Ideal Books brings Judaica to Route 10
Aron Lutwaks, owner of Ideal Books, established in 1931, has brought his scholarly Judaica tomes to a warehouse on Route 10 in Whippany. The bookstore, formerly located near Columbia University, was long a favorite haunt of students. Photo by Johanna Ginsberg
Tucked behind a gas station on Route 10 in Whippany, housed in an unlikely block of single-level office buildings and warehouses, is a treasure trove of scholarly Judaica.
The proprietor is Aron Lutwaks, a book lover's book-seller, 72, who has filled the 1,000-square-foot space with books on Jewish history, culture, customs, and linguistics.
Subjects range from the Jews of Azerbaijan to Yiddish folk music, from reference works on American Judaica to books of inscriptions from Jewish cemeteries. There's an entire bookcase devoted to Jewish bibliographies.
And since his own passion is Jewish history, there are, of course, sections devoted to the history of the Jews of France, Spain, Russia, and a host of other countries.
Lutwaks, in heavily accented English, can tell you what's in each book; he reads in every language he sells (that's six all together), and if he's not familiar with a particular book's author, he probably knows enough intriguing details to entice a visitor to thumb through it anyway. Among his wares are out-of-print books and current Israeli titles.
If the bookstore seems to be a bit of urban culture transplanted to the suburbs, that's because it is: Last November, Lutwaks moved the bookstore, established in 1931 on Broadway and 110th Street in Manhattan, from its second home in Yonkers to Whippany, when his wife, Alice, became the executive director of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in Short Hills.
Long a favorite haunt of the Columbia University/Jewish Theological Seminary crowd, Ideal Books has specialized in scholarly Judaica since shortly after Lutwaks took over in November 1984 from the original owner.
Although Lutwaks no longer has a storefront, he continues to fill orders sent in by libraries, academics, and private collectors from his new headquarters, as he has been doing for decades.
"Do you read?" he asks a lucky visitor, settling for a conversation in English rather than the Yiddish he opened with.
He pulls volume after volume from the shelves, hoping to make a shidduch. Here's a history of the case of Mendel Beilis (accused and later acquitted of killing a Russian child in a notorious 1913 blood libel case); here's Elias Bickerman's work on the Jews of ancient Greece (along with some gossipy details about Bickerman, a fixture at JTS until his death in 1981).
Now that Lutwaks sells mostly through the Internet and his catalogues, he misses the interaction with students and other customers. His favorite part of the business was the relationships he built over time.
"It was a pleasure 20 years ago to see a graduate student come in, trying to build a library in the field he was getting a PhD in, getting the PhD, getting a teaching position, and then sending his students to me," he said.
Even customers who landed at Midwestern universities, he said, "used to come to New York at least once a year for a conference, and they would come to my place."
But between liability insurance and the Internet, he said, "You cannot compete."
Child's work
Lutwaks' love affair with books began when he was a child in Chernovitz, Bukovina, a region in northern Romania and western Ukraine. By the time he was in his teens, he had begun working in bookstores, sweeping and doing other odd jobs, to acquire books and then sell them.
Lutwaks survived the Holocaust with his family. At first, they were hidden in a gentile neighbor's basement and later they escaped to Bucharest, where his father was thrown into a forced labor brigade there, and Lutwaks attended a French-Catholic school under cover.
In postwar Bucharest, still a teenager, he opened his first bookstore in a flea market stall. It was in 1947 during what he describes as "the Stalinist horror."
"Everyone wanted to eat, and no one had any money," he recalled, so everyone went to the flea market, bringing with them to sell "whatever: old clothing, lamps, whatever. So one day, I said to my father, 'You have to come with me. You have to sign [because] I am a minor.' We went by tramway and bought a space. We put two blankets on the floor, we put some books on the floor. At the end of the day, I had something like $400 — more than my father earned the whole week. That's how I started."
His family moved several times, to Israel, South America, and then to the United States. Wherever he went, he sold books. Within five days of arriving in the United States in 1961, he recalled, he was selling at McGraw-Hill on 42nd Street. He enrolled in City University, but never finished his studies there; instead, he worked in bookstores and then in publishing, where he knew himself in sales, marketing, promotion, and production. While that lasted about 20 years, he knew he could always turn to the local street corner to make a living.
In 1982, Lutwaks found himself newly divorced, unemployed, and with severe hearing loss. He was angry, and a therapist challenged him about his anger. "What do you want me to do, sell books on the street?" he recalled saying to the therapist.
Of course, that's exactly what he did.
By the end of the first day as a bookseller on the sidewalk at Broadway and West 81st Street, he had made $300. Within a month, he said, he knew his customers, and which day of the week each came. He continued there for two years, supporting himself and earning enough to visit his daughter in Israel twice each year, before purchasing Ideal Books.
Always a keen businessman, even in his youth, he knows instinctively what will sell and who will buy — and he memorizes Jewish bibliographies just to make sure. When he meets new clients, he explores what their reading interests are, picking up books with them in mind.
As he opens a book on Hebrew linguistics, he explains that he has purchased it for a particular customer who has an extensive library devoted to the subject. "I bring her the books, I sit, we shmooze. I give her the books, she gives me a check. Then I spend two hours looking."
He travels extensively to purchase books, but will buy them as readily at a book convention as from a shlock merchant on the street. When he bought Ideal Books, Lutwaks, who had studied Jewish history at Hebrew University in Israel, converted it from general academia to scholarly Jewish interest.
In 2001, his building was torn down to make way for a high-rise. So he moved the store to Yonkers. But when he and his wife, Alice, moved to West Orange, he did not want to commute, so he looked for a location nearby and eventually found the space on Route 10. After decades of interacting with customers coming in off the street, he finds his current location lonely.
"If I had a bookstore in Manhattan with a reasonable rent, I would go back today," he said. He's not in love with New Jersey, where he describes the intellectual offerings as "gornisht mit gornisht" — nothing from nothing.
He does get away from his store, traveling to book shows around the world. He also purchases the collections of retired professors who, more often than not, once bought books from him. Once a month he sells at a Judaica book sale at the Workmen's Circle in Manhattan.
At 72, he could retire. But don't bet on it.
"I love it," he said, adding that his wife — whom he married in 1995 — asked him, "'What if someone comes and buys all the books?'" "I won't sell," was his answer. "Why not? What am I going to do the next day?"
He'd probably sell books on the street.
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