SOL Tuesday: Painfully Downsizing Books

     Until recently, all my bookcases had two rows of books on every shelf. Three years ago, one of those shelves collapsed, in the middle of the night, scaring the heck out of me. In daylight, I knew I had to pare down. Half the books in that bookcase (American history) had to go. It took a few weeks, but I did it. During Covid, I thought I’d better tackle the Fiction bookcase before its shelves started collapsing, and that task was done.

     Last week, it was time to take on the European/world history bookcase. First, I removed all the books and piled them in categories (Europe, Russia and Russian Revolution, Middle East, Africa, etc.). Then I had to go through each category: what to keep, what to give away, which books so decrepit or so marked up I have to toss them (that’s painful). 

     Today I sorted through the Holocaust section. I read “Schindler’s List” as soon as it came out, and for the first time I was conscious that there were people who survived the Nazis’ effort to kill every Jew they could find. All I had known up until that moment, at age 40, was that six million Jews were murdered, and if my grandparents hadn’t come to the United States at the beginning of the century, Iwould have been among them (whoever I would have been in that case, a more metaphysical issue). Who wanted to know any more? But survivors? This I needed to know more about. I’d read Keneally’s book in November 1982, and over the next six months I found and read 29 more — survivors’ accounts, histories, biographies, even fiction, and more. Ten of those books I still have, and have since acquired even more, most of which I’ve not read. The books to keep are mostly chosen, but there’s one dilemma I’m facing. I have two histories — Lucy Dawidowicz’s “The War Against The Jews 1933-1945” (a small paperback) and Martin Gilbert’s “The Holocaust: A history of the Jews of Europe duirng the Second World War” (a large hardcover). Maybe for now I’ll keep both and see whether there’s room for them on the shelves. 

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SOLTuesday: Bookcase Finds

            No, this is not about books, although I’ve been doing a lot with my books lately.

            Recently, three shelves collapsed on one of my many bookcases—I’d had books two rows deep, and those shelves just weren’t built for that. I had to cull, and quickly, to get those books off of the floor.

            Having done that job on one bookcase, I thought I’d tackle the others before I was forced to by more collapse. But as I got started, my daughter reminded me that my husband used to stash emergency money, maybe $100, in “a book,” and since Jack’s no longer among the living, I can’t ask him which book it was. So Christie and her husband came over to help, riffling through books on four shelves of the “fiction” bookcase.

            In the process, they found, stuck behind books, a month’s worth of New York Times Book Reviews from 2005—and a brown paper bag. I know exactly what that bag is for.

            Jack used to buy a small container of yogurt at a neighborhood

deli as his movie snack, and often he didn’t get a bag to put it in. So he made a point of saving small paper bags like this one for his movie yogurt. Usually, he put the bags on a top shelf in a kitchen cabinet, but I guess this one never got there. It just ended up in the secret world “behind things,” out of sight, out of mind.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.