It was hard to find a seat at the Old First Church on the corner of Carroll Street and Seventh Avenue last Saturday afternoon. People filled the benches, jealously guarding places for their latecomer friends. A man with a feather earring sat by a quiet old woman. A group of tattooed twenty-somethings laughed, as if remembering a joke.
This was not to be a religious service. And yet the gathering assumed a form of worship, if not for The Book, than for those who for 40 years had made it their business to provide all types of books – the Community Bookstore.
Stephanie Valdez and Ezra Goldstein, the third owners of the store after Susan Scioli and Catherine Bohne, had arranged this anniversary event. They invited selected customers to read their favorite works from the past 40 years: those “regulars” were Paul Auster, Jonathan Safran Foer, Siri Hustvedt, Nicole Krauss, Mary Morris, Jon Scieszka and Haley Tanner. All Brooklynites, all literary stars.
Auster went first. Standing behind the dark wooden altar, he held the “New Collected Poems” by the late George Oppen, who had lived in the borough. “A friend,” Auster said. With a soft lisp, he read Oppen’s words, blending tales from the Second World War with “Poem number 4, about poetry”, and a piece on Bergen Street. He paused occasionally to look up at the audience, as if to make sure everyone was listening.
His wife, Siri Husvedt, sat in the first row with Foer, Krauss, and their children. Krauss tried –- and failed — to keep her two sons quiet, but Auster didn’t seem to mind. After all, he’s the one who made Foer move to Brooklyn. “He convinced me that Queens wasn’t the center of the Universe,” said the author of “Everything is Illuminated.”
Foer chose to read a passage from “See Under: Love” by David Grossman. “I really think it’s one of the best books ever,” the Jewish novelist said before starting a passage on humor as “the only true religion.” He then seemed to remember where he was and explained that he didn’t “obviously mean this.” Thou shalt have no other gods before me, read the first commandment on the tables hung over his head.
This was very much an interfaith event. Hustvedt, for instance, preached feminism with “My Emily Dickinson” by Susan Howe. The room was still as she thundered that to believe that women writers are no longer treated condescendingly was “utter bunk.”
Jon Scieszka used a children’s story for his sermon: he was allowed to break the rules and pick a chapter from the “Phantom Tollbooth”, ironically the only reading that was over 40 years old.
Krauss read “The Selected Poems” of Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli poet, while Mary Morris chose a novel about New York: “Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow. The last reader was the youngest: Haley Tanner, 28 years old, opted for Tom Robbins’s “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” whose Chapter 100 concluded: “I am an author, and therefore I am in the same business as God.”
Blasphemy? Perhaps. Still, the phrase bore some truth for anyone present at the Old First Church that day. The bookworm community gathered before their literary idols could have been a religious one. Not for the mystical experience –- the authors saw to that, casually running up the altar and reading with no need of further ceremony — but for their common belief in certain principles: The value of books over e-books (“This is why you shouldn’t buy e-books,” said Tanner showing a worn out copy of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” “because it’s my copy, and it spills of things.”) The power of words recommended by others. The need to help keep independent bookstores in business.
At the end of the ceremony, people lined up to buy books. Those from the featured writers, and those whose words they’d just been read.
Call it the collection, if you will.
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