getting lost in a good book

[samhexum]

OR 10,000...

Too Many Books?
Mendel Uminer faced a crisis when his landlord objected to the 10,000 volumes in his New York studio apartment.

For a young Jewish scholar and writer named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge.

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.

“I’m always reading,” Uminer, 31, said. “I’m reading to extract knowledge. Every book I own, I need. My library is my manual for life.”

He worked as a freelance Hebrew translator and used the apartment as the headquarters for his fledgling literary journal, Notarikon Review, hosting parties that gained a reputation among quarters of New York’s literary underclass. Striving writers drank beer among the teetering stacks while arguing over foreign affairs and Greek poetry.

The stacks kept rising as Uminer added his hauls from thrift shops, book dealers and eBay deliveries. “I don’t think of myself as a hoarder,” he said, “but I guess my building did.”

This past winter, he received a notice from building management. “You are violating a substantial obligation of your tenancy,” it began. “You are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books in the Premises.”

“I open this letter,” Uminer recalled, “and they’re telling me my books are a fire hazard, that I have to be out if I don’t get rid of them.”

After he did not heed the warning, eviction proceedings began. He decided to fight back in court.

One afternoon last month, Uminer stood amid the leaning towers, savoring his unruly paradise while he still could. As klezmer music played from his phone, he ran his hand across the spines of “The Russian Theater after Stalin” and “The Kurdish Question in Iraq.” He tenderly held up a book of poems by Abraham Reisen, a Yiddish writer he was smitten with.

“Sure, maybe I’m a little bit different,” he said. “And I know my library might seem excessive to some. But it’s not as excessive as people might think. In a rabbinic household, no one would blink twice at a library like mine. Reading is part of my culture.”

He descended the building’s opulent staircase and lit up a Marlboro on the sidewalk.

“I thought I’d found peace here, that I’d start my magazine here,” he said. “Maybe I’ll need to stop growing my library for a while. But I feel I always need to be learning, because that’s what I think I have to offer the world.”

A Precocious Scholar
Raised in a Hasidic enclave of Crown Heights, Mendel grew up speaking Yiddish with his grandparents, listening to the teachings of his bearded Lubavitcher rabbi uncles and attending troika dances in banquet halls. His father, a pious real estate broker named Isaac, relished studying the Torah with him. But the boy craved literature. At 12, he was reading Dostoyevsky.

In his teens, Uminer attended rabbinical seminary, where he embraced Talmudic study. Lessons began at 7 a.m. and ended with nights of vodka-fueled argument with the rabbis.

“My days were spent studying texts in Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish, and I sometimes went a whole year without seeing a woman’s face, but I was also disobedient and incorrigible,” he said. “I was always reading what I wanted to read, not only what they wanted me to read. But that’s where you assert yourself. Where you form your opinions. Where you make your own sense of the world.”

“If I form an opinion, and there are books saying the opposite, I need to read them all, to know if I’m justified,” he continued. “If I’m not convinced, I should let my conviction go.”

In his early 20s, as he grew engrossed in Ovid and Rousseau, he befriended writers at Caffe Reggio in Greenwich Village and found himself browsing more at the Strand than at the Judaica emporiums of south Brooklyn. One year before his ordination, he turned away from the path set out for him.

“It dawned on me I wasn’t as much of a true believer as I thought I was,” he said. “Maybe it upset my grandparents, but I decided I should just go do what I wanted to do, which was enter the modern liberal cultural society of New York. I didn’t want to be drunk on medieval piety anymore.”

His mother, Dina Uminer, said she wasn’t surprised by his secular turn. “It tracked with the curious boy he always was,” she said. “Even when he was little, he would try to convince us of things through argument. A little bit of knowledge was never enough for him.”

After putting away his kipa, Uminer enrolled at Columbia University to study film and philosophy. Outside the classroom, he interned at Tablet magazine. After graduating at 27, he met a young woman from Paris. He soon ventured to her home city, where the romance came to an end.

“She kicked me out of her apartment, but I stayed in Paris until I spent my last dollar,” Uminer said. “I smoked Gitanes in the Marais. I got robbed in the subway. They had the best politics journals and literary magazines. Paris changed me.”

He spent hours at the book stands along the Seine. Reading journals like Nouvelle Revue Française and Connaissance des Arts, he found his vocation.

“These French journals had people making arguments in ways that really mattered,” he said. “So much of our writing here is about, ‘You must choose a lane.’ Theirs has a comfort with controversy, a precision in argument, a sense of historic consciousness, that we need more of.”

Back in New York, Uminer decided to start a publication of his own, Notarikon Review, an eclectic journal that will “publish people who don’t agree on everything,” he said. Some of the writers he has recruited are former social-media adversaries. The debut print issue, scheduled to come out later this year, will include fiction by Julia Kornberg, an essay by Hayley Jean Clark about the artist Anna Weyant and a translation of a Yiddish short story by Abraham Reisen. Uminer conducted his first editorial meeting, over pizza and beer, on the floor of his Upper East Side studio.

On a recent afternoon, he went browsing at the Mizrahi Bookstore in Marine Park, Brooklyn. When he entered the aisles packed with ancient Jewish texts and leather-bound Torahs, the store’s owner, Israel Mizrahi, warmly greeted him as “Mendy.”

“I think Jews have an almost mystical relationship with books and knowledge,” Mizrahi said. “We’re always reliving our past, creating a thirst for knowledge, which is why a Jewish home needs a library. But Mendy’s insatiable curiosity stands out from all my customers. He understands that physical books are the only way we can truly retain knowledge. I’ve seen him spend three hours here in random conversation with someone about the kinds of horses used by 18th-century Polish Jews.”

He had heard about Uminer’s apartment troubles.

“Of all the vices, I find books to be the least dangerous,” Mizrahi said. “I think it’s possible his landlord might have their priorities misplaced, or might not understand him. If you’re not steeped in his culture, maybe his library does look chaotic. But I’d argue it only looks like a mess. I’ll bet he can tell you where every single book is in his apartment.”

The Move
After months of slow legal jousting, Uminer finally resigned himself to moving out of 6 East 65th Street, which is owned by the Hakim Organization, a company founded by the New York real-estate magnate Kamran Hakim.

“I don’t want to be here if I’m not wanted,” he said.

The Hakim Organization and the building’s management company did not reply to requests for comment.

On a hot Friday, a few friends arrived to help Uminer with the move. They tamed the heaps of books into neat piles that could be placed into boxes.

“Why has God cursed us with this heat?” Uminer said.

“God doesn’t curse us, Mendel, we curse ourselves,” replied Julian Cosma, a filmmaker.

“Well, I didn’t mean it in the Spinozistic sense. I just meant, it’s a hot day for moving.”

While Uminer took a smoke break, Cosma heaved books into boxes.

“It makes sense to me that Mendel, a Brooklyn yeshiva kid, would come to the Upper East Side and make this world for himself here, only to get rejected from it,” Cosma said. “There’s a New York now, keyed into professionalism and uniformity, that sees a guy like him and thinks something must be wrong. There’s an element to the city now that’s hostile to the life of the mind, to the eccentricity that might produce it.”

More friends stopped by. As they disassembled the library, the walls grew more and more unobscured. Finally, it was time to take the boxes to the van outside. The sky darkened, and a hard rain began to fall.

Wearing shorts and Tevas, Uminer led the charge, dashing into the downpour with a box of medieval Italian plays. His friends followed, getting soaked as they deposited their hauls into the vehicle.

Drenched, they headed back to the apartment. Uminer ordered pierogies and stroganoff blinis from the Russian Samovar restaurant to reward his helpers while they kept packing.

As night fell, the room turned into a salon crackling with arguments and discussions — about Nabokov’s early Russian poetry, about foreign affairs in Lebanon, about the French Romantic writer Charles Nodier. Among those holding forth was Katya Danziger, an art history student at Columbia.

“Mendel lives in his mind,” she said, “and he can take that with him anywhere.”

“I heard he’s found a bigger apartment,” Danziger added. “So that means, more books.”

 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/style/too-many-books-new-york-city-apartment-scholar-landlord.html 

Edited 21 hours ago by samhexum
for purely academic reasons

[+ Charlie]

I can relate to him. My late partner and I have never been able to get rid of a book, even after we have read it and probably never will open it again. I have 98 shelves of books in 21 bookcases in my house (some of them floor-to-ceiling bookcases). My house-cleaner keeps urging me to sell some of them somehow, but I just can't face the task--I become sentimental whenever I pick up a book written by or about someone I knew, or that I used to use in classes that I taught.  I live in a gated retirement community that has a lending library for residents, so I asked the librarian and his partner to go through my collection and take whatever thy thought they could use. They came with a pick-up truck and left with five large boxes of books, and it hardly made a dent in the collection. I know my heirs will be cursing me when they have to figure out what to do with all of it. 

[Luv2play]

I’m in a similar situation to Charlie. I have a smaller collection of books but they still number between 1 and 2 thousand volumes. They are in most rooms of my house,  6 out of 8. The largest collection is in my library which has floor to ceiling built in bookcases. The second largest collection is in my office on the bedroom level. The next in a lovely Georgian bookcase in my living room. 
By spreading them out they don’t seem so numerous. 
I’ve only made a half hearted effort to slim down the collection. My cousin’s son took about 90 volumes by or about Churchill, a collection I inherited from my uncle. So they went to a good home. 
I’ve donated a few valuable books to my old Alma mater and a professor at another university. 
I’ve sold a few volumes for a few thousand dollars. 
But I am still acquiring new books as well so progress is limited. If I ever have to downsize out of my home I will be confronted with the issue.

[samhexum]

35 minutes ago, Luv2play said:

My cousin’s son took about 90 volumes by or about Churchill, a collection I inherited from my uncle. 

@wsc are you going to put up with this outrageous betrayal?!? 

Declare war on @Luv2play!!!

Edited 26 minutes ago by samhexum
to maintain the incredibly high standards he has established here