by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

August 7, 2008

Sol Scharfstein can’t exactly recall why he decided to undertake a Torah commentary 10 years ago.

“I’m still trying to figure out how this lunatic got started and dared write a huge commentary,” he tells a visitor to Ktav Publishing House with a slight grin.

The official publication date of Torah and Commentary: The Five Books of Moses, an easy-to-read Torah translation, is Sept. 15, Scharfstein’s 87th birthday. The book is by no means a last hurrah, or even the culmination of a life’s work. It’s merely the latest chapter in a lifetime of publishing.

A companion to the Torah commentary, an easy-to-read haftara translation, is nearly ready to go to press, and Scharfstein ticks off the other projects he is working on or about to start. He drives to Ktav’s offices in Jersey City from his home in Livingston every day, and enjoys running the company with his younger brother, Bernard, 82.

Starting in the middle of the last century, Ktav was among the best known publishers of Judaica and Jewish educational texts. Generations of children raised on Ktav texts instantly recognize its logo: two lions sitting astride the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Today, the office, near an Indian section of town, is a kind of warehouse, with large offices and aged carpets, and memories from nearly a century of publications. Scharfstein still has a copy of Chaveri, the first educational text he wrote, which helped put the company on the map in 1951. He lovingly pulls off the shelf one of the first siddurs they ever published.

Books line the office and the warehouse, but his favorite place is the aisle where the company’s tchotchkes are stored. He delights in the pens with pull-out screens printed in bright colors showing the Hebrew alphabet; he loves to show off the new DVDs, the dreidel games, and the alef-bet rulers that shine and glow with holographic effect.

Scharfstein remembers the bookstore his parents, Asher and Feige (Fannie) Scharfstein opened in 1921 when they emigrated from Russia. It was one of 10 Jewish bookstores on Manhattan’s Rivington Street and had no official name. The family lived behind the store.

“It was narrow and dusty,” Scharfstein recalled. They sold religious items and books geared for Orthodox immigrants like themselves.

After just a few years of barely scraping out a living, Asher decided to improve on the “crummy” dreidels they had been importing from Poland. He had a die made and started manufacturing lead dreidels. That first year, they made 25,000 dreidels and sold them for a penny a piece.

“My father’s friends who were plumbers brought lead pipes they had taken out of houses, and we would melt them down. We could make 100 an hour, and we’d make them for hours at a time.” The dreidels marked what Scharfstein calls, pun intended, “a turning point” for the business. He still has the original die in his Livingston home.

Dreidels were quickly followed by flags for Simhat Torah — the family took the sticks from Maine and attached the flags on with glue cakes made from fish. “It stunk to high heaven,” Scharfstein remembers. Later came wooden dreidels from pre-state Israel. They tinted these in a bathtub full of dye. The young Scharfstein brothers “always looked like we had suntans.”

What’s in a name

It wasn’t until the company expanded into notebooks in the late 1920s, nosing into the business of the Hebrew Publishing Company, the powerhouse at the time, that they named the company Ktav. The family sweet-talked a salesman into helping them; he told them, “You need a name; you’re going to be a big company,” Scharfstein said. They came up with Ktav, from the Hebrew root meaning “to write.”

Scharfstein grew up with the business; he fought in World War II, married Edythe Shor, and eventually joined the company.

One day, Edythe, who had been teaching Hebrew at an afternoon school, had an idea. “She said, ‘Why don’t you write a beginner’s book? We can do a Dick and Jane for Hebrew books.’”

Scharfstein wrote Chaveri, published in 1951, in black and white. Today, the Hebrew reader is still in print and has sold over one million copies. He had found his calling, and spent much of the next six decades writing and publishing texts destined for the classroom.

Sol and Bernie, who took over the company from their parents, have moved the company three times from its longtime Canal Street location, eventually moving within Manhattan and then to New Jersey, first to Hoboken and more recently to Jersey City. Today, they continue to publish five or six new textbooks a year and about 10 new scholarly works.

Scharfstein declined to offer a comparison of sales through the decades but said they haven’t dropped the number of publications at all. The 2008-09 catalog includes dozens of textbooks and siddurim as well as teaching devices and classroom charts, scholarly titles, and popular spirituality books. A tiny percentage of their books are vanity publications done at the request of the authors. And of course, there are plenty of tchotchkes.

When Scharfstein is asked about the company’s heyday, his answer is simple. “Today,” he said. “I’m alive and I’m [almost] 87. Bernie is 82. We’re alive and making a good living.”

But he is concerned with more than just money. Recently honored by Yeshiva University, Scharfstein said, “Money is not the object. It’s our contribution to Jewish society and Jewish education. That’s more important than a couple of bucks.”

The highlight of Scharfstein’s career was a visit to the former Soviet Union during the 1980s, the height of the struggle for Soviet Jewry. There, he exhibited Jewish books and remembers “the Russian Jews were under tremendous pressure. They lined up like crazy; they had been deprived of looking at Jewish books. There were 1,000 exhibitors, and we were the busiest of all. They looked at us as if we were Moshiach.”

As the book industry changes, Ktav tries to keep up with computer-integrated books, such as with one of its new titles, From Ur to Eternity. A Jewish history text, it includes in each chapter a section that directs students to the Ktav website for interactive activities.

“There are a lot of changes in the book business — tremendous changes,” he acknowledges. “It’s not going to be a paper-oriented book industry.”

None of the Scharfstein brothers’ children (they each have three) have joined the business.

“I regret it, but I understand human nature,” said Sol. “Every kid has to do something special that’s in them.” Still, he said, he’d like to see the business continue.

“When they bury us, I don’t want them to bury the business. I’d like to see it continue to do what it is doing and go into the next generation.”

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A teen-friendly Torah commentary

Sol Scharfstein’s new Torah commentary, Torah and Commentary: The Five Books of Moses, is designed for teens, adults, and both Jews and non-Jews who prefer an all-English, accessible Torah text to one with Hebrew or a more scholarly translation. “It’s simple, it’s down to earth — it’s something a kid can read,” he said.

“I noticed during the Torah reading, the kids close the book and they yap between themselves. And it’s not only kids, it’s adults too,” he said.

(Scharfstein, who locates himself somewhere between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism, has belonged to both the Orthodox Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob and David in West Orange and the Conservative Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston.)

Learning that the Hebrew often serves as a deterrent provided just the inspiration he needed.

“I said, ‘How can I provide an instrument to interest a kid and just read it as an ordinary book and not hit him over the head with a religious hammer?’”

His answer is a takeoff on the famous response of the Jews to God at Mount Sinai, “Na’aseh v’nishma” — we will do and we will listen. “I say, we will read and understand,” he said.

In addition to the classic commentators, he doesn’t shy from offering his own commentaries, always marked with the acronym, Shenash, for his own Hebrew name, Shlomo ben Asher.

Leafing through the finished book, Scharfstein points out empty spaces he wishes were filled with commentary. “There are at least 50 that never made it into the book. But that always happens. It’s part of the process,” he says.

Asked about deciding how to illustrate the book, or which commentaries to include, he shrugs his shoulders and says, “There’s no system. After 60 years of experience, you just know.”

— JOHANNA GINSBERG

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