Space and Place, People and Objects Example

[dropcap style=”book”]F[/dropcap]rom 1979 to 1990 my father’s Jewish bookstore, J. Roth/Bookseller, was located in a small neighborhood known as Pico-Robertson. Squeezed between Mid-City/Carthay Circle and Beverly Hills/West L.A., it was once a quiet residential neighborhood with a sleepy retail corridor along Pico. Now it’s the bustling heart of Jewish Los Angeles. Yet despite how Jewish the neighborhood might seem, its cultural diversity reflects a range of peoples from Europe to Central Asia to the Middle East. This is evident in all the store signs that advertise Persian, Israeli, and traditional Eastern European/Russian Jewish products and foods. There’s also a vibrant kosher restaurant scene up and down Pico with a diverse selection of cuisines, suggesting that the neighborhood’s acculturated, middle-class demographic is aware of and open to the culinary influences and fads circulating through L.A.

A Map of Pico Blvd.

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That diversity seems evocative to me, not only of the contingent and changeable nature of Jewish identities and cultures, but also of the wide-ranging understanding of Jewish literature retailed in my father’s bookstore. Today, the new immigrants and food trends that define Pico-Robertson as a Jewish place reflect current global flows in people, consumer goods, religiosity, and especially capital. Pico-Robertson is both a contemporary mixture and a historical layering of dynamic social relations, linkages, and memories (Cresswell 70). In my father’s day, that cultural dynamism and socially meaningful interconnection between people and material things was evident in the space of his bookstore and, especially, in the collection of books he sold in the store.

[hr style=”2″ margin=”40px 0px 40px 0px”]grand opening 1979-1

[dropcap style=”book”]M[/dropcap]y father remembers that he chose the location on Pico because it was fresh territory with clean streets and neat storefronts located at the farther, western edge of the neighborhood’s fast-growing Jewish population. It was free of the clutter and Jewish kitsch he associated with the aging Fairfax Ave. neighborhood, the previous center of Jewish retailing in L.A. The arrival of J. Roth/Bookseller and Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles, which also opened in 1979 even farther west on 9760 W. Pico Blvd., signaled a new phase in the neighborhood’s development.

The influx of new Orthodox organizations quickly reshaped the retailing environment; the neighborhood’s businesses became more identifiably Jewish, with restaurants proudly advertising their kosher certifications. It was a major moment, I remember, when Dunkin Donuts opened with bona fide rabbinic approval of their donuts’ kashrut. The excitement was only matched by the opening in 1985 of Milky Way, an upscale dairy restaurant owned by Steven Spielberg’s mother, Leah Adler.

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Photographs of my father’s bookstore in Judaica Book News and The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles reveal the care he took to arrange and display his books, the meticulous presentation of his collection. Yet just as important to the store’s outward face was its inward floor plan, which reflected a certain narrative about the collection. Following the books in one direction, customers were clearly led from the past to the present, from a Jew’s foundational reading toward works that, in some ways, depended on previous knowledge to contextualize their Jewishness. Traversing the store from the opposite direction simply turned such a pedagogical narrative into an archaeology of Jewish writing. Each wall could also be read in itself as a minor commentary on Jewish literature; most evocative was the far wall, which was telling in its reflection of my father’s and, by extension, of publishers’ thinking about the historical succession of Jewish writing: Bible, History/Holocaust/Zionism, Philosophy/ Jewish Thought, Fiction/Poetry, and Yiddish/Cookbooks—a spatial narrative whose punch line is “So now let’s eat.”

Below is a floor plan of the store. If you hover over the image, small icons will pop-up.

  • Green icons indicate text
  • Red icons indicate image
  • Begin at the entrance and go clockwise

One of my own photographs of the store also reveals a prominent and very telling detail of the store’s presentation. Rightward from the entrance, at the far end of the new-book table, was a large support column on which hung a sepia-tone photograph of a bearded old Jew in an old-fashioned, wide-brim biberhit, a beaver hat. inside_bookstore_pptHe is leaning on a shtender, a lectern, in front of a Torah ark and looking straight into the camera. That was my great-great-grandfather, Dovid Roth. His is an image of Jewish memory and authenticity that privately advertised my father’s ownership of the collection and publicly advertised its cultural purpose. It also turned the customer into the object of a Jewish gaze.   Given the composition of the photograph and its placement just above eye level, my great-great-grandfather functioned as a kind of store greeter, welcoming and surveying all who came in. His regard and appearance assured customers, especially new ones in search of a title like Hayim Donin’s To Be a Jew or Morris Kertzer’s What Is a Jew?, that they were in the right place. What I am suggesting here is that the consciousness that Walter Benjamin, his essay “Unpacking My Library,” attributes to a collection—a consciousness that is both an extension and reflection of the owner’s mind and tastes (67)—finds symbolic expression in this photograph of a forefather. It illustrates the nature of my father’s “living library” as Benjamin describes a book collection (66): seeing and being seen within a space organized under this sign of memory and by the memory-driven spatial narratives of the store’s floor plan created a metaphoric Jewish community where both the books and the customers were subjects and objects, actors and acted upon insofar as each took possession of the other. [hr style=”2″ margin=”40px 0px 40px 0px”] [dropcap style=”book”]T[/dropcap]o put it plainly, Jewish memory and Jewish identity accrued social meanings through the customer’s interactions with the store’s collection. Benjamin helps us to see that J. Roth/Bookseller offered customers an opportunity to peruse and possess the personal recollections, creative works, and scholarly interpretations attesting to past and present varieties of Jewish identities and historical experiences. It offered them, in other words, an opportunity to define and be defined by their own Jewish collections. Or, to borrow an insight from James Clifford, the store exemplified that in the modern, consumer oriented West, collecting things is an extension of “the idea that identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience),” and that the ways we collect objects help remind us “of the artifices we employ to gather a world around us” (218, 229). This timeline, for example, is both a history of one bookseller’s world and a record of the objects and memories that made up the J. Roth/Bookseller collection.

My father’s bookstore was, therefore, an artifice too, a space that enabled a certain kind of cultural and self-possession. To shop at the store was an engagement in self-definition and self-explanation. It acted out in small, and for purposes that did not require that one identify as Jewish so much as with Jews, the larger dynamic of my father’s quest to gather a meaningful world around himself through a collection of books. The store, and its gathering of books as objects, reveal modern Jewish literature to be a business, a network of human behaviors, transactions, and deeds in and of their time, and reveal bookstores as places where ideas and capital collide as literal bodies. This knowledge does not so much change our notions of Jewish literature as reassert what is tangible yet transient about it (definitions, like possessions, are fugitive goods), without reducing such transience to the vagaries of biological or cultural identity.

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[dropcap style=”book”]A[/dropcap]s my list of J. Roth/Bookseller bestsellers suggests, the varied collection within my father’s bookstore also underlined that a “modern” Jewish literature is not self-evidently a canon of works produced at a particular moment in history or even strictly by Jews. What is modern about that literature is implicit in its complex of responses to, improvisations on, and commercial interrelationships with classical Jewish texts; Jewish mystical writing and the Gentile interpretations inspired by it during the Renaissance; works that illuminate the ragged edges of Jewish affiliation like Uriel Acosta’s Exemplar Humanæ Vitæ or Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus; and works by non-Jews that claim to describe Jews, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew—or even The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, both of which my father kept in a drawer of his desk available for sale, should someone ask for them. In addition, “literature,” as it was constellated in my father’s bookstore, quite obviously meant more than just works of fiction and poetry.

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Illustration of Borge’s Library of Babel

As a commercial library of Jewish memory, then—memory of patriarchs and matriarchs, of law and custom, languages and commentary, the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the diverse histories of a transnational Diaspora—my father’s bookstore offered customers a social and cultural opportunity to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct a modern Jewish literature of their own. But it had its limits; the physical space of the store was finite. It was not, and my father never intended it to be, a version of Borges’s Library of Babel, that labyrinthine metonymy for the mind in which the entirety of human literary production would be cataloged and preserved for all time. And it was subject to the commercial and cultural marketplace, liable to competition and to public statements of discontent with the collection, such as when certain customers felt compelled to turn Lev Raphael’s Dancing on Tisha B’Av face down on the new-book table because its frank portrayal of gay Jewish life offended them.

In these ways, the store revealed its vulnerability and historical contingency, foreshadowing its demise. Walter Benjamin, in “Unpacking My Library,” observes that a book collection like my father’s is both a personal and communal inheritance, and

“inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility” (66).

Yet there was blindness along with Benjamin’s insight. The transmissibility of a collection may be its most distinguished trait, but it is not a given. There may be no one willing to purchase the collection, or the inheritors may decline their inheritance. The market may dry up or move on; after all, and especially in the West, the past is an endlessly regenerating commodity. And if objects share in our subjectivity, then they, too, are mortal.

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[dropcap style=”book”]I[/dropcap]n 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake revealed the necessity for seismic retrofitting of all buildings in Los Angeles, and the landlord of 9427 Pico began work on the property. The store took on the look of a construction site. At the same time, the book business changed yet again. In the 1980s, S. I. Newhouse and Rupert Murdoch were transforming publishing in America, merging older houses and ruthlessly demanding that every title pull its weight in profits (Schiffrin 82). More important, by the mid-1980s, the mall bookstore chains—Walden Books, B. Dalton, and Crown Books—reached the limit of their expansion. They were sold off to outfits like Kmart and Barnes and Noble that developed the new superstore model “with several times the number of titles and the amount of floorspace found in the typical chain outlet.…Superstores were a hybrid of the large independent bookstores that developed in the 1980s, in part as a reaction to the competition presented by the chains, and the large specialty stores, or ‘category killers,’ that had developed in several other consumer good fields” (Miller 50).

My father understood that these new book superstores could and would undercut his prices, and he even understood how attractive a target his extensive backlist presented to them. But his strategy for facing these challenges was to move his store in November 1990 to larger quarters in Beverly Hills, adjacent to Beth Jacob Congregation and Hillel Hebrew Academy, and thereby mimic a superstore model. The new store was modern, box-like, and cold. Though it was only six blocks from the old location, to the Los Angeles Jewish community it seemed as if the bookstore had become too upscale and had lost its taam, its Jewish taste.

OlympicStore4For the first time, and in response to the superstores’ increasing pressure, my father began to stock ritual items, greeting cards, and gifts. He did so, however, with the same collector’s sensibility with which he had built up his book collection, and, ironically, this proved to be his undoing. His obsession with collecting blinded him to the dangers of the social changes taking place around him: the resurgence of Orthodox Judaism, the rise of the ba’al t’shuva phenomenon, and political developments in Israel that turned the question “Who is a Jew?” into an international Jewish brawl.

In addition, as Haym Soloveitchik observed, the shift of religious and cultural authority to texts and “their enshrinement as the sole source of authenticity” (339), though potentially a boon for my father’s business, instead provided a warrant for the newly religious to create litmus tests in order to discriminate between authentic and inauthentic texts. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, with its report of American Jews’ high rates of intermarriage, only fanned the flames.

My father responded to these changes by wearing a kippah during business hours (for the first time in his career, and not without complaint) and by simply collecting more Orthodox and traditional Jewish materials. The primary way that he did that was by inviting an Orthodox silver wholesaler and an Orthodox sofer, a scribe, to set up their shops within his store. He put the sofer behind the glass wall of a corner room that had originally separated his small collection of Jewish paintings from the book collection, thinking to show him off as an attraction.

Unwittingly, though, my father turned his store from a living library into a museum; his sofer exhibit, and the scribe’s performance of culture, suggested that authentic Jewish tradition belonged, literally, to religious insiders, relegating nonobservant outsiders to the role of audience and cultural tourists. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 410) This undermined the very concept of the bookstore. What had once been hospitable and inviting space now appeared staged and contested. It discomforted, even alienated, the few remaining Reform and secular customers who had not already been lured away by the cheaper prices and caffeine-fueled socializing at the superstores. In the meantime, the sofer, who stayed in the store after my father closed up for the night, was busy with his own plans. In less than a year, he opened his own shop back on Pico Boulevard, the 613 Mitzvah Store, which carried only “kosher” sforim and ritual goods.

That signaled the end for my father’s bookstore. If the Jewish memory that materialized in his store can be said to have described a collective memory, it was only because my father, as a collector, gathered as much as would fit into that space. Once that memory collection—and, by extension, the definition of modern Jewish literature that it described—was broken up and demarcated by Jewish book publishers, retailers, and consumers into rigidly policed categories of classical and modern, traditional and secular, authentic and inauthentic, its purchase became subject to availability. By the spring of 1994, the shelves and tables of J. Roth / Bookseller were thinned out and filled with gaps, and both Jewish and non-Jewish publishers began refusing my father’s orders. In June, he sold what stock remained to another Jewish bookstore that took over his lease, and though he could have declared bankruptcy, he instead worked out repayment schedules with his many creditors. He paid the last of them off in 2004.

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Gotham Book Mart, a famous midtown Manhattan bookstore and cultural landmark, closed in 2007.

[dropcap style=”book”]T[/dropcap]oday, Jewish bookstores, like American bookstores in general, have reverted to the commercially and economically more feasible model of their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forebears, albeit one now buttressed by new technologies. No Jewish bookstore that I know of carries only books, just as no general bookstore can survive without offering, if not the nonliterary inventory, at least the level of service of the old department stores. That is the secret to the survival of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon; City Lights in San Francisco; Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California; the Tattered Cover in Denver; Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi; Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida; and Kramerbooks in Washington, D.C.—among the last of the large independents, a fact that they all advertise on their Internet websites.

Bookstores come and go, however; insolvency is an ever-present hazard of doing business. Bemoaning the end of a particular model of the American bookstore, taking offense that no one in the new book superstores “seems to love books, or even to like them, except as money makers” (Perry 109), simply underscores the one enduring aspect of the bookstore: it is a culturally invaluable space on which to project notions about writing and reading that express, and allay, anxiety about changes in literature and literacy.

Change, though, is inevitable. In Brooklyn, Eichler’s Judaica Superstore, the largest Orthodox-oriented bookstore in America, retails a very well stocked but narrowly conceived selection of Jewish books in Hebrew, English, and, increasingly, Yiddish. The four largest nondenominational Jewish bookstores—Westside Judaica and J. Levine Books & Judaica in Manhattan, Pinskers Judaica Center in Pittsburgh (home to 1-800-Judaism and Judaism.com), and Rosenblum’s World of Judaica in Chicago (home to alljudaica.com)—offer more widely conceived selections, though their backlists are thin and their stock is still aimed primarily at tradition-minded customers. All organize the dynamic and varied shapes of Jewish literature according to the habits of a new generation of American Jews. They forward a definition of that literature reflective of the more stringent tastes of those buyers and sellers who currently wield the greatest desire for, and ascribe the highest value to, the religion section of the collection.

Westside Judaica, Manhattan

J. Levine Books & Judaica, Manhattan

Pinkers Judaica Center, Pittsburgh

Rosenblum’s World of Judaica, Manhattan

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Sources

Images

All images of J. Roth Bookseller courtesy of Laurence Roth.

Desmazieres, Erik. “La Salles des planetes.” The Library of Congress: Jung and Jorge Luis Borges. <http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/redbook/legacy/ExhibitObjects/JungAndBorges…>

Intermarriage Graph

United Jewish Communities: The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01. <http://www.jewishfederations.org/local_includes/downloads/4606.pdf>

Text

Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Objects of Ethnography.” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

Miller, Laura J. Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Perry, Jack. “Bookstores, Communist and Capitalist,” The American Scholar 55.1 (Winter 1986): 107-111.

Schiffrin, Andre. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso, 2000.

Soloveitchik, Haym. “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy.” Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader. Ed. Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman. Hanover: Published by University Press of New England [for] Brandeis University Press, 1999.

Video

Youtube. Stock Footage: Loma Prieta Stock Footage. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaW9rqTy_Yk>

Present: Place and People Example

The last time I was in Los Angeles I made a point of driving by 9427 West Pico Boulevard, the location of my father’s Jewish bookstore from 1979 to 1990. It was located in a small neighborhood known as Pico-Robertson, an area squeezed between Mid-City/Carthay Circle and Beverly Hills/West L.A. that was once a quiet residential neighborhood with a sleepy retail corridor along Pico and is now the bustling heart of Jewish Los Angeles.

This map is from the Los Angeles Times’ Neighborhood Project, which provides a comprehensive profile of the Pico-Robertson neighborhood. Click on the map to visit the website and learn more about crime and schools in the area. 

Picomap

According to the Los Angeles Times’ neighborhood map of Los Angeles County, Pico-Robertson’s outline looks somewhat like a chubby axe stretching from La Cienega Blvd. on the east to Beverly Green Drive on the west, with West 18th Street the axe-blade facing south and Gregory Way the head’s poll to the north. The belly of the handle runs along Cashio Street and its back along Whitworth Drive.

income_chart
Household income
Ethnicity

Almost 20,000 people live within its 1.03 square mile boundaries, which makes it one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in L.A. and L.A. County. These days the neighborhood is 73.5% white; not surprisingly, the most common ancestries are Iranian and Russian, and 34.6% are foreign born with the majority coming from Iran and Israel. The median age is 36, the median household income is $63,356, and 48.3% of residents age 25 or older hold a four year degree, which is high for L.A. and L.A. County. There are 11 public schools and 12 private schools in the neighborhood; 8 of the 12 are Jewish schools. Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy (K-8), which I attended, is the largest of the private schools with an enrollment of 405.

Despite how Jewish the neighborhood might seem, its cultural diversity in fact reflects a range of peoples from Europe to Central Asia to the Middle East. This is evident in all the new store signs (new to me that is) that advertise Persian, Israeli, and traditional Eastern European/Russian Jewish products and foods. There’s also a vibrant kosher restaurant scene up and down Pico with a diverse selection of cuisines, suggesting that the neighborhood’s acculturated, middle-class demographic is aware of and open to the culinary influences and fads circulating through L.A.: MexiKosher, Jeff’s Gourmet Kosher Sausage Factory, Meshuga Sushi, Eilat Bakery, Kolah Farangi Kabob & Chinese Food, Bodhi-Thai Vegetarian & Vegan Kitchen, Brooklyn Pizza and Pasta.

Jeff’s Gourmet Kosher Sausage Factory

Bodhi-Thai Vegetarian & Vegan Kitchen

Brooklyn Pizza & Pasta

Comparison
Above: J. Roth Bookseller
Below: Pico Glatt Mart

As I approach the intersection of Pico and Elm, where my father’s bookstore used to be, I must seem like an annoying out of town driver, my car slowing down in the now always heavy traffic, my head swiveling madly to check out what new developments have overtaken a block and a building I know better than any place in which I’ve since lived. Leaning over I see that, yes, Pico Glatt Mart, the kosher market that replaced the bookstore, is still there. What a food-obsessed street. And that’s all I can see with any clarity this time because the cars honking their horns behind me are making it clear that my nostalgia drive-by is holding up commuters with more pressing concerns in the present.

But perhaps this experience is, in a metaphoric way, also the type of pause in space that the human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan considers a sign of place (Cresswell 8). That is, much to the consternation of my traffic mates the brief slowdown in time and space that I’ve created indicates that here at 9427 is a meaningful location, though one whose meaning at that particular instant is dependent on my memories and on me. Yes, the new immigrants and food trends that now define Pico-Robertson as a Jewish place reflect current global flows in people, consumer goods, religiosity, and especially capital as scholars like David Harvey would point out (Cresswell 58-59). I suppose I’d like the street to remain the same, to see my father’s bookstore and its unique collection of books as still in place and still an actor in the contemporary social and cultural mix of this Jewish neighborhood.

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My car seems to materialize both the fixity and the mobility that are at odds in such a social space (Cresswell 58). Still, the bookstore as a retail business is always on the move, always finding another version of “the proper environment for the sale of books” (40), to quote Laura Miller’s study of bookselling. If, as she points out, the consumer is sovereign in the modern version of bookstores then new choices and changes that serve the new customers in this neighborhood are inevitable, and so Pico-Robertson is very much a place in Doreen Massey’s understanding of the term: both a contemporary mixture and a historical layering of dynamic social relations, linkages, and memories (Cresswell 70). Or, as I experienced it, a moment’s traffic jam between my time and my father’s place.

 

Sources

Charts

Los Angeles Times, “Income” chart. <http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/pico-robertson/>

Los Angeles Times, “Ethnicity” chart. <http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/pico-robertson/>

Images

J. Roth Bookseller photos courtesy of Laurence Roth.

Pico Glatt Mart photo <http://picoglattmart.com/>

Maps

Los Angeles Times, Pico-Robertson Neighborhood Map. <http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/pico-robertson/>

Google Maps: Bodhi-Thai Vegetarian & Vegan Kitchen, Brooklyn Pizza & Pasta, Jeff’s Gourmet Kosher Sausage Factory.

Text

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004.

Miller, Laura J. Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

 

Past: Place and People Example

Like many folks I play hooky from my work routine by ghost walking on “street view” in Google Maps, touring places I’ve been to or plan to see. So when I get the urge to revisit my father’s bookstore I can do what I’m doing as I write this: gazing at the Google Maps window neatly placed next to this open Word document on my desktop, considering all the information available to me about the single-story building at 9427 W. Pico Blvd. that used to house my father’s bookstore, located, if you’re curious, at 34º 03’ 19.26” N, 118º 23’ 41.25” W, elev. 59m.


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The ornamental wrought iron that fills in the decorative arches on the upper tier of the building’s façade is still there, though beneath them the new tenants, Pico Glatt Mart, have added what looks to be a home-made metal cart return and four green sun-shades over the display windows and entrance. Hanging from the shade facing Pico is a banner proclaiming “Shabbat Take Out Available Here.” The show window beneath, which used to feature new books, now features a sign assuring customers that the store is “Under Strict Supervision,” while folks more interested in value might be enticed by the banner on the shade over the entrance advertising “Lunch $4.99.” The photograph shows the sliding doors at the entrance wide open, but all I can see is the side of a Snapple display and the back end of a shopping cart peeking out where the children’s section used to be.

The grand opening of J. Roth's Bookstore in 1979.
The grand opening of J. Roth’s Bookstore in 1979.

While I can gaze as long as I want at that photo and the coordinates on Google Map, I can’t step into the past from my office here in Pennsylvania. The real ghosts are the businesses and people who used to inhabit the Pico-Robertson neighborhood during J. Roth/Bookseller’s heyday from 1979 to 1990. The store was particularly well suited for that time: the civil rights movement and Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967 provoked a surge of American Jewish ethnic pride over the next decade, which in turn led to a flowering of renewed Jewish learning at Hebrew Union College on the Eastside and at UCLA on the Westside, in synagogues and day schools, and among those caught up in the Havurah movement and in the rage for Hasidic literature. By 1979, according to the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, J. Roth/Bookseller “stood alone as the place to· find seemingly every book of interest to Jews…. Everyone, from Orthodox rabbis to Hollywood stars to visiting dignitaries, knew that whatever the Jewish book, J. Roth had it.”

My father remembers that he chose the location on Pico because it was fresh territory with clean streets and neat storefronts located at the farther, western edge of the neighborhood’s fast-growing Jewish population. It was free of the clutter and Jewish kitsch he associated with the aging Fairfax Ave. neighborhood, the previous center of Jewish retailing in L.A. To be sure, it was still a Jewish neighborhood; B’nai David-Judea Congregation, founded in 1948, anchored the center of Pico-Robertson at 8906 W. Pico, and Beth Jacob Congregation, located since 1954 on Olympic Blvd., defined the northern border between Pico-Robertson and Beverly Hills. Both were Orthodox synagogues. But the retail businesses had been mostly dry cleaners, upholstery stores, appliance repair shops, and sundry non-kosher restaurants. One of the oldest stores in the neighborhood was (and still is) Sonny Alexander Florist, established by New York cab driver Alexander Friedman in 1929 after the stock market crash convinced him to head west and start over at 9330 W. Pico.  Jewish owned food shops like Beverlywood Bakery, established in 1946 at the corner of Pico and Oakhurst Dr., or Factor’s Famous Deli, opened in 1948 across the street from the 9427 building, or Label’s Table Delicatessen, which started in 1974 at 9226 W. Pico, had no kosher certifications and they catered mainly to non-observant Jews and to non-Jewish customers.

B’nai David-Judea Congregation
Beverlywood Bakery
Beth Jacob Congregation

A Map of Pico Blvd.


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My father in front of the bookstore.

The arrival of J. Roth/Bookseller and Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles, which also opened in 1979 even farther west on 9760 W. Pico Blvd., signaled a new phase in the neighborhood’s development. Young Israel of Century City soon opened up a block east of the bookstore catering to the young newcomers, affiliated with the burgeoning Orthodox revival, who wanted a separate and ritually stricter congregation than those at Beth Jacob and B’nai David-Judea. The Aish Center appeared shortly after at the corner of Pico and Doheny Dr., one of the outposts of Aish HaTorah, an Orthodox Jewish outreach organization serving ba’alei t’shuva, returnees to the faith, who were searching for “authentic” Judaism. And it wasn’t long before Chabad-Lubavitch showed up too at 8850 W. Pico, perhaps the most well known Hasidic sect in America because of their commitment to outreach and educational activities for Jews, especially young unaffiliated ones.

The influx of all these new Orthodox organizations quickly reshaped the retailing environment; the neighborhood’s businesses became more identifiably Jewish, with restaurants proudly advertising their kosher certifications. It was a major moment, I remember, when Dunkin Donuts opened with bona fide rabbinic approval of their donuts’ kashrut. The excitement was only matched by the opening in 1985 of Milky Way, an upscale dairy restaurant owned by Steven Spielberg’s mother, Leah Adler.

For a long while there were no other Jewish booksellers or Judaica shops on Pico. But beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s those businesses started showing up and putting pressure on my father to carry more Orthodox and traditional Jewish materials. When he moved in 1990 to a new location on Olympic Blvd., a block down from Beth Jacob Congregation, he invited an Orthodox silver wholesaler and an Orthodox sofer, a scribe, to set up their shops within his store.

The Mitzvah Store
Brenco Judaica
Solomon’s Bookstore

It was not a successful arrangement. In less than a year, the sofer opened his own shop back on Pico Blvd., the 613 Mitzvah Store, which carried only “kosher” sforim and ritual goods. It’s still there. Soon there were other sforim stores and Judaica shops on Pico: Brenco Judaica, Ufaratsta Judaica Center, Nagila Gifts & Housewares, and Cadeau Gifts, Silver, Jewelry, Judaica. Today there’s even an outpost of one of the Fairfax Ave. Jewish bookshops doing business on Pico, Solomon’s Book Store. It’s as if the old map of Jewish L.A. that my father wanted to stretch westward had finally sprung forward into the present like some cultural slinky, all the places and people contracting into their familiar shapes, only now on Pico Blvd.

It’s tempting, of course, to claim that not just a map but also a model of Jewish bookstore relocated to this new Jewish place. Here again were those smaller Jewish bookstores of New York’s Lower East Side, themselves modeled after the bookselling stores, stalls, and peddler’s carts ubiquitous in Eastern Europe. As a 1906 magazine article described it, these stores, “musty with the smell of books and soup” (“Jewish Bookstores” 21), featured in their show windows ritual items like prayer shawls, phylacteries, mezuzahs, kiddush cups, and Torah mantles, but in back stocked prayer books, Bibles, and works of halakhah (Jewish law) and responsa (legal rulings). They might also, depending on the owner’s tastes, carry Yiddish stories by Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Abramovitsh) or Jacob Dineson, plays by Jacob Gordin, or even Yiddish translations of Shakespeare and Tolstoy (“Jewish Bookstores” 22-23).

But that would be a historically inaccurate and far too nostalgic a view. I think it’s more accurate to say that when places are relocated spatially and their past social and cultural arrangements relocated by the present too, the mix of the familiar and the novel that appears on the street reminds us not of models per se but of their social mobility and cultural changeability. Which is why Christopher Morley’s image of the bookstore in his novel Parnassus on Wheels and in his essay “Escaped Into Print” has always been so appealing to me. Whether a travelling book van or “the world’s first seafaring bookshop” (“Escaped” 62) aboard the R.M.S. Tuscania in 1922, the bookstore in Morley’s view is constantly in motion, helping to create “interlacing roots of association” (“Escaped” 64) between books, people, and places. J. Roth/Bookseller may no longer be a part of the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, but the Jewish bookstores that multiplied in its place attest to the various ways that the past still circulates in the present.

Sources

Photos courtesy of Laurence Roth. 

Maps embedded from Google.

Links 

Jewish Virtual Library, “Six-Day War.” <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/1967toc.html>

Pinsky, Mark. Los Angeles Times, “Quiet Revolution: Havurah: A New Spirit in Judaism.” <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/1967toc.html>

Photos

Beth Jacob Congregation. <http://www.bethjacob.org/home.html>

B’nai David-Judea Congregation. <https://www.localresearch.com/listings/bnai-david-judea/>

Brenco Judaica. <http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/brenco-judaica-los-angeles?select=YGIxZy4oiy6hw5BDGGZ71w#YGIxZy4oiy6hw5BDGGZ71w>

Beverlywood Bakery <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beverlywood_Bakery_%26_Beverlywood_Kosher_Meats.JPG>

The Mitzvah Store. <http://www.experiencingla.com/2013/05/pico-blvd-again-from-beach-to-fairfax.html>

Solomon’s Hebrew & English Book Store. <http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/solomons-hebrew-and-english-book-store-los-angeles?select=oPv9_2nrl_RAOarjkg-_jA#oPv9_2nrl_RAOarjkg-_jA>

Illustration

Douglas, Gorsline. Leaves and Pages, “Parnassus on Wheels.” <http://leavesandpages.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/review-parnassus-on-wheels-by-christopher-morley/>

Images in the timeline

Natali, Enrico. Lomography, “Subway, New York City, 1960.” <http://www.lomography.com/magazine/news/2012/02/17/black-and-white-pictures-of-1960s-subway-scenes>

Walton, Carlton. Scuba Diving, “Redbird subway car.” <http://njscuba.net/reefs/site_nj_redbirds.html>

Text

“Jewish Bookstores of the Old East Side,” The Book Peddler: Newsletter of the National Yiddish Book Exchange 17 (summer 1992): 20-23.

Morley, Christopher. Parnassus on Wheels. New York: Avon Books, 1983.

______. “Escaped Into Print,” in Ex Libris Carissimis. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1961.

Space and Objects Example

Photographs of my father’s bookstore in Judaica Book News and The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles reveal the care he took to arrange and display his books, the meticulous presentation of his collection. Yet just as important to the store’s outward face was its inward floor plan, which reflected a certain narrative about the collection.

Below is a floor plan of the store. If you hover over the image, small icons will pop-up.

  • Green icons indicate text
  • Red icons indicate image
  • Begin at the entrance and go clockwise


Following the books in this direction, customers were clearly led from the past to the present, from a Jew’s foundational reading toward works that, in some ways, depended on previous knowledge to contextualize their Jewishness. Traversing the store from the opposite direction simply turned such a pedagogical narrative into an archaeology of Jewish writing. Each wall could also be read in itself as a minor commentary on Jewish literature; most evocative was the far wall, which was telling in its reflection of my father’s and, by extension, of publishers’ thinking about the historical succession of Jewish writing: Bible, History/Holocaust/Zionism, Philosophy/ Jewish Thought, Fiction/Poetry, and Yiddish/Cookbooks—a spatial narrative whose punch line is “So now let’s eat.”

One of my own photographs of the store also reveals a prominent and very telling detail of the store’s presentation. Rightward from the entrance, at the far end of the new-book table, was a large support column on which hung a sepia-tone photograph of a bearded old Jew in an old-fashioned, wide-brim biberhit, a beaver hat. He is leaning on a shtender, a lectern, in front of a Torah ark and looking straight into the camera. That was my great-great-grandfather, Dovid Roth. His is an image of Jewish memory and authenticity that privately advertised my father’s ownership of the collection and publicly advertised its cultural purpose. It also turned the customer into the object of a Jewish gaze.

Given the composition of the photograph and its placement just above eye level, my great-great-grandfather functioned as a kind of store greeter, welcoming and surveying all who came in. His regard and appearance assured customers, especially new ones in search of a title like Hayim Donin’s To Be a Jew or Morris Kertzer’s What Is a Jew?, that they were in the right place. What I am suggesting here is that the consciousness that Walter Benjamin, in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” attributes to a collection—a consciousness that is both an extension and reflection of the owner’s mind and tastes (67)—finds symbolic expression in this photograph of a forefather. It illustrates the nature of my father’s “living library” as Benjamin describes a book collection (66): seeing and being seen within a space organized under this sign of memory and by the memory-driven spatial narratives of the store’s floor plan created a metaphoric Jewish community where both the books and the customers were subjects and objects, actors and acted upon insofar as each took possession of the other.

To put it plainly, Jewish memory and Jewish identity accrued social meanings through the customer’s interactions with the store’s collection. Benjamin helps us to see that J. Roth/Bookseller offered customers an opportunity to peruse and possess the personal recollections, creative works, and scholarly interpretations attesting to past and present varieties of Jewish identities and historical experiences. It offered them, in other words, an opportunity to define and be defined by their own Jewish collections. Or, to borrow an insight from James Clifford, the store exemplified that in the modern, consumer-oriented West, collecting things is an extension of “the idea that identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience),” and that the ways we collect objects help remind us “of the artifices we employ to gather a world around us” (218, 229).

The graph below depicts J. Roth Bookseller’s bestsellers (by author and title), which helps illustrate the various kinds of books customers might identify with, and be identified by, by purchasing them at the store.


My father’s bookstore was one such artifice, a space that enabled a certain kind of cultural and self-possession. To shop at the store was, therefore, an engagement in self-definition and self-explanation. It acted out in small, and for purposes that did not require that one identify as Jewish so much as with Jews, the larger dynamic of my father’s quest to gather a meaningful world around himself through a collection of books. This is one reason that the store was perceived as a welcoming space by Jews of every denomination and ideological bent-from Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovitz, the Orthodox chief rabbi of England, to Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, the Reform rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles; from Irving Howe to Dennis Prager; and from Barbra Streisand to Wolf Blitzer. They all shopped there. Non-Jews, too, saw it as a welcoming space, especially the evangelical Christians who visited the store in the 1980s in search of the Jewish roots of Jesus.

Sources

Text

Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Images

Courtesy of Laurence Roth