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CHAPTER 13 Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore Laurence Roth For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? —Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Unpacking My Library’’ Two early memories of my father’s bookstore, J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, are a prologue of sorts for this essay. Here is the first: it is 1967, and I am six years old. My father, Jack Roth, is having an IBM computerized billing machine installed in the store. This is the first store, the one on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, which started out as M. Harelick Books, a small Yiddish-oriented bookshop that Michael Harelick opened in 1944 and that my father bought and is making over into a more sophisticated operation. He has just expanded into what had been a beauty shop next door, which is where the machine is, in the new bookkeeping area. Reels of hole-punched tape magically run a clacking, loud typewriter. The salesman is explaining the system as I walk the pattern in the linoleum, black and white tiles arranged in concentric squares. I walk in rhythm to the keystrokes as they drum across the page—long burst, long burst, short, short, short. This is the sound of bookselling. The second memory: it is 1971, and I am ten or eleven years old. For some reason, I am alone in the back of the store. I am bored sitting there, and I wander out to the bookshelves to find something interesting to read. Somehow, I stumble upon a few copies of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint , which, because of customer complaints, my father has moved from My Father’s Bookstore 281 the new-book table, where they had been displayed face up, and has shelved them, yellow spines out, in the literature section. Did I really find them by accident? Did I know they were there? Had they been moved, in fact, because they were no longer new? What I remember is that I took a copy back to the lunch table and something changed, something that had to do with girls and cored apples and a character named The Monkey for sure, but also with reading. What was this doing in the store? What did it mean? Accounting and interpretation. These memories are emblematic of the two parts of this critical meditation on that bookstore, each an aspect of my understanding of, and introduction to, modern Jewish literature. On the one hand, the business of bookselling: it suffused the life of my family. At the end of the day, if my father was home for dinner, and he rarely was, the table conversation was about the ludicrous demands of New York Jewish publishers or, most likely, the outrageous behavior of customers— rabbis at the top of the list, followed by bar mitzvah–gift shoppers, Yekkes, those snooty German Jews, and sundry Yiddish-speaking oddballs. On the Sabbath and holidays, my father would sometimes take us to an Orthodox synagogue, sometimes a Conservative synagogue, and, on occasion, even to a Reform synagogue. It was good for business. At social events, my father would often take orders or promise to track down a hard-to-find book. It was good for business. On the other hand, literature framed our upper-middle-class perspective : books flooded into our home. Signed first editions of Isaac Bashevis Singer, oversize Jewish art and photography books, rare and new printings of prayer books and Hebrew Bibles, fiction by Sholem Aleichem, Cynthia Ozick, Isaac Babel, and Jerzy Kosinski, anthologies such as A Treasury of Jewish Poetry by Nathan and Maryanne Ausubel and The Golden Peacock by Joseph Leftwich, nonfiction by Hannah Arendt, Amos Oz, Ben Hecht, Trudy Weiss-Rosmarin, and Martin Buber. And not just Judaica; our library included Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Zola, Dreiser, Howells, biographies of Maurice Chevalier and the Kennedys, the entire Time-Life series on countries of the world, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dali in a series of twelve heliogravures that my father framed and hung along the central hallway of our house. Little wonder, then, that I see my father’s business and his love of the book—his love of their look and feel—through the prism of Walter Benjamin ’s essay about the passion and ‘‘tactical sphere’’ of book collecting. For [52.14.150.55] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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