Jewish Reading, Then and Now
In the weeks leading up to the presentation of the 5th annual Koret Jewish Book Awards and the re-launch of JBooks.com, Steven Zipperstein, Chair of the Koret Book Awards Committee, and Yosef I. Abramowitz, CEO of Jewish Family & Life! and publisher of JBooks.com, got together for a conversation about the awards and the future of Jewish reading. The following is an excerpt of their conversation.
Yossi Abramowitz: Let's start with your reading as a child. What did you read? What stuck, both in general and then Jewishly?
Steven Zipperstein: Well, first, my dad was a book collector. The idea of spending four, five, eventually ten dollars, God knows twenty dollars, on a book–it just seemed inconceivable to him. He would buy duplicates by the pound. When I cleaned out his library after his stroke a few years ago, I counted 34 copies of Alan Dershowitz's Chutzpah. And he wasn't even all that much of a fan of Alan Dershowitz.
He had this large collection of guidebooks, Ann Landers-type books about sex, which he bought by the pound and intermixed with extraordinarily rare early 19th century missionary tracts from Poland and the Middle East that he had also bought for 75 cents a piece. He had a sense of the value of books. He was particularly interested in rabbinic sermons and amassed this extraordinary collection, about a thousand of them, mostly American rabbinic sermons dating back in some cases to the early 19th century. One of the most impressive collections I've seen. We donated his library to Arizona State just a few months ago. So, books were from the outset a way for me to connect with him and probably at the same time a portal to look beyond him.
When I was a senior in high school, I wrote a play–probably dreadful but it was well received–and my father came to see it. My father was one of these massively busy businessmen who rarely, if ever, came to school events. I stopped by his office after school and while he couldn't register approval visibly, all he said was, "Let's go to Pickwick's." Now, Pickwick's was a retail bookstore and in our house, the notion of buying retail was comparable to moon travel. We got in his car, drove to Hollywood Boulevard, and went into Pickwick's. He looked at me and all he said was, "Buy whatever you want." That was his way of saying he liked the play. It was communication through books. Everything was book based, in a sense, word based. It was books, the printed word, that mediated our relationship and that was the most important relationship I had as a child.
Abramowitz: Did these ideas about the power and value of books inspire you as you developed the Koret Jewish Book Awards?
Zipperstein: Part of the motivation for the awards was the recognition that the book business has been undergoing such massive changes. Until very recently, for example, when a book was published by almost any publisher of any substance, there would be bookstores in any fair sized city where you could see the book, touch it, look at it, leaf through it. It's no longer true. It's no longer true for many reasons we understand, few of them pernicious, but nonetheless, these are changes that have had a significant impact on our cultural lives. At the same time given the rise of all kinds of new technologies in printing, you find a plethora of publishing houses filling in for what Farrar Straus or some of the other sort of edgy presses used to do but no longer can afford to do because they're owned now by mega-companies.
I remember the idea first came to me when I was taking my older son Max to this music shop in Palo Alto to tune his trumpet. It's this splendid music shop where there is a long table and all these musicians hanging around, talking about music. Music lessons going on in the back, all kinds of instruments being sold. I asked myself where, even in Palo Alto, in this relatively bookish environment, could you find a place where people who love books as much as these people love instruments can stand around and do this in the way that you could in older bookstores. The idea of the book prize was, quite simply, to gather together a couple hundred of people who love books, in this instance, Jewish books–people from different walks of life because part of the rationale was to sort of unsettle the notion that people of a certain caste, religious or secular, scholars or non-scholarly writers, would live these segmented intellectual lives–the idea was to just throw a bunch of these people, a couple of hundred incredibly talented people into a room for a few hours, celebrating books that by general consensus were wonderful. So, in effect, it was an attempt to try to create, albeit in the somewhat rarified atmosphere of the Harvard Club in New York, the kind of excitement that I saw in that music shop. I took for granted in my 20s that any literate Jew basically reads everything Š which is a fiction, of course. But as I understood things then, you were supposed to read and be aware of everything that comes out in Jewish life. It seems to me one byproduct of the enormous amount of activity that's going on now–the greater sophistication of Jewish cultural institutions, the growth of whole Jewish studies apparatus, a large body of publishing around Jewish spiritual issues–is a heightened separation between various sectors of Jewish life. I'm not sure that we were necessarily better informed earlier on but I think there was greater shame, a greater sense of embarrassment about not knowing. And I admit part of what has always interested me about what we might do with the Koret Book Awards is to try to break down some of those boundaries. Do you feel any of this? Do you think these barriers exist?
Abramowitz: My hunch is that we're living in an era where there's no shame about anything Jewishly. I mean if you have half the people who are Jewish intermarrying then already there's no ghettoization of anything. There's no stigma either, about anything. If you're in a society and in a Jewish community in which there's just tremendous fluidity–there's no membrane that's keeping out certain information, people, or interactions–then certainly the knowledge gets diffuse. At the same time there's been an enormous explosion of the amount of things that are out there. So there's no center of gravity. That's one of the things that attract me to the book awards. You're actually creating a center of gravity, saying, "Hey, everyone, if you consider yourself part of the community, here's a handful of books that should be part of your library, part of your consciousness." In a sense we're trying to do that with the website, JBooks.com, as well–saying, "These are the things that literate Jews think about and these are the books that we're reading." But it may be an illusion. Unless it goes mainstream, in a sense, we never really get out of our own sub-communities.
Zipperstein: When I was growing up, there still existed those projects that did for Jews what Adler's University of Chicago project did for general knowledge. The Jewish Publication Society seemed to reach into a significant number of homes and whether the people who bought the books or subscribed actually read the books or not, at least they were on the shelf, staring at them. And the Jewish Publication Society featured a very impressive broad range of books as did Schocken. This is in contrast to our immeasurably more segmented world where there's a Jewish Lights reader and a university press reader, and so on.
And you're right: in media, in publishing, in almost every aspect of life, there's no longer a center of gravity. Hundreds of channels–and what magazine has the kind of cache that Time magazine had when I was kid? There's none. One could be nostalgic for that kind of authority, or one could exaggerate the intellectual of importance of that kind period–but at the same time something significant has changed.
Abramowitz: You mentioned university presses, and a lot of the books that are finalists and winners for the Koret Awards tend to be published by university presses. Is that affirmative action by the book intelligentsia or is it a sign of something else? What does it indicate?
Zipperstein: Recently, the larger university presses, like the University of California or Chicago, have tended to pick up a lot of titles that publishers like Norton or Houghton Mifflin might have published five years ago. Now a publisher like Norton can't afford, by and large, to publish a title that will sell under 25,000 or 30,000 copies. Until recently they picked up titles that sold 10,000, but less and less frequently now. Now University of Chicago will buy those titles and so part of what you've seen has to do with the vagaries of book business. Part of it also has to do with the way in which we've tended to structure our juries. As committed as you may be to having popular history judged together with academic history and for both sorts of histories to be taken seriously–it can be hard; often non-academics on a panel capitulate in the face of the arguments of academics and occasionally academics might be intolerant of the quality of non-academic work. It's even hard to get panels of generalists and academics to sit together and actually weigh things together. We've tried very very hard.
Abramowitz: This season, during which the books are nominated and judged–is this a time of exuberance or fear for you?
Zipperstein: As chair of the advisory board, what preoccupies me is to keep the process as open as possible. It's hard to know what to do, for example, with this recent phenomenon–maybe it's true in general publishing, but it's certainly true in Jewish publishing–of the incredible visibility garnered by first time young authors, often first time young male authors, especially first time young male authors who are photogenic. It's hard to know to what extent this is a byproduct of the hunger of a community that wants to be reassured of its continuity; to what extent it's a product of some extraordinary young literary talent; to what extent it's a byproduct of the excessive cultivation and celebrity of youth. It's hard to know. At the same time, I'm often concerned that my judges might too quickly dismiss a new book by a young writer, say with very long hair, whose name may be Englander, just because of the enormous volume of noise surrounding the book. Perhaps the book is being celebrated because it's awfully good.
Abramowitz: I've heard you speak about the awards aiming to highlight new authors. Some of your finalists are younger but many of the books also seem to be still about traditional topics, like the Holocaust, and there's still the gravitational pull of scholarship.
Zipperstein: The whole term "new writer" is complicated. The winner of the fiction award this year is Henryk Grynberg. On one level he's not a new writer, he's been writing for years. On another level, for many American readers, he's new. And so is his work; he's produced a book on a topic that seems old–it's a series of interlinked tales about the Holocaust and life in the Soviet Gulag drawing on memoir and also fiction–but the stories are shocking, startling, extraordinary. In my reading, his seems to be a new voice though he's in his early 60s. And I'm sure you've met writers in their 20s whose voices seem pretty stolid and old. So I don't know–we've sought to have writers, established and young, compete with one another. And what that means is that in some years the results are predictable. If you have a new novel by Saul Bellow or Philip Roth or collection of essays by Cynthia Ozick–well, it's hard to compete. But it's also worthwhile to affirm the extraordinary fact that Saul Bellow, deep in old age, can still write the way he writes. And Cynthia Ozick, who's an active member of the Koret Advisory Board–the fact that arguably the best living stylist in the English language is Ozick, who is so deeply, so ferociously preoccupied with Jewish issues is really something to note, and celebrate.
Abramowitz: Think about the Koret Book Award 25 years from now. What do you want it to represent?
Zipperstein: The prize, as I see it, is a mechanism to help people surrounded by Jewish books–on the one hand there's so much in the way of Jewish publishing that exists, but so much of it is of an uneven quality. Part of what the prize provides is a roadmap, an indication of some of the better books that exist in any given year. Also because of the dwindling number of bookstores where you can actually hold books, it's also a way of concretizing books, of making them more real.
And I've always seen the book prize itself as a catalyst, as a centerpiece for a whole array of programs that would render reading, literacy in various forms, more accessible, palatable, more fun. Some of these projects we'll be working on together. What I'd like to see is a comfort with books, the kind of joy and wisdom that books provide, be part and parcel of the way schoolchildren function, and be something that playwrights refer to, that the people involved in Jewish media and TV and films just naturally refer to; just a breaking down of the boundaries between the full range of creative people. Non-scholars recognizing that scholarship isn't only turgid and inaccessible, but is also the source of extraordinary wisdom; and scholars recognizing that wisdom comes in lots of different shapes and sizes. We'll be embarking on a whole array of very concrete local and national programs connected with the prize but I think for me the key is just a heightened sense of comfort, and the prospect of joy.
