Akedah secular source

12/22, 4pm
    A young man, university-age, approached the Reference Desk, and asked for information on the akedah. At first I thought he meant Acadia, but he explained that it is Isaac's binding (the binding that Abraham used to bind Isaac before the sacrifice). He wanted a "secular source," he explained when I suggested the Encyclopedia Judaica, which he had at his table. He also has a Christian source he got from the Internet; when I asked him if he thought it a reliable source he pointed out that he'll explain in his paper that it is an electronic source, and, indeed, it is that sort of source that he needs. Makes sense.

    OPAC searches revealed that HW's book on it was gone and billed; his deadline is tonight ("I like to leave papers for the last minute."). I suggested database searches, and gave him 296.14 as the call number of the book that is not there, the religion call number (actually 296 is Judaism). He thanked me, and went back to his table, laptop and assignment.
 
    Remembering Tikkun, I went to to the site and searched; plenty of results. I searched ProQuest and also found many results (Galenet gave 4 results).
 
    Walked over to the table where he's sitting, and told him about Tikkun, "it's a liberal Jewish publication." As soon as I said the word Jewish the Orthodox Jew sitting at the next table turned around to look at me.
 
    O, and the students first name is Solomon; I told him mine is Salomon.

Halloween at the Library

Starting today at the Children's Room.

A man came in asking for Dear Mr. Henshaw / Beverly Cleary ; illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky.

A mother with her two daughters were looking for a PG-rated DVD; they looked at Home Alone 4, but Mum nixed it. The violence was okay, but the plot includes a relationship that clearly she did not approve of.

A father with his son, Joseph, who is in the third grade, asked for a book; recommended Cam Jansen.

It has gotten busy, and I can't keep up, but I've recommended, and as wasked about, Patricia Giff, Barbara Cohen, Robert Munsch. Books on Thanksgiving (on Halloween Day), Magic school bus.

At 3, I repaired upstairs to Reference. Decidedly different in Reference than in Children's. A few people studyuing, 6 Internet PCs in use. A patron I know came over and asked for three books:

 Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, by Glenn Dynner. An associate professor of religion at Sarah Lawrence College. Growth and development of Hasidic movement in Eastern and East Central Europe. Glenn Dynner draws upon newly discovered Polish archival material and neglected Hebrew testimonies to illuminate Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the region of Central Poland during the early nineteenth century. (from Oxford Press)




Blind jump: the story of Shaike Dan, by Amos Ettinger. Found it in Suffolk.

Blind Jump is the story of the amazing exploits of Shaike Dan. During World War II, Shaike Dan volunteered to parachute behind enemy lines in Romania on behalf of British Intelligence. His jump had two objectives: to locate the prison camp where 1,400 Allied Air Force crewman, downed when bombing the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, were being held, and also to find ways to get them out of Romania so that they could go back into action and resume their contribution to the war effort. The second objective was to try to rescue Jews from Eastern Europe and get them to Palestine.

Rome and Jerusalem: the clash of ancient civilizations. Martin Goodman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2007.
933.05 G

Clearly there is a theme running through his requests. He is one of the more interesting patrons I encounter here.

Israeli books

A patron came in today with hold requests for these books:

To the end of the land, David Grossman
The trials of Zion , Alan M. Dershowitz.
The rise of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan
Bearing the body. Ehud Havazelet.
The Jewish Messiah. Arnon Grunberg.
Fire in the blood.  Irène Némirovsky.
A pigeon and a boy / Meir Shalev.
When the grey beetles took over Baghdad / Mona Yahia.

Reference question

A patron called asking about Jewish population in Aden. Found article in Encyclopedia Judaica, emailed answer. Nice to use technology to provide library service.

An interloan

Under the heading of unusual books, this is an entry: From Ararat to suburbia; the history of the Jewish community of Buffalo. (1960). Selig Adler; Thomas Edmund Connolly. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. College libraries, as well as Brooklyn Public, own it.

Boreslav

A youngster from the Hebrew Academy (HAFTR) came over to the Reference desk asking about Boreslav. A reference interview identified him to have been a Polish king in the 1300s. We looked in the OPAC (bibliographic instruction), and found some books on Polish history. She wanted to know about finding scholarly articles. Later, she came over to the desk and showed me a book about Jews written by Simon Dubnov. In it, there is reference made to the charter issued by King Boreslav.

We Look Like the Enemy

We Look Like the Enemy : The Hidden Story of Israel's Jews from Arab Lands

Saw this book on new-book truck this morning.

In Chicago, a Sarajevo Exile Finds a New Home and Voice

Last year, a teenager in a trench coat shot to death five people in a crowded Salt Lake City shopping mall, before being gunned down himself by police. The story caught the writer Aleksandar Hemon's eye not for its horrible post-Columbine banality, but because of a detail about the shooter -- he was a Bosnian Muslim refugee from Srebrenica, Europe's bloodiest killing field since World War II. Without presuming to know the boy's demons, Mr. Hemon, who fled Bosnia himself, notes that traumas of war and exile lurk deep inside.

Nelson Algren said loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose, and loving Sarajevo is like loving a woman with a broken spine."

Mr. Hemon is often put in good company with W.G. Sebald, Joseph Roth and Bruno Schultz as well as his generational "immigrant-lit" cohorts -- Gary Shteyngart and this year's Pulitzer winner, Junot Diaz.

He acknowledges literary debts to the late Montenegrin-Jewish writer Danilo Kis and his favorite of favorites, Anton Chekhov.

Jewish sport?

A patron came in (3.15pm) and asked for this book:

Dewey call number: 796.83 B

Author: Allen Bodner.

I just don't get why sports are in the 700s. Yes, the 700s are arts and recreation. Yes, the 790s are recreational and performing arts -- but why? Boxing and puppet theater in the same slot? This Dewey Decimal System is a conundrum wrapped in enigma.

791.572 M is a book by Jay Mohr about his stint in SNL, and right after it, 791.602 G is a book by William Goldman, novelist (Marathon Man ) and screenwriter (The Princess Bride ) was invited to be a judge at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1989, followed by The nature of the beast, by Hans Brick (791.8 B), an animal trainer.

Geez.

The Drop of a Feather

Plumes - By Sarah Stein (Yale University Press, 244 pages, $30)

Talk about crazes: The tulip mania of 1634, when speculation in tulip bulbs from Holland reached such heights that one collector paid 1,000 pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes for a single Viceroy bulb. The tulip market collapsed barely three years later; hundreds of investors were ruined, and thousands of bulbs lay rotting in warehouses.

Must've been, or seemed, quite a bulb, that Viceroy.

It is the tulip craze that is most often cited in discussions of speculative bubbles, like the frenzy for Internet stocks a decade ago and the more recent madness in the mortgage and credit markets. But the rage for ostrich feathers a century ago is instructive, too. When ostrich feathers flounced into vogue among the fashionable set in Paris, London and New York,

traders assumed that the popularity of plumes would stay permanently aloft, as if floating on an endless zephyr.

I can just hear it: it's different this time.

Of course there were a few cautious voices. One South African ostrich farmer warned members of the feather industry that they were dealing "with an uncertain, arbitrary, whimsical love of luxury . . . at our own risk. We cannot expect it to be durable." Such spoilsports were booed off the stage. Another dealer more typically crowed that a fine ostrich feather was "an investment for life" and that the plume "has been in fashion for centuries past, and will probably be for centuries to come. It holds its place like the diamond." At the height of the boom, Ms. Stein notes, the price per pound of plumes almost equaled that of diamonds.

That's optimistic: for centuries to come.

In South Africa, where the Barbary ostrich (prized for its extra-fluffy plumage) was domesticated and raised on ranches, and in London, where the feathers were brokered, and on New York's Lower East Side, where the feathers were applied to garments, most of the men and women in the feather business were Jewish.

Fascinating. Any parallel to the garment industry? I wonder. Certainly a parallel to other times were reactions when World War 1 spelled the end of the ostrich feather craze: with the collapse, anti-Semitism flared: "Once valued for their extra-regional contacts," Ms. Stein writes, "Jews were now disparaged for their cosmopolitanism and recast as ruthless speculators inclined to prey on economically vulnerable farmers."

However, Ms Stein does venture to say some things which might prove provocative in some quarters.

Ms. Stein, who specializes in Sephardic studies in the history department of UCLA, is quick not to attribute the rise and collapse of the feather market to Jewish cunning or sharp practice. She does, however, point to what she calls a "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks." She recognizes that this is a provocative note to strike and defends it by saying: "It has been the goal of this book to eschew the indignity that popular and scholarly sources have directly or indirectly associated with Jews' involvement in modern global commerce. This ambition has been shaped not in the interest of taboo-breaking," she writes, but because "modern Jews" undertook "commercial practices" for "clear historical reasons."

Take nerve to venture outside widely-accepted strictures and break new theoretical ground.

Ms. Stein, who specializes in Sephardic studies in the history department of UCLA, is quick not to attribute the rise and collapse of the feather market to Jewish cunning or sharp practice. She does, however, point to what she calls a "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks." She recognizes that this is a provocative note to strike and defends it by saying: "It has been the goal of this book to eschew the indignity that popular and scholarly sources have directly or indirectly associated with Jews' involvement in modern global commerce. This ambition has been shaped not in the interest of taboo-breaking," she writes, but because "modern Jews" undertook "commercial practices" for "clear historical reasons."

Clear historical reasons?

For centuries, when European Jews were ghettoized and subjected to special "Jew taxes," and not allowed to own real estate, Jews were forced into businesses dealing with products that could be easily transported from place to place – coins, precious stones, commercial paper, works of art. It was easy to roll an oil painting into a suitcase when it was time to flee. And what could be lighter than a bagful of feathers when that ominous knock from the tax collector – or someone much worse – came at the late-night door?

Lighter, but not as easy to carry as a few little stones - valuable gems - inside one's pocket or purse.

It might be simpler to say that Jews took to ostrich feathers not because of the "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks" but because of generations of hard luck.

Simpler, yes, but as accurate? Perhaps simplistic.

Not that every financial bubble-burst is the same. When the feather market collapsed, a magazine joked that the newly devalued ostrich might make a nice change for Thanksgiving dinner, adding: "Heaven help him who gets the neck."