A World of Books
I love journalism that makes me wonder how the story was discovered–especially when it gives no sign that it could have been researched from the armchair of social media. This story, about Mendl Uminer and his 10,000 books, is one of those.
Uminer, until recently the holder of a rented studio apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, committed one of the more harmless infractions that has ever gotten a renter evicted: he had too many books. The situation:
Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside.
In defense of the building that kicked him out, the most obvious way in which 10,000 books might harm someone is by falling on them. I read an estimate that this many books might weigh between 3 and 10 tons-more than 500 book boxes worth. I have some personal experience with this. I live in a bookish neighborhood, and have walked by more than a few apartments and houses over the years that show visible signs of hoarding. Often the possessions most visible from windows are books. I have been in book-stuffed houses that show alarming cracks and twists in the walls. A recent Supreme Court justice had to move out of a centuries-old house because his library nearly broke the place.
It’s funny, the actual process of reading makes you rather boring by outward appearance. The reader is a sedentary figure, someone who has chosen to forego conversation for a while. Writers know this well: a rich inner life can come at the cost of an adventurous outer one. But the article is written with enough skill to convince me that Uminer has already lived a life. The way the tale is told, his journey to 10,000 books was not a linear accumulation of one book after another, but a crossing, from one way of life to another: a childhood in a Hasidic enclave, early adulthood attending rabbinical seminary and studying the Talmud, a break with his religious vocation to “enter the modern liberal cultural society of New York. As Uminer explains it, “I didn’t want to be drunk on medieval piety anymore.”
One doesn’t have to read too deeply into Uminer’s evolution to see his book collection as a monument. As objects, books are self-organizing art. If you just set them down wherever you feel like, they turn into haphazard statues, walls and barriers, labyrinths that control your movements. I’ve always found the physical self-assertiveness of books to be a little surprising. They seem to take up more space in aggregate than the compactness that any one volume suggests. Then again, when I consider how much of the world can be compressed into a single book, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at their sprawl. Anyone who has tried to organize even a modest book collection will tell you that books are unruly objects, either threatening to burst out of the shelves or fall across of them. It can be hard to find the furniture to play well with your book collection.
The thought that Uminer and his friends repeat is that his library is not what his adversaries claim it is: it’s not eccentric (not in the textually rich subculture in which he was raised), it’s not a mess or a hoard pile (“I bet he can tell you where every single book is in his apartment”), and it’s a necessity (“I feel I always need to be learning, because that’s what I think I have to offer the world”). I admire a guy who lives inside of his library with such certainty. He needs the city for the people, but also he needs to block it out. That’s what the books are for. And it makes me happy to see that he’s 31, well inside the generation that supposedly doesn’t care about books. Ha! What makes him impressive is not the library itself but his commitment to it, even as it gives him back something immaterial.