However bleak is the prognosis for the language itself, the last secular Yiddish bookstore in New York City has survived a near-death experience and found a new home in the distinctly unfamiliar soil of Long Island City, Queens.
The 75-year-old shop, run by the nonprofit Central Yiddish Cultural Organization, faced extinction two years ago when its patron organization and landlord, the Atran Center for Jewish Culture, downsized and put its three floors on East 21st Street in Manhattan, including the bookstore’s space, on the market.
Since then, the CYCO store’s manager, Hy Wolfe, has been struggling to find an affordable new location, adrift in the wilderness like the people who eventually made Yiddish its lingua franca.
Now, Mr. Wolfe reports, he has secured a location in a seventh-floor loft near the Queens entrance of the Midtown Tunnel at 21st Street and Borden Avenue and has moved in over 50,000 books. His loft neighbors include a potter, a sculptor, a high-end furniture boutique and a party planner.
More than 150 racks of books on wheels were delivered by professional movers, including the felicitously named Samson Moving and Storage. But Mr. Wolfe, the 50ish son of Holocaust survivors who was raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, when Yiddish was still commonly spoken there, said he transplanted many books from the racks to the shelves himself.
“Fifty thousand pounds of books I lifted,” he said, wording his sentence in a Yiddish syntax edged by weariness. “I could get people to help, but everyone has to get paid. Like a dog I was working.”
And pay others is not something Mr. Wolfe can easily do.
The store has laughably few sales. It is open by appointment only and those hours vary considerably. In one recent year it had 50 sales appointments and took in $11,220, which barely covered Mr. Wolfe’s annual salary.
The shoppers include Yiddish students, Russian immigrants, collectors and Hasidim. They can find books not only by Yiddish writers but also classics like Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” in Yiddish (“Der Alter un Der Yam“).
The move cost $50,000, paid by Atran. Half of the first year’s rent of $11,000 and other operating expenses were financed with private donations. Many donors learned of the store’s plight from a 2010 article in The New York Times.
Long Island City is not exactly Yiddish-speaking terrain. Actually, the only Yiddish quarters left in New York are neighborhoods where Hasidim live, while the number of secular Yiddish speakers is dwindling to relatively few.
But Mr. Wolfe thinks many connoisseurs of the language will make the trek to his industrial area because the Hunters Point Avenue subway station is just a few stops on the No. 7 train from Midtown.
“We have beautiful views of Manhattan,” he said, offering an enticement.
All in all, he said, the ability to keep the store breathing “means the world to me.”
“The old Jews, the Holocaust survivors, survived for one reason: They were stubborn, they refused to die,” he said. “And I think I inherited that from my parents.”
