Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
First, the pre-story. There were no Hebrew scholars in the USSR, except a few people in libraries and research institutes in St. Petersburg, who by some strange chance had been officially allowed to be involved in Jewish studies.
I was one of the lucky few. However strange it may have seemed to the KGB, the leaders of the Academy of Sciences, and the library, I was appointed keeper of the Jewish collection of the Academy of Sciences as a relatively young man.
One day, we received two calls: one from Lvov, the other from Tallinn. The calls were essentially the same.
They both said to have discovered books in unknown languages in similar locations: a Catholic church cellar in Lvov, and the cellar of the great Alexander Nevski Cathedral in Tallinn.
The unknown language was in a strange scribbly script, and the nice girl who called from Lvov said her Ukrainian intuition suggested that these were "zhidivski starodruki", old Jewish books.
And so I was assigned to go to these two cities.
It was an interesting time: officially, nobody had any concept of Jews or Hebrew scholars. They placed me in an Intourist hotel and spoke respectfully about "the person from Leningrad here to work on the zhidivski starodruki".
They took me down to the cellar (I wrote about this story later), and I saw something I have remembered ever since.
In this cellar were piled all the layers of culture unneeded by this destitute Soviet city, which even had no water, so all of my colleagues came to wash at my hotel, which did have some.
I was especially shocked to see a Catholic statue of crucified Jesus on the floor, buried under a heap of Torah scrolls which left visible only his toes and head.
I stood there with just the two of us there, and said to Jesus: how shall we interpret this? There are two possible ways, really.
One is to say that we have defeated you. Look at Notre Dame -- the old church is small and crooked, and the new one is a work of art. And yet none of that artifice helps you, pinned to the floor by our scrolls.
Another way of looking at it is that the Bolshevik *** have cast you naked into this cellar, and the only thing that covered you and let you survive were these scrolls of Jewish Scripture.
Anyway, there really were heaps of Jewish books there including six books printed before 1550, which was a rare discovery indeed.
I described all of it, they translated everything into Ukrainian, etc., but this is not the main matter of the story, because there were no exlibrises there.
Next, I moved on to Tallinn. The situation was slightly different there: the books were also kept in a cellar out of anyone's reach, but they were relatively neatly stacked and dusted.
The books were very strange. They varied from Yiddish fiction to manuscripts and old printed books, but all bore the same exlibris, or stamp.
It was the stamp of the city library of-- what's the name of that university town?-- yes, Tartu. And the stamp was in German.
I had studied book history and the history of collections, and I knew the Tartu collection, which had had no such books.
I had no idea what to make of it, so they found an old librarian who used to work there, to help the confused scholar out. He told me a fascinating story.
When the occupation began and it became clear that the Jews were about to be murdered, there came a man with a library stamp who went to Jewish houses and stamped their books.
The Germans were a law-abiding nation, they would not destroy a book with a state stamp. They would take it to a depository instead.
In the face of death these people understood that they needed to save their books. So they let the man stamp them in the hopes that the stamp would prevent the destruction of the books.
It did not prevent their oblivion in Soviet times, but it did prevent their destruction. Times changed, and even as I was there, the books were already extracted from the cellars and shelved.
To me, this proved the way such a plain thing as a stamp could play the definitive part in the history of the literary culture underlying our Jewish culture, our main grounds for founding the state of Israel.