Over the years I’ve spent a whole lot of time at our two Village library branches, and as a result I sometimes end up making friends with the librarians. Lately I’ve gotten to know head librarian Emil Allakhverdov, who’s been at Hudson Park since 2017. He’s an Armenian who grew up in Ukraine, and he speaks perfect, lightly accented English, and cares deeply about the place and its history, even though much of his own history occurred far away. I’ve lived in the Village for decades, and lately we’ve been having fun pooling our institutional memories.
One day recently he excitedly walked me over to a showcase in which he’d put an old scrapbook. It’s one of two filled with flyers, press clippings and sign-in sheets from the branch’s very active literary programs, 1987-1996. He has already scanned the contents to create a limited-access resource for scholars and historians, just the start of his plans for these unassuming repositories of history. The book was open to a flyer from the time Maurice Sendak, the revered children’s picture book author, came to talk.
Well, it so happens my husband and I were there that night, amid a huge crowd sitting in folding chairs, of course (see: Pierre, in which a folding chair plays a cameo role), all of us hanging on Sendak’s every word. I remember that Sendak talked for a long time. I remember an aspiring illustrator in the audience asking a nuts-and-bolts question, and Sendak, who could be crabby, growing downright passionate about his favorite inks and papers. What I remember most was his sad admission: he didn’t set out to write children’s books and didn’t particularly want to, but that’s what came out of him.
Emil pulled out the book and let me leaf through. I ran my eye down a random sign-in page full of Palmer script signatures. There I found an old neighborhood comrade who died years ago, and my grown son’s third-grade teacher at PS 3.
Hello, my life, I said to myself, quoting a favorite line from Grace Paley, another author who came to talk at Hudson Park. If you don’t know the reference, Google her very short story called “Wants.” It takes place at the other Village branch library, Jefferson Market; we Villagers are rich in libraries and literature.
I was bowled over in the 80s when I discovered Paley’s hilarious, slightly Yiddish-inflected Village stories. So of course I was there when she spoke, practically kneeling at her feet, wanting desperately to do what she did. What I remember most is someone asking about her relationship to the character Faith, the star of many of her stories. Paley got a gleam in her eye and said: Let’s just say that Faith works for me.
Apparently I saw Paley not once but twice. How do I know this? Because I made a date with Emil to spend more time with the scrapbooks, and in doing so learned a few things about my own history. I don’t remember ever signing a guestbook, I told him. But in the hour or two I spent combing through the pages, I was shocked to find my own signature five times: Sendak, Paley, Paley, journalist Ann Banks and tour guide Joyce Gold.
Now that he’s scanned the books, Emil wants to archive and index them and write a blogpost about all the famous authors to draw new patrons to the library. He’s already an avid book collector on the side, with an unusual specialty: publications created by Ukrainians living in displaced person’s camps just after World War II. So it’s not a surprise that he’s envisioning a collection for the library of first editions of books the authors wrote around the time they visited.
“It’s still doable to get signed copies of Sendak’s books,” he told me. He also said that he feels an obligation to honor the library’s important past: “I want to see life: talks, readings, poetry nights. We have to do this more and more, given our track record. The bottom line is that this place has been an important hub since day one.” The branch already offers poetry workshops and has started a new monthly literary salon.
The scrapbooks are homey analog documents. The flyer glued into the first page is pink, with hand lettering that’s jaunty but a bit amateurish—the way things looked then. It announces the fall season of Village Writers Meet Their Neighbors, 1987, including Calvin Trillin on The Art and Science of Humor, Richard Howard on Translation, Catherine Stimpson on Sex and Gertrude Stein. I was entranced.
As I turned the pages I checked each attendance list. Up popped Margalit Fox from The New York Times; a writer friend I didn’t meet until years later; Bill Bowser, who was once the chair of the formidable West Village Committee. And always Muriel Mandell, a children’s book author who may have been the creator of the scrapbooks. Emil was surprised I didn’t recognize her name. Later I googled her and, yes, of course I knew her face well.
I enjoyed the clippings, too. I cringed at this headline from The Villager, remembering the era when the paper was in serious need of a copy editor: Writer Reflect’s on the Village of Her Youth. I smiled at an account of playwright Israel Horovitz’s “talk”: he brought along an actress and they spent over two hours reading his new screenplay. The article says, politely, it was not everyone’s cup of tea, but those who stayed offered valid criticism. Said Horovitz: “I was very proud of my Village connection once again.”
Turns out I know even more of the authors than the audience members, a testament to the intensely literary turn my life has taken: memoirist Vivian Gornick and poet/memoirist Grace Schulman are both closely associated with The Writers Studio, where I teach. Novelist Marcia Golub is a friend. James Lasdun’s poetry collection Landscape with Chainsaw is one of my all-time favorites; one of the poems became an assignment for my memoir students. Author and religion scholar James Carse was the grandfather of my son’s first best friend. Better-known names abound, too: Katha Pollitt, Meg Wolitzer, Nat Hentoff, Eve Merriam.
Me? I published my first novel, Save the Village, in 2022. Paley’s influence is all over it. My main character is a tour guide, like Joyce Gold. Hudson Park has given to me and now I’m in a position to give back. I’ve given multiple talks and readings, proud to pick up where my literary heroes left off.
