(Author: Veronica Belling, Vol. 65, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2010)
Cape Town’s oldest Jewish bookstore M. Beinkinstadt, established in 1903 by Moshe Beinkinstadt, remained in the hands of his descendants for 105 years. Situated on the outskirts of District Six, site of the earliest Jewish settlement in Cape Town, it reflects the history of Cape Town’s Jewish community. In June 2008, shortly before the shop’s closure, I was contacted by the late Joseph Sherman, Korob Fellow of Yiddish Studies at Oxford, and former editor of Jewish Affairs, to assist the proprietors, Michael and Fay Padowich, in disposing of their collection of approximately 3500 Hebrew and Yiddish books. They were keen to send the books to the National Yiddish Book Center (NYBC) in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States, but required help sorting them. Joseph had been contacted by the NYBC and had subsequently put them in touch with me.
It was agreed that I would sort through the books in the shop, which would then be transferred to the Jewish Studies Library at the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town for further sorting, listing and packing up. In this way, I would also be able to select any items of particular interest to the Jewish Studies Library. Of the approximately 3000 books in Hebrew and Yiddish that I examined, I selected about 1800 for this purpose. Of these, about 1100 were in Yiddish and 700 in Hebrew. The religious books were left behind, with those in very poor condition being set aside as sheymes for burial according to Jewish law.
The shop had a Dickensian quality. The books were packed from floor to ceiling. I was told that in certain sections there were even books packed behind the walls that had been boarded up over the years. Many of the books had never been moved since the 1920s, and were heavy with dust. An old fashioned book press stood on a table near the entrance. All the shop’s business was still being recorded manually, and their administrative records were also donated to the Library. These records were kept in a storeroom that was piled from floor to ceiling with leather- bound letter books and ledgers from as early as 1904. Due to space considerations, we chose to take just the one hundred leather bound letter books (1904-1942). These contain copies of letters that were written with special ink, laid between dampened sheets of tissue paper and placed in the book press in order to make the copies. We also took one ledger (1947-1952), and a miscellany of exemplars of the shop’s stationary and letterheads.
The letters are to suppliers, who were generally overseas, in Russia, Latvia, Germany, Palestine, London and the United States. Among the earliest supplier was M. Katzenellenbogen of Vilna, who sold Jewish books, pictures, maps and wool and silk taleysim (prayer shawls). The customers are local, living all over South Africa as well as in the former southern Rhodesia. By far the greater proportion of the letters is written in Yiddish, but in the earliest books there is also a fair amount of correspondence in Russian. Beinkinstadt’s customer base expanded very rapidly. While in the 1904 letter book customers were in Cape Town, Paarl and Oudtshoorn, by 1905 customers from all over the Western, Eastern and Northern Cape were being supplied: Beaufort West, Colesberg, Graaff-Reinet, Middleburg, Moorreesburg, Piketburg, Port Elizabeth, Riversdale, Simonstown, Stellenbosch, Uniondale, Wellington, and Worcester. They also had customers in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State and Pretoria and Roodepoort in the Transvaal.
Moshe Beinkinstadt arrived in Cape Town from Vilna, Lithuania, in 1903 to escape conscription into the Russian army. In 1905 he was joined by his wife, Olga, and daughter, Bertha. In Vilna, Moshe had been employed as an accountant in the timber and paper industry. A year after he arrived in Cape Town, he established a bookstore.1 In the 1910s M. Beinkinstadt Bookseller was located at 76 Caledon Street. Sometime in the 1920s, it moved to 38 Canterbury Street, and Moshe and his family moved in above it. Beinkinstadt was not the only bookshop in that area. Book stamps reveal another three Jewish bookshops very close by: A.P. Melmed, Hebrew bookseller and Stationer, located at no. 62, Harrington Street; Smiths Jewish Booksellers in Canterbury Street; and Segal and Witten Hebrew Booksellers & Stationery at the corner of Caledon and Canterbury Street.
Moshe Beinkinstadt imported all the basic Jewish ritual requirements, such as tsitsis (fringed undergarment), taleysim, tefilin (phylacteries) and mezuzas, as well as prayer books and rabbinical literature. In 1910, Beinkinstadt took over the City Printing Works of 117 Bree Street, and offered services ‘for all kinds of Printing, Bookbinding and kindred lines’. Beinkinstadt’s signs were well known all over Cape Town.
About this time, Beinkinstadt also started importing kosher foodstuffs, advertised itself as “Beinkinstadt’s Cape Town Kosher, Matzos & Grocery Store”. Their printed list of Passover foods advertises imported products from all over the world, such as Manischewitz’s Matzos from America, cake mix from London, German potato flour, fat-goose [sic], Russian – shmaltz, Colonial horse radish, Palestine cognac and wine, Russian cognac, and Colonial wine and spirits. Also listed are all the favorite Jewish foods, including sauerkraut and cucumbers in tins, herrings in barrels, almonds, prunes, pomerance peel, and poppy seed. They also advertised kosher soap. As late as 1930, Beinkinstadt was importing tinned fish delicacies from Arnold Sorenson in Riga, as well as salt herrings from Yzermans in Holland. It continued to be one of the main suppliers of kosher food and matzos for Passover, until the 1970s, when the big supermarket chains took over.
From the outset, Beinkinstadt imported secular as well as religious books. A book list in a letter book from 1904 includes such popular Yiddish titles as Dorfs Meydl (Country Girl), Siberer Ayzenbahn (The Siberian Railway), the Yiddish translation of David Copperfield Dovid ben Dovid, Tolstoy’s Anna Karanina, Tsvey Shveger (Two Sisters-in-Law) by Meir Ahun published in Vilna in 1900, and Di Alte Shklaferay2 (Ancient Slavery) by Russian revolutionary philosopher and economist Alexander Bogdanov, published in Warsaw in 1904. Inside Di Alte Shklaferay, I discovered that Moshe Beinkinstadt had operated a lending library. The property stamp reads: M. Beinkinstadt – Hebrew Books, Stationery – Circulating Library – Box – Cape Town.
Operating six days a week, Beinkinstadts became an institution, a gathering place for Yiddish speaking intellectuals. Friday nights was ‘open house’ in the Beinkinstadt’s apartment above the shop. It was at one of these that Bertha Beinkinstadt met her future husband, Berl Padowich, who had been sent from Palestine to South Africa as a canvasser for the Jewish National Fund. When Moshe died in 1943, his scholarly son-in-law, with his passion for literature, took over the business. A man of many talents, who spoke thirteen languages, Berl also found time to direct Yiddish plays and chair the Zionist Socialist Party, and later the Yiddish Cultural Federation, as well.3
Bertha was one of the early Jewish women to graduate from a South African university. In 1930, she published an anthology of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry she had translated into English.4 She also wrote poems in Yiddish, one of which, Der Soldat (The Soldier) is one of only two Yiddish poems by South African Jewish women that were included in Ezra Korman’s anthology of Yiddish poems by women, published in Chicago in 1928.5 Like Moshe’s apartment above the shop, the Padowich home in Oranjezicht, became a gathering place for Cape Town’s Jewish intelligentsia. Bertha and Berl’s son Michael took over the business when his father died in 1973. He expanded the stock, concentrating on buying English books rather than Yiddish and Hebrew, and moving more into the gift line.
It is fortunate for the social historian that the owner was too sentimental to get rid of the huge collection of Hebrew and Yiddish books, by then in very poor condition and deteriorating rapidly. The books, the majority of which were sent to the NYBC, provide a unique insight into the changes that were taking place in the intellectual world of the Yiddish speaking immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Fiction was by far the largest category. It included all the well known authors, such as Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Seforim, Peretz, Asch, Opatoshu and Nadir. However, it also included some very rare early Yiddish fiction by Isaac Meir Dick, Shomer, and Ozer Bloyshteyn, that were written for women in the 1890s and early 1900s, with lurid titles, such as, Der Ferflekter Yikhus: fun der Khupe tsum Toyt (The Stained Reputation: from the Khupe to the Grave), by Shomer6; and Der Tiran (The Tyrant), an anonymous novel about the Russian government, that was said to include intrigues, nihilistic activities, Jewish persecution and emigration to America, published in New York.7 Poetry was the next largest category with works by the well known authors, Shimon Frug, Zalman Rejzen, Itzik Manger, Yehoash, Peretz Markish, Dovid Edelstadt and others. There was a volume of sketches by the well known humorist, Der Tunkeler8; and a handful of children’s books, some published as late as 1950, proving that there were children in Cape Town in the 1950s who could still understand Yiddish. Certain categories of literature were noticeably absent. For instance there were very few works of South African Yiddish literature. This was no doubt because those books had been sold over the years. Other books, such as Gedaliah Bublick, the American Zionist’s description of his journey to Israel9, could not have sold that well, as there were 16 copies left in the collection. A very large component of the collection were translations from world literature, part of the Jewish enlightenment initiative to acquaint Jews with all the great European authors by translating them into Yiddish and Hebrew. Included were the Russians: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Krylov, Andreyev, and Chekhov; Germans: Goethe, Nietsche, Schiller, Lessing and Schnitzler; English: Dickens, Swift, Robert Louis Stevenson, Longfellow, Jack London and Disraeli; French: Balzac, Zola, Eugene Sue, de Maupassant and Jules Verne; Scandinavians: Ibsen, Strindberg and Knut Hamsen; and Spanish: Cervantes’ Don Quixote. There was a collection of all the famous operas, translated into Yiddish by William Edlin.10 Most of these were sent on to the NYBC. As one would expect, a very large proportion of the books related to Jews and Judaism, including history, biography, religion, Zionism, Jewish nationalism and literary criticism. These included the standard historical works by Graetz and Dubnow, Schiper’s economic history, Chaim Zhitlowsky’s works on Diaspora nationalism and Lestschinsky’s works of Jewish sociology. Books on socialism and radical politics constituted another significant section of the collection, reflecting the growing trend towards secularization and away from religion. They included the works of the anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx, Alexander Bogdanov and Karl Liebknecht. There was also a set of Darwin’s Descent of Man,11 a work that demonstrates that man was descended from the ape, challenging the Biblical view of the Creation; and also Jean Meslier, the 17th Century French Catholic priest’s treatise promoting atheism and denouncing all religion.12 Also popular were educational handbooks on topics varying from the natural sciences, geography and geology, to music, Muhammad, ethics, sociology, evolution, child psychology and the aesthetics of women’s beauty.13 There were several health manuals: on diabetes,14 small pox, the organs of the human body,15 and a book about birth control (published Warsaw, 1934).16 There was a book about what to expect during pregnancy and how to bring up your child (New York, 1912)17 and the popular book on sexual relationships between men and women, by Benzion Liber (New York, 1919).18 There were virtually no cookbooks in the collection, as they had most probably been sold over the years. An unusual exception was a vegetarian cook book, Di Vegetarishe Kokhbukh, by Abraham and Shifra Mishulow, published in New York in 1926.19 This interest in vegetarian cooking among Yiddish speaking immigrants was part of a radical movement that arose in the early twentieth century. The Yiddish Vegetarian Society of New York regarded vegetarianism less as an experiment in gastronomy than a moral philosophy. The book, Gezunt un Shpayz (Food and Health),20 is replete with helpful dietary hints on how to avoid anemia, rheumatism and constipation, as well as with graphs computing the calories, carbohydrates and fat content of food. The companion cook book contains the recipes that make healthy eating possible. Among the piles of books there were also about thirty four issues of the Groshn Bibliotek, the biographical pamphlet series published in Warsaw in the 1930s. Beinkinstadt listed 271 titles from the Groshn Bibliotek, in the Yiddish section of his SixPenny Library of English and World Famous Classics, Sikspens Bibliotek. The Hebrew books were far fewer than the Yiddish. The largest proportion comprised textbooks, of which the earliest were published in Vilna and Warsaw. Among the approximately eighty items kept for the Jewish Studies Library were a couple of particularly rare items of Afrikaner Yiddica. These are: the very first anthology of Yiddish writing ever published in South Africa: Di Fraye Baylage – the Free Supplement to the newspaper Der Afrikaner, published in 1919.21 I had never come across it before. The other was a copy of the SA Jewish Year Book of 1920, published by Beinkinstadt.22 Although there wasn’t a copy of the earliest Yiddish book published in South Africa, Nehemiah Dov Baer Hoffman’s Sefer ha-Zikhroynes (Book of Memoirs), published in 1916,23 I did find a flyer advertising it, indicating that they were selling it at one time. Besides the books kept for the Jewish Studies Library, I was also on the lookout for any rare items that would be of interest to Joseph Sherman. Besides Soviet Yiddish his current research interest, he asked me to look out for anything by Isaac Meir Dick (1914-1893), one of the earliest Yiddish fiction writers. There actually was one item, the adaptation of a play by Schiller, entitled Der Farmaskirte Frant (The Masked Fop). Sadly, I never got the opportunity to tell him about it. Veronica Belling has been the librarian at the Jewish Studies Library, part of U.C.T. Libraries and the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, for the last 29 years. She is the author of Bibliography of South African Jewry (1997), Yiddish Theatre in South Africa (2008), and the translator of Leibl Feldman’s The Jews of Johannesburg (2007) and Yakov Azriel Davidson: His Writings in the Yiddish Newspaper, Der Afrikaner, 1911-1913 (2009). 
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