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claimed had courted her in her youth. Another regular visitor was Dov Noy, head of the folklore department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who was in town as a visiting professor at Berkeley. A native Yiddish-speaker, Dov had been the first professor to teach Yiddish literature in Israel, and he enjoyed regaling me for hours with stories about the books I was sorting and the people who wrote them.
    Perhaps the most revealing visitor was an old man who showed up one day to “tell the truth about all these books.” An early member of the Petaluma commune, he quit after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes in 1956 and had been bitterly disillusioned ever since. “You want to know why these books are in such good condition?” he asked. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because nobody ever read them! The only reason the commune had Yiddish books at all was because the Party made them buy them!”
    Be that as it may, the books
were
in uncommonly good condition. I remained at the carriage house for four months, until all the boxeswere unpacked and the sorting complete. Between work and commuting, I had little time for reading, but a process of literary osmosis took place nonetheless. By the time I got to graduate school in Montreal I not only recognized most authors’ names, but thanks to Malka Tussman and Dov Noy, I felt I knew many of them personally. And, what with all the duplicate books I received in lieu of salary, I arrived with the best personal Yiddish library of any student in my class.
    W HEN I WAS growing up my mother used to call upstairs with the same question: “How would you like your sandwich today, dear, on rye bread or on
gayishe
?”
Gayishe
was her folksy Galitsianer pronunciation for
goyishe,
which, as I learned before I could walk, was synonymous in this context with white bread. Jewish or goyish was the grand bifurcation of the universe. If, on rare occasion, my parents uttered a sentence that did not contain the word “Jewish,” odds were it contained “goyish” instead.
    I learned other aspects of Yiddish sensibility at shul, in the Conservative synagogue we attended every Saturday morning. In the front rows, where my parents sat with other American-born professionals, the proceedings grew steadily more decorous with each passing year. In the back it was different. There the European-born immigrants davened (prayed): tough Jews in enormous wool
taleysim
(prayer shawls), bootleggers, peddlers, and junkmen, who drank
shnaps
(straight whiskey) out of water glasses, munched on herring and raw onions, spoke mostly in Yiddish, and almost never stopped talking. I was seven years old, with a clip-on tie, but instinctively I preferred the
heymish,
home-grown, back of the shul over the highbrow front, and I escaped there every chance I got. The old men greeted me in their heavy Yiddish accents, hugged me to their bristly cheeks (they never shaved on Shabbos) and let me sit with them while they told and retold their jokes andstories. They listened with one ear to the service and interrupted their kibbitzing only long enough to shout
“Omeyn!
(Amen!)”
    I learned about Yiddish sensibility at Hebrew school, too—albeit inadvertently. Our teachers taught us to read siddur (the prayer book) and Torah in Ashkenazic Hebrew. There was something strange about these nervous men with their heavy accents. Mr. Asch used to smoke half a cigarette, pinch the end between his fingers, and save the rest for later. Dr. Gross once got so exasperated with a student that he threw the boy’s public-school notebook out the second-story window. Only years later did I learn that most of these teachers were Holocaust survivors, philologists with Ph.D.s from Viennese universities. Not that it would have mattered. We were American kids and we tormented them mercilessly, imitating their accents, hiding their books, placing tacks and bubble gum on their chairs, barraging them with spit balls and paper airplanes. But at