CHAPTER PEE—THEME 5

I myself deployed Schwitters’ abstract art to bridge cultures, on behalf of anticommunist free enterprise. From “Trading Places”—chapter six of my memoir, Rebel Bookseller:

In January of ‘95, American Booksellers Association education director Willard Dickerson called me up and asked me to sit down. “Andy, how would you like to be dean of this fall’s booksellers school in Latvia?”

The Children’s Bookstore was headed into a demanding year. Since October of ‘94 we’d been running a small full-time outlet at Chicago Children’s Museum’s location on North Pier. Now we were immersed in planning the museum’s much larger shop at Navy Pier, to be opened in September of ‘95. We also had seventy-five book fairs on the docket. The count of superstores in the Chicago area had risen to eighteen, six of them close to us.

But how could I say no? I’d taught at several ABA schools, and I loved them.

ABA’s Eastern European program had been going for several years—it was a function of the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute. OSI had identified bookstores as some of the threatened institutions to try to assist in their transition from the centralized economic system of the communist era to the free-for-all capitalist marketplace now emerging, since bookstores perform a vital informational and educational function in every free society. I’d been on the American Booksellers Association education committee when this overseas schools program had launched, and I’d alerted Willard I’d like to get involved. 

***

After the first day of their September booksellers school, the forty Latvian booksellers are visibly uneasy. We’ve been told one of the difficulties is tension dating from the period when they’d been locked together into the Soviet bookselling bureaucracy. Some of the booksellers did cruel things to others. Now they are trying to run their shops like independent competitive capitalist enterprises. It isn’t easy for them to relax and act collegial.

At dinner I announce there will be a special lecture and everyone should assemble back at the hall at 8 PM. No one is happy about this but they do all come. My colleagues—Stan Bolotin of Harvard Bookstore, Tracy Danz of Zondervan Publishing, and Valerie Lewis of Hicklebee’s Bookstore—present storytelling performances and songs before my lecture, so the Latvian booksellers are alert something unusual might be coming.

I step to the podium, clear my throat, and launch into Ur Sonata. After a minute—as I’m emotionally declaiming, “Dll rrrrrr beeeee bö, Dll rrrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö, Rrrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö wö, Beeeee bö fümms bö wö tää, bö fümms bö wö tää zää, fümms bö wö tää zää Uu,” but Berutha is providing no translation—the Latvians begin to express annoyance.

Berutha interrupts me, “Is it German poetry? From the early twentieth century? Is it Christian Morgenstern?”

I’m delighted. Morgenstern was a nonsense poet who preceded Schwitters by a decade; I love “Das Grosse Lalula” and Morgenstern’s other Gallows Songs. I tell Berutha it’s Kurt Schwitters’ classic Ur Sonata. She gives the booksellers a quick explanation. She has a degree in poetry!

I continue with Ur Sonata and realize something is happening I’ve never experienced in my decade performing with Lynn Book. Our audiences were English speakers, so the text was always non-English, but here, the syllables are equally non-English and non-Latvian. Although our day of bookselling classes has been spent communicating via translator, now we need no translation. Ur Sonata blossoms translingual.

Valerie, Tracy, and Stan coach the group to join in chanting. We transform to a jolly ensemble.