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I don’t know where my father got his love of books. His own
father, a plumber by trade, was an epic raconteur but not, to my
knowledge, much of a reader. His mother, the youngest of
thirteen children, was sent for her protection from a Polish shtetl
to Palestine at the start of the Second World War, only to learn
afterward that her parents and eleven of her twelve siblings had
perished in Auschwitz. Whoever she might otherwise have been
died then, too; the woman she became was volatile, unhappy,
and inscrutable. My father was never even entirely sure how
literate she was—in any language, and least of all in English,
which he himself began learning at the age of eleven, when the
family arrived in the United States on refugee visas and settled
in Detroit.
It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his
parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure. I
do know that when he was nineteen he left Michigan for
Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had
so impressed him when he first arrived in America. Instead, he
found penury on the Bowery. To save money, he walked each
day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West
Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library.
Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father
describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in
what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he
found there.
But if books were a gift for my father—transportive, salvific—
he made sure that, for his children, they were a given. In one of
my earliest memories, he has suddenly materialized in the
doorway of the room where my sister and I were playing, holding
a Norton Anthology of Poetry in one hand and waving the other
aloft like Moses or Merlin while reciting “Kubla Khan.” Throughout
my childhood, it was his job to read aloud to us at bedtime; to
our delight, he could not be counted on to stick to the text on
the page, and on the best nights he ditched the books altogether
and regaled us with the homegrown adventures of Yana and
Egbert, two danger-prone siblings from, of all places, Rotterdam.
(My father had a keen ear for the kind of word that would make
young children laugh, and that was one of them.) Those stories
struck me as terrific not only at the time but again much later,
when I was old enough to realize how difficult it is to construct a
decent plot. When I asked my father how he had done it, he
confessed that he had routinely whiled away his evening
commute constructing those bedtime tales. I regret to this day
that none of us ever thought to write them down.
In a kinder world—one where my father’s childhood had been
less desperate, his fear of financial instability less acute, his
sense of the options available to him less constrained—I suspect
that he would have grown up to be a professor, like my sister,
or a writer, like me. As it was, he derived endless vicarious
pleasure from his daughters’ work. Although he seemed to
embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not
terribly rah-rah about the bootstrap fantasy of the American
Dream; he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had
been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead,
how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances
he had had along the way. Still, given his particular bent, having
a daughter who got paid to read books was perhaps the
consummate example of seeing to it that your kids had a better
life than your own.
In the weeks and months after my father’s death, my family
and I went through his belongings, donating whatever was
useful, getting rid of what no one would want, and divvying up
the things we loved, the things that reminded us of him. As a
result, some of my father’s books are my books now: my Dickens
and Dostoyevsky, my biology and natural history, my literary
fiction and light verse and tragedy. They came with me the
summer after he died, when my partner and I moved in together
and merged our worldly possessions. Along with the rest of the
books, they were the first things we unpacked and put away.
Although I often identify as my father’s daughter, there’s no
mistaking which half of my genome and rearing was involved in
organizing our household books. Not only does Philip Roth come
after Joseph Roth on our shelves; “The Anatomy Lesson” comes
after “American Pastoral,” and the nonfiction is subdivided into
Linnaeus-like distinctions. And yet, as my father knew, a perfect
shelving system is also inherently an imperfect one. The difficulty
isn’t all the taxonomic gray areas—whether to keep T. S. Eliot’s
criticism with his poetry, for instance, or whether Robert
McNamara’s “In Retrospect” belongs with memoirs or with books
about the Vietnam War. The difficulty is that anything that is
perfectly ordered is always threatening to become imperfect and
disorderly—especially books in a household of readers. You are
forever acquiring new ones and going back to revisit the old,
spotting some novel you’ve always intended to read and pulling
it from its designated location, discovering never-categorized
books in the office or the back seat or under the bed. You can
put some of these strays away, of course, but, collectively, they
will always spill out beyond your bookshelves, permanently
unresolved, like the remainder in a long-division problem. This is
a difficulty that goes well beyond libraries. No matter how
beautifully your life is arranged, no matter how lovingly you tend
to it, it will not stay that way forever.
I keep two pictures of my father on my desk now. One is a
photograph, taken a year or so before his death, of the two of us
walking down the street where I grew up. My dad has his hand
on my shoulder, and although in reality I am steadying him—he
was already beginning to have trouble walking—it looks as if he
is guiding me. It is the posture of a father with his daughter, as
close to timeless as any photograph could be. The other is the
picture of the Stack. Strictly speaking, of course, that one isn’t a
photograph of my father at all, and yet I can’t imagine a better
image of the kinds of things that normally defy a camera. My
father’s exuberant, expansive mind; the comic, necessary,
generous-hearted compromises of my parents’ marriage; the
origins of my own vocation—they are all there in the Stack,
aslant among the books, those other bindings. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the March 25, 2019,
issue, with the headline “The Stack.”
Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015.
In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a
National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” her story on
the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest.