Mindy Newell: Yiddishkeit
I miss bookstores. Being able to walk up and down the aisles, pulling out a title that sounds intriguing, perusing the dust jacket flap, sometimes sitting down on the floor and reading the first couple of pages…just killing a couple of hours lost in a bibliophile’s heaven.
Okay, bookstores aren’t entirely gone, but they are, as everyone knows, on the endangered list. My own first hint of this came about 15 years ago when the Borders in the Short Hills Mall closed up. It was astonishing—this was a bookstore that was always mobbed, no matter the time of day. Many, many people objected to the closing, and many, many people let the mall’s management know it; the customer service desk clerk told me, as I filled out the complaint form, that there were over 3,000 signatures in the first week alone protesting the shutdown, and demanding, if not the return of Borders, the opening of another book proprietor. I thought, and I’m sure many others thought, that the store closed because the management had raised its rent beyond what Borders was willing to pay. But now I think that I witnessed the beginning of the end. I knew for sure that bookstores were about to go the way of the dodo bird when I drove over to Hoboken one Sunday morning a few years ago to spend a few hours in the Barnes & Noble there to find that it was gone; I remember being shocked (“Holy shit!” I said out loud) because not only is that particular store is in a city with a university (Stevens Institute of Technology), but it is also home to the sort of population that publishers love and book stores crave—well-educated and upscale and readers.
I bring this up because I recently bought a book on Amazon that whetted my appetite, especially because it is the last work of the late, great Harvey Pekar, who was one of its editors. That book is [[[Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land]]]. According to the blurb on Amazon, which is lifted from the front flap of the book’s dust jacket:
Yiddish is everywhere. We hear words like nosh, schlep, and schmutz all the time, but how did they come to pepper American English, and how do we intuitively know their meaning?
strikes me as an important moment in that career, then, as Pekar is settling into a more mellow existence. In the first issue of this volume (the second from Vertigo), Pekar doesn’t call a pharmacy worker a Nazi (and benefits from the lack of anger) and doesn’t blow his top at a sycophantic fan who invades his life and doesn’t totally trash a critic who didn’t like his book 
Everyone has a story – at least one. Every human life could be told in some way, to illustrate a point, or evoke an emotion, or just entertain an audience. 
attempts to tell some of those stories, or to create stories based on tiny pieces of real people’s lives, almost randomly – to invent stories out of the smallest of seeds.
At last, one of my favorite TV shows paying homage to the comic book format! Writer Anthony Bourdain, the host of the Travel Channel show No Reservations, is a big fan of Cleveland’s own Harvey Pekar, many of whose daily-life adventures in American Splendor have been drawn by Gary Dumm. Last night’s episode of No Res had Bourdain visiting his friend 
