Yiddishlands: A Memoir

16. Playing Solitaire

JustbecauseIhatedFieldDay,ColorWar,teamsports,andanythingovertly competitive unless the game was already rigged, like Making Mommy Happy, didn’t mean I couldn’t compete against myself. All the boys in my class, for example, collected cards, and I learned how to trade and flip with thebestofthem.Butthetradingcardsthatreallymatteredtomewerenever in the running to begin with. Wild West, featuring the portraits and biographiesof JesseJames,WyattEarp,WildBillHickok,andAnnieOakley,were so life-like you could smell the sweat and horse shit, while most Jewish boys in Canada were enamored only of the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, and Dale Evans. My real favorites anyway were tiny-type reproductions from The World, the New York Times, and other period newspapers. There were three good reasons why I would never let on that I collected Front Pages: (1) at a quarter a pack, they were costlier than baseball cards and the fact that my parents spoiled me wasn’t something to brag about; (2) square-shaped and not rectangular, they were very hard to flip; and (3) who but a brainy type was interested in yesterday’s news? Front Pages reinforced my long-held belief that everything of importance happened before I was born. After almost a year of collecting, I was only two shy of making up the whole 125-card set. Lately, however, I was finding a lot of doubles, as if the card manufacturer were deliberately testing my mettle. So one Saturday 97 16 Playing Solitaire morning I decided, enough was enough. This was to be my last try, and to raise the stakes, I put only a quarter in my pocket. As I approached Kaplansky ’s on the corner of Bernard and McEachran, just up the block from the Adath Israel Congregation, which, if I didn’t hurry, would soon be disgorging the Sternthals and other families I knew, an inner voice spoke to me and said: David, this time you will beat the odds. Since then I’ve heard this voice only once. But that’s another story. Mr. Kaplansky, with his thinning reddish hair and freckled face, greeted me as he always did, suspecting nothing. “One pack of Front Pages, please,” I said, putting down the charmed quarter. Then, to hide the trembling of my hand, I turned my back to him and tore open the blue-and-yellow wrapper. Here’s what I found inside, along with the square sheet of flour-coated bubble gum: stanley meets livingston, stock market crashes, amelia earhart lost at sea, archduke ferdinand assassinated, and hillary climbs mt. everest—mostly bad news by the world’s standards but, for me, a winning hand. The first and fourth were my missing cards. MypassionforcollectinghadbeenlongsincespentwhenaboxedsetofYiddish cards arrived in the mail, from the “Wilner Farlag,” c/o L. Ran, Jackson Heights, N.Y. Not cowboys, but a different Yiddish writer appeared on the face of each card, complete with his dates and major works. I did not know this L. Ran at the time, but one thing was certain: a card player he was not. He divided the deck into ten groups of ten, each representing another period of Yiddish literary history. There were Founders, Pathbreakers, Fighters and Rebels, Thinkers and Historians, categories that struck me as irredeemably unplayful. Trying my own game, I started to build a deck from those writers I had met in person. It was easy to pick out the prophetic-looking H. Leivick (a “Pathbreaker ”), but to include him would be cheating, because unlike my best friend, Khaskl, I missed seeing Leivick during his last visit to the Jewish Public Library, which left as the oldest candidate Avrom Reisen (born in 1876), one of the “Fighters and Rebels.” Brief as his visit to our home had been, which Mother dominated with her stories about Zalmen, his brother (card 87, “Scholars of Yiddish”), I adopted Reisen to be my zaydee, the one I never had, and he returned the compliment by telling a Workmen’s Circle audience back in New York that there was still hope for mame-loshn so long as there were Yiddish-speaking boys in the world like Dovidl Roskes. chapter sixteen 98 Added to Reisen were Ravitch and Sutzkever (“The Generation of the Holocaust ”), and Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom I had met just once, at my sister’s. Four out of a hundred—a losing hand, I reckoned. If you sorted the Front Pages by decade you could tell right away when...