A JOURNAL AND A BOOK

In my cataloging and reading travels lately, I have come across two things I thought were quite interesting and which I’d like to share.

The first is a little book by Etgar Keret. The title is The bus driver who wanted to be God : and other stories. It is published by Thomas Dunne Book, of St. Martin’s Press in New York in 2001. Cincinnati’s call number is PJ 5054 K3.75 A2.3 2001. As the title suggests it’s a book of short stories, only 182 pages and only 19 cm. high. Keret is like the David Sedaris of Israel. His stories give you a chuckle, but they are darker than Sedaris’s. The story that amazed me the most is called A Souvenir of Hell. It takes place in a village in Uzebekistan that was built at the entrance to Hell. It turns out that people from Hell get a day off every hundred years and they come to this village, and that tourism is the main source of income for the village. Of course there is a girl and a handsome guy from Hell, and I don’t want to spoil it for you by telling you any more.

This is a good little book to read when you need a break from studying or other stressful activities, and since the stories are short, you don’t have to take a long break at any time. We also have some of Keret’s books in the original Hebrew and reading them is a good way to sharpen your Hebrew skills.

The journal is an electronic only title, Women in Judaism. It comes out of the University of Toronto, Dept. of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations which includes the Jewish Studies program. It has been coming out since 1997 but is only up to volume 4, so it has been irregular. The articles are interesting, and I recognize the names of several of the authors. It is a refereed journal. Women in Judaism is free and anyone can sign up for it from the website, http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/index. It appears in the library’s online catalog with a hot link. At this time, it is available in Cincinnati with a login and password which are available at the Circulation Desk in Cincinnati. We try to get the online resources by IP address to avoid the step of user ID and password, but sometimes we can’t do it.

While you’re at it, check out our full-text online journals on our website. From the Cincinnati library webpage, click the Journals CD-ROMS and from there go to Online Journals. There will be a list of titles. Click on the one you want to get to it. Unfortunately, at the moment it is only Cincinnati on-campus use, but we hope to change that some time soon.

Sarah Barnard

Serials Librarian,

Cincinnati Campus.

This blog entry comes as a follow-up to my posting of last week.

To date there has been only one comment posted, anonymously, that somehow the rebbe HAD heard of the Book of Enoch. Well, I attended a Roman Catholic university in the early 1960s when the Legion of Decency still rated movies for Roman Catholics, and the priests I encountered knew all about the proscribed films even though they had not seen them. So it would not surprise me if the rebbe knew what the Book of Enoch was.

There were seven altogether. Six of them told me how wonderful the story was, and how inspiring. One colleague waxed so elegiac on my being a role model of professionalism that my ears burned. And, by the way, six of the seven comments came from individuals one would categorize as “Traditional,” if not Orthodox.

Yet all was not rosy. One colleague, Orthodox, librarian at a major day-school, and an individual of stature within the Association of Jewish Libraries, took me to task for censoring information. (She made an excellent point, that there are no evil texts, only the evil use people put them to.) Censorship is a “hot button” in librarianship, and even suggesting someone is censorious is something not taken lightly.

She and I exchanged several e-mails in which she spelled out her feelings, which I certainly cannot fault. For her, perhaps the only thing that redeemed my not answering the young man’s initial question was the fact that he was a minor.

I will say that had the young man asked me about the Sefer ha-Aggadah, I think I would have had no problem in explaining who Bialik and Ravnitzky were and what the agenda behind the book was. This is very different from what he did ask.

Another person, also Orthodox, a professor at another institution, and a gentleman whom I have known for perhaps thirty years, and hold in the highest esteem, wrote to me that he found the story “heartwarming, but ultimately depressing.” I asked him what he meant. He wrote back that he saw yet another example of a young inquiring mind in the Orthodox world being squelched.

I begged to differ with him. After all, I had no expectation of the young man calling me back. Yet his rebbe told him to. Moreover, his rebbe told him to thank me and to tell me that the rebbe said I was a mensch. This, for me, bespoke a good deal about the rebbe. While the rebbe did not give me permission to tell the young man about the Book of Enoch, perhaps this rebbe took the young man aside and sold him privately about the Apocrypha, as well as Rabbi Akiba’s admonition on Mishnah Sanhedrin !0:1.

I adduced another example. One gentleman, now a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at a major American university, had been a student at the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland more than 60 years ago. One of his teachers, recognizing the student’s brilliance, gave him permission to read the Humash with the commentary of Samuel Leib Gordon (1896-1933). By today’s secular standards, this commentary is rather “tame stuff,” yet for a yeshiva bahur 60 years ago, it was close to heresy.

There was a snap inspection in the dormitory and a volume of ShaLaG was found in this student’s locker. He would have been expelled from the yeshiva, but his teacher came forward and said that he had given the student permission to read the offending book.

Granted, this occurred three generations ago, and most likely might not happen today. But thirty years ago, and in my situation? I can only hope…

Oh, I nearly forgot - One professor at the College (a committed Reform Jew) asked why I simply did not answer the young man’s question. I would like to think the intention was other than to challenge and possibly destroy the young man’s beliefs.

As I said to this person and to my two Orthodox interlocutors, “I may be ‘Hote’ [het-tet-alef], but I am not Mahati.” If I sin, it is my business. But I will not be a willing party to someone else’s falling prey to sin

Finally what sort of obligation do I have, in my profession and as a Jew, not to censor, but yet to protect?

One of the first things I learned in Hebrew School over fifty years ago was the statement: Kol Yisrael ‘arevin zeh be-zeh.” Jews are responsible for one another.

It has not ceased to be a guiding principle.

An old joke:

Question: How many librarians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: I don’t know, but I can look it up!

Over the past several years, it’s been my job, my challenge, and occasionally my passion to “look it up.” I love playing detective: tracking down elusive facts and citations; finding everything ever written on an obscure topic; and knowing the hidden places where knowledge is lurking in the library and the world of electronic resources.

So, when we started planning my son’s Bar Mitzvah, I was confident that I could find everything that I needed. A quick search of the catalog under the subject “bar mitzvah” led me to the BM 707 section of the stacks. I found rows of books about the history and customs of the ceremony. Need to plan a party? I found the checklists. Need to select a mitzvah project? I found some guidelines. Need to keep it spiritual and meaningful? We have it on the shelves! Need to figure out how the baby I held yesterday suddenly turned 13? I can’t find a thing! Need an outline for a speech expressing how much this child has brought to my life? Not be found.

I wander up and down the stacks. I stroke the baby name books I had poured through, although I had already known that he would be named after my grandfather, a man of great kindness and integrity. I finger the Bibles remembering that we had ‘sponsored’ my son’s name in the Torah scroll that was written for our congregation and hoping that he would keep coming back to the Torah. I pass the literature section and smile, thinking of the delightful rhyming stories I read to him as a baby and the fantasy adventure books he brings to me now to share. I pass the cookbooks and think not only of the massive baking we’ve done in the past few weeks, but all the years of covering the kitchen and ourselves in a layer of flour as we baked mandelbroit or challah.

I wander up and down the stacks thinking about my son and family and think, “Perhaps I have found a speech here.”