! the NYBC generally declines to assess, much less accept, such collections (including ones with a lot of rarities)**, so there must have been some very specific treasures.
.
* the summer camp established by the “linke” pro-soviet socialists expelled from Workers Circle in 1929, who amounted to at least half of the organization’s membership (they were still bragging about their premature mccarthyism in 2000). it’s still operating, but in tolland, massachusetts, rather than across the lake from the “rekhte” competition.
** though that may be a good thing in some cases, given their variable and at times rather dicey storage conditions and quite slow processing of new acquisitions. i do have hopes for this all improving, now that aaron lansky has finally made his long-overdue exit.