The $65 Akkadian dictionary, in hindsight, was a mistake. It was an impulse buy at the Yeshiva University annual book sale 13 years ago, and I ended up using it as many times as you’ve bumped into a Sumerian. So I flipped it into the giveaway pile. The Great Aliyah Book Purge had begun.
Selling our house in New Jersey and sorting through which of our thousands of books would make the cut to be shipped to the Holy Land alongside mattresses, dishes, bikes, baseball bats, and lots and lots of Starbucks Instant Via Iced Coffee packets proved to be an unexpected emotional blender. A librarian’s version of This Is Your Life: Modern Orthodox Edition, the experience led to revisiting prayer books received as bar mitzvah presents as well as a copy of my PhD dissertation. Here were my old Spidey comics and a Chihuly coffee-table book my wife and I picked up after seeing an exhibition of the artist’s work during our honeymoon. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s learned opus on the nature of family found its way next to Leslie Knope’s Parks and Recreation guide to running an efficient bureaucracy. Ian McEwan’s Atonement landed next to Yom Kippur machzorim. Adam Grant’s encouragement to Think Again, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s lyrical meditations on wonder, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ musings on morality all beckoned for revisiting.
But the shippers were coming, and heartrending choices needed to be made. It quickly became clear that, like the ancient Israelites in the desert, not all would merit safe passage to the Promised Land.
“I’m really proud of you,” my wife said one Friday afternoon while we were packing. “You seem to be doing okay.”
I’d already spent hours and hours trimming a collection that had taken decades to build, and she was eager to ride the momentum. As I piled a collection of academic tomes on the Dead Sea Scrolls on top of The Archive Thief and Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam, she posted to social media that, in that generous spirit of the Passover Haggadah, all who are hungry could come and partake. We would be giving hundreds and hundreds of books away (though not any haggadot—we would actually be taking those).
The dwellers of the Twitterverse, usually found inhabiting a Gotham-like cesspool of put-downs and polarization, united in eagerness to assist. Immediately, there were knocks on the door.
The People of the Book appeared, Elijah-like, out of the whirlwind. They offered the oh-so-somber and serious messages of support usually found in a shiva house, while salivating like kids in a candy store.
“This must be so hard for you. I hope you are holding up okay. By the way, do you have any empty boxes?”
“I really didn’t think it would ever come to this. You are so strong. Excuse me while I make a few trips back and forth to my car outside.”
“So wonderful that you are moving to Israel and living the dream. Any chance you also have volume 2 of this?”
“Wow, this one is really expensive. Can’t imagine how much you paid for it. Would it be okay if my brother-in-law popped by later? He’s from the Five Towns.”
Of course, there were more than a few volumes I deemed off-limits. I believe the Bible says somewhere that “Thou shalt not give away Elie Wiesel’s Night even if you have never read it,” so that made it to the shipping pile. So did Hegyonei Halacha, a classic work of Jewish law that I’m counting on my nine-year-old to ask for in about a decade when he’s studying in yeshiva (I’m already practicing my “I’ve been waiting 10 years for you to ask me if we have it” voice). Any books written by friends or colleagues were coming with us, both because I like being a good friend and because I didn’t want anyone to show up and exclaim amid the crowd of shelf raiders, “I can’t believe you’re giving away that book that got Daniel tenure!”
The Great Giveaway proved, despite my hesitations, to be an unexpectedly uplifting experience. Warnings from a random person on Twitter to be wary of letting other random people from Twitter into our house aside, it became an occasion to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. The rabbi of the American community we are leaving found a rare English translation of a Bible commentary he could give to a congregant who is a direct descendant of its author. A 14-year-old studying for Israel’s National Bible Contest, a Lakewood resident interested in the ancient Near East, and a physician’s assistant interested in Jewish medical ethics went home happy. (Sorry to disappoint you, fantasy readers, but that’s just not my jam.)
One soulful graduate student in psychology, while delicately placing into plastic bags two of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s stories, Modern French Jewish Thought and Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic, said I was probably thinking of the Italian cultural critic Umberto Eco’s concept of the “antilibrary” as I accumulated my collection. I hadn’t been but was eager to hear more. As Nassim Taleb tells it, Eco owned a 30,000-book library and separated visitors into two categories:
Those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.
Knowing that homes in Israel would hardly allow space for much, I would say my ego barely had a say in the matter.
I had been thinking of Ecclesiastes, though—that author of a book read for millennia during the holiday of Sukkot. He who dwelled in a palace and possessed all there was to own knew well that generations would come and pass, houses would find new owners, and to the making of books there was no end. We were all on our way, with or without taking our books with us.
In the meantime, any chance you want to learn some Akkadian?
i hope his israeli 'house' has enough room. we moved from 2 storey 'cottage' with about 4-6 thousand books into flat with room hopefully for 1 to 1.5 thousand books. no 'market' except trashbins for the discards.... all university and other libraries want 'list' of books on offer (need money time and secretary were this possible). luckily trashbins remain open minded.
Love this post and Umberto Eco's notion of an "anti-library." The more we know, the less we (realize we) know...