My Library
Six weeks ago, I signed a two year lease on a new apartment in Kips Bay, on the East Side of Manhattan. As I explored the junior 2 bedroom for the first time, I walked down the hallway into the back room. It was small and plain, without much external light. The moment I entered the room, I immediately thought, “This is going to be my library.”
/I/
I’ve always owned a lot of books, but I’ve never really had a library.
Growing up, personal libraries were a facet of my familial life. My grandfather collected books, most rooms in my parents’ home were replete (or even overrun) with books, as were the homes of my aunts and uncles. I loved visiting the different homes because I never knew what I would find. I read Oscar Wilde (and later Orhan Pamuk) for the first time at one aunt’s home, and the first Harry Potter book at another.
The tradition continues even among many members of my generation: While visiting the homes of my brother who is a rabbi in Jerusalem and my cousin who is an English teacher in Miami, one cannot be unimpressed by their joint affinity for the printed word, though the two resulting libraries could not be more diverse. And that is not to mention my younger brother, whose personal library rivals that of many academic institutions. (He would likely inform you about how he receives many new volumes before the university libraries.)
None of these libraries were built in a day; they are organic creations that take a lifetime. My father takes pride in still using the same haggadah during the Passover seder he had received as a bar mitzvah present, despite the plenitude of haggadot in his home, including the one he published himself. And they don’t happen on their own. They develop in a sort of dialogue with each other. A library is not just a series of solitary volumes; one book must lead to another. I even remember a friendly debate at a family dinner about which sets of books and which authors must be placed on separate shelves, or better yet, different bookcases. I think it was in jest, mostly.
As an aside, the bookcases themselves were something in which my parents invested. In the main library and the attic, they were carefully custom crafted to be not only beautiful, but to make use of every inch of available space.
Personal libraries tell you a lot more than just that someone is literate; they show you how they are. An archeologist could comb through a personal library and ascertain the books’ varying ages and usages, and reconstruct an intellectual history of its owner.
“In my library, every book has its own story.”
I could look at every book I own and remember the circumstances of its acquisition. Whether I originally purchased them for a class, or upon the personal recommendation of a professor. Whether they were the result of conversations with friends over brunch or dinner. Whether they were purchased while accidentally visiting a used bookstore after having a few drinks. Or on Amazon, immediately after reading an article in the Economist or the Atlantic quoting it. Or reading every play by Brecht I could find so I would have something to talk about on a first date with an Italian Brecht enthusiast. Or attending a lecture or a reading by the author. Or being given the perfect book for a birthday. Or needing to own the play I just saw. They are filled with stories of friendships, unrequited crushes, happiness and heartbreaks.
But my collection transcends my sociocultural experience. Each time I would embark on a new project, I’d read anything I could find to deepen my understanding about the field in question. When I was designing an intelligent digitized menu for people with dietary restrictions, I bought Taschen’s Menu Design in America so I could better appreciate the tradition I was attempting to advance. My collection of stress-, workplace-, and emotion-related volumes echoes the personal and professional research I’ve been engaged in for the past decade. My selection of books on linguistics comes from a variety of places, including a rabbit hole I went down to better understand verb group taxonomies for a semantic creativity platform I was attempting to build.
/II/
Part of its construction was out of pure necessity. I had nine boxes of books sitting in my office that I had recently shipped from Israel after being in storage for more than eight years. I had another five boxes of books sitting in my parents’ storage room from my time in Los Angeles. And then another six boxes I had accumulated during my time in New York over the past few years.
After I moved in, I searched online for bookcases and other innovative (read: inexpensive) ways to store books. I asked people for suggestions. Nothing felt right. Some looked cheap. Others felt temporary. Others were extremely outside my price range. I realized that I had a lot of books, and any solution needed to be able to hold all of them, and more. It just felt that buying four or five bookcases and figuring out how to fit them in the room lacked something. If I’m going to be here for two years, I thought, I would like some permanence.
And then Peter, the French tâche lapin I found to mount my television, suggested hanging shelves. I hadn’t even considered that walls could hold that much weight. It was like a world of possibility was opened. I looked to the construction of the room for inspiration. I noticed that the corner of the room jutted out about a foot.
Instead of being frustrated that the room was not a perfect rectangle, I leaned into the imperfection. I researched and measured and researched and found floating shelves with nearly invisible mounting that fit perfectly in the space. (As gratitude for the idea, I re-hired Peter to mount all 14 shelves. It took a few days and I think that he has since decided to never hang shelves again.)
Over the next few weeks, all twenty-odd boxes made their way from their various storage spaces to this room and onto the shelves. A couch was purchased, a coffee table constructed, and art hung.
The books were ordered and reordered in a way that would only make sense to me, and in a way that would make me smile.
Doesn’t it makes perfect sense to have Reza Aslan’s Zealot, No God but Godand God, Guy Branum’s My Life as a Goddess, Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deusand Sapiens, Viktor Frankl’s Man in Search of Meaning, Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic, and Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought side by side? A little further down that same shelf, I experienced a perverse sense of joy in placing a particular author between two writers I was quite certain he personally despised.
In another section, I found myself placing Steven Greenberg’s Wrestling with God & Men about homosexuality in the Jewish tradition next to Deborah Nussbaum’s From Disgust to Humanity, on sexual orientation and Constitutional Law. I felt that logically, I had to put Randy Shilt’s And The Band Played On, a book about institutional and governmental inaction during the AIDS crisis next to them, to remind myself how much this is not just theory. Avram Finkelstein’s After Silence, a book about activism and art during the AIDS crisis, came next, followed by Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner’s Modern Loss, a book of essays on dealing with modern grief and mourning, and finally Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, because while I could not fathom the magnitude of the AIDS crisis, I could remember feeling the loss during the series of queer teen suicides eight years ago, and how my understanding of his work has evolved over the past two decades.
I noticed certain repeating themes that popped up in different points in my life. I discovered multiple copies of various books that I picked up in different points in my life. As diverse as everything was, it was all me. I was able to categorize my fascinations, perhaps not with a discrete classification, but by associating like with like.
As I took a step back and observed everything I had done, I became overwhelmed with nostalgia. I thought of all the people I had met in all the places I have lived. All the relationships that were present in the room. I saw the book written by my grandfather as a letter to my grandmother in 1945 and another book written by my father while he was mourning him. I saw the small talmud I’ve owned since I was a teenager. I had memories of art exhibits and countries I’ve visited and classes I had taken and research I had done and the dream of an academic life and entrepreneurial ventures and projects I had attempted and articles I wrote and people who broke my heart and languages I’ve tried to learn and so many more things. All these memories were finally in the same place.
I realized that the library was only here because of many people: Ahuvah, my brothers Reuven and Menachem, my childhood best friend Ephie, my cousin Moshe, Olivier, Jésus and Ruth, my mother and father, and my boyfriend Isaac, who each helped move, store, or pack the boxes of books at some point over the past decade. And obviously, Duvi, for suggesting I move the couch against the wall.
The following day, I unceremoniously walked into the room, picked up a book I hadn’t yet opened, laid down on the couch and began to read it. As one does when they enter a library.
It was Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, a book I had purchased on a whim a few months earlier at The Strand, and of which I knew nothing about. The book began by talking about interior design:
“The arrangement of furniture offers a faithful image of the familial and social structures of a period.
… The pieces of furniture confront one another, jostle one another, and implicate one another in a unity that not so much spatial as moral in character.
… Such a family home is a specific space which takes little account of any objective decorative requirements, because the primary function of furniture and objects here is to personify human relationships, to fill the space they share between them, and to be inhabited by a soul.
… Human beings and objects are indeed bound together in a collusion in which objects take on a certain density, an emotional value — what might be called a ‘presence’. What gives the houses of our childhood such depth and resonance in memory is clearly this complex structure of interiority, and the objects within it serve for us as boundary markers of the symbolic configuration known as home.”
From when I was very young, I had always innately intuited that every home should have a library. At that moment, I realized that I no longer was just living in some apartment, with a random assortment of books on shelves. I finally had a home.
If you would like to add a book to my library, feel free to browse here. :)
I would be remiss if I didn’t thank
Tim Mulkerin (Tim Mulkerin), Adam Smith(Adam Zmith), Juliana Antoninus, Isaac Lobel, and Duvi Stahler (Duvi Stahler) for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this piece. If you have the opportunity to hire any one them, you should.