When I traipsed into Lower Manhattan, eight months pregnant and holding my 3-year-old daughter’s hand, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting into.
I’d screenshotted the event from the Jewish Book Council on Instagram — “A Jewish bookstore is popping up in downtown Manhattan for two days only” — and shared it with my husband, who agreed immediately that we needed to go. And so there we were only a few days later, bundled up against the November chill and trying to navigate the cramped streets of the Lower East Side.
We were excited when we saw the windows emblazoned with bright pink “Free Jewish Books” and “100 Years of Jewish Literature” decals, and even more overjoyed to see how packed the building was when we entered. Standing there, glancing at the upper and lower levels, which were brimming with loud, happy Jewish people — the curly hair, the Star of David and chai necklaces, the kippahs — I wasn’t sure where to go, but I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be.
It was like entering another world, I reflected, as my daughter (who knew exactly where she wanted to go: toward the hot chocolate) dragged me downstairs. The cold air outside only highlighted the contrast of a room so warm I was shrugging off my coat. The city sounds were overtaken by the clamor of enthusiastic book lovers. We had found our people.
My husband and I walked out with substantially more in our arms than when we’d entered, including posters, a literary journal and stickers. Apparently, our daughter counted as a third person eligible for free books, which meant we had six new books to read together. My daughter held her first-ever signed book, “Twinkle Twinkle Hanukkah,” which author Talia Benamy had inscribed for her in gold gel pen. Keep sparkling, Mila, she had written.
We didn’t even manage to make it home before Mila was insisting we read her new book.
When I initially found out about the event, I assumed it would be fun. Perhaps a nice cultural outing for our child. But after actually being in the space, I understood it was so much more than just “fun” or “cultural.”
The last few years have been hard. It feels challenging to exist as a Jew in Jewish and non-Jewish spaces. I’ve become more defensive. And isn’t that justified, when I’ve got one Jewish daughter and another one on the way? My children will grow up in a world that is more openly antisemitic than the one I came of age in.
That, I think, is why this event was so meaningful to me. This kind of event provides a space to be boldly, loudly Jewish, for authors and storytellers and readers. And, of course, for our family.
Whitman once wrote that “we contain multitudes.” And in that bookstore, with a baby inside me and my child clutching my hand, surrounded by dozens of colorful people and thousands of colorful books, I understood it. I contain multitudes, and I am so gloriously Jewish.
Jewish New Yorkers talk so much about antisemitism and anti-Zionism and Israel and Palestine. This event wasn’t a space ignorant or spiteful or devoid of those conversations. On the contrary, it embraced them — and every other bit of joy, neurosis, tradition, love and pain that is both unique to us as Jews and entirely ordinary for us as humans.
A few weeks after the pop-up Jewish bookstore event, I noticed an email in my inbox promoting a Jewish Children’s Book Festival hosted by PJ Library at the 92nd Street Y.
We’re going, I texted my husband immediately.
I’m so excited, he wrote back.
And so we will go to this next event and fill our already-crowded apartment with more Jewish books, stories we read every night, sometimes twice, if my daughter insists. Some of those will be about foods and values and histories reflecting our personal cultural legacies (my husband’s family is Polish; mine is Syrian, German and Hungarian). Others — like “Mazal Bueno,” the Ladino-inspired book my daughter knows by heart and requests to read daily — tell stories that aren’t exactly ours. But they are stories of our people.
Stories we must keep telling. Stories we must keep reading. And stories we must keep sharing.
