Stephen Durchslag can’t get enough of freedom’s story–a story that’s spelled out in the age-old text of Passover, which begins Monday at sundown.
Like other Jewish families around the world, the Durchslags will sit down this evening to celebrate the holiday with a special kind of family dinner. Their table will be set with good things to eat–and some bad ones, too, such as bitter herbs to remind them that their ancestors were slaves in Egypt.
They’ll take turns telling the story of how Moses freed the Jews from Pharaoh’s yoke, reading from a haggadah, a small prayer book recounting those events and prescribing the order of the service.
Many Jews will have a couple of haggadahs around the house, souvenirs of Passovers past, maybe tucked away in a buffet drawer. The booklets don’t take up much room and it’s hard to discard them, even when their text has become obscured by wine spills. They are bound up with memories of bubbies and zadies no longer here to drink the four cups of wine according to the holiday’s ritual.
Durchslag understands those sentiments only too well. He has several haggadahs himself–4,500 of them, give or take a few.
Some bound in finely tooled leather, others printed on cheap newsprint stock, they stand side-by-side on the floor-to-ceiling shelves that line the walls of his study. Collectively, they form an enclave of traditionalism in Durchslag’s ultramodern home decorated with pop-art sculpture on Chicago’s North Side.
The ranks of haggadahs grow all the time. Hardly a month goes by without the Durchslag household getting a telephone call from what his teenage daughter Danielle calls the “cha” men, her oral shorthand derived from the guttural first syllable of “haggadah.” Often it’s the only word of the conversation she’ll understand, the caller speaking breakneck Hebrew or Yiddish or some even more exotic tongue.
Yet, the message is clear: Somehow they have heard that her father has the largest collection of haggadahs outside of a museum, and the callers have one dating to, say, 18th Century Poland, one that survived the Holocaust that devoured most of Eastern Europe’s Jewry and its religious artifacts. Or, maybe, one from the Samaritan community, a tiny group that split off from the main body of Judaism, 2,000 years ago. Would Mr. Durchslag be interested?
“How could I not be?” said Durchslag, 56, who was replacing some of his haggadahs on the shelves, having just returned from giving a pre-Passover lecture to a synagogue group. “There is a living, breathing aspect to this collection. They’re a record of our people’s history.”
Some of Durchslag’s haggadahs are bilingual, printed on facing pages in Hebrew and the language of one of the many lands the Jewish people passed through during their folk wanderings. He has an Afrikaans haggadah from South Africa; and another one in Marathi, the language of the Bene Israel, a group that lived isolated for centuries in India not even suspecting there were other Jews in the world.
Durchslag’s collecting began as a hobby that escalated into a passion. A lawyer by trade, he had warm memories of his parents’ Passover dinners when he was growing up near Humboldt Park. So 15 years ago, when someone suggested that haggadahs, many of them no bigger than a pamphlet, were inexpensive to collect, he thought he’d pick up a few.
His friend’s cost-analysis advice proved true enough, that is until his collecting became a compulsion. It was a line Durchslag passed over when it dawned on him that haggadahs preserve a record, not just of the Jews’ escape from Egypt but of all the other ups and downs of their collective story.
For instance, among the less expensive items in his collection are a group of commercial haggadahs, issued by American businesses as goodwill advertising giveaways. Years ago, the Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn had its haggadah. So, too, did the Breakstone Dairy and Shapiro Wine Co. — which boasted that its Passover wine was “so thick you could cut it with a knife.”
Now, this genre is perpetuated by only one of its kind — the Maxwell House Coffee haggadah, which is available at grocery stores again this year, just as it has been for six decades.
“It may seem strange that a religious text would be commercially sponsored; you can’t find a (Roman Catholic) missal at the supermarket,” Durchslag said. “But that very commercialism indicates how seriously those firms took their Jewish customers’ religious observations.”
In its text, the haggadah enjoins those reading it that they should recount the story as if they themselves had witnessed the deliverance from Egypt. One of Durchslag’s haggadahs was specially designed to help make that leap of imagination easier: The artist who produced it set little mirrors next to pictures of biblical characters.
All too many haggadahs, Durchslag noted, are themselves, in effect, mirrors reflecting the less fortunate chapters in Jewish history. Not every land has welcomed Jews as America did — with giveaway haggadahs.
Some of Durchslag’s most treasured items barely escaped the flames of Inquisitions and pogroms. One was issued by a small community in Holland in 1940, even as World War II was beginning.
“That haggadah escaped,” Durchslag said, “only because someone mailed a copy abroad, maybe to a relative, just before the Nazis marched into the country.”
He has a whole series of Italian haggadahs, dating to the early age of printed books — which, unfortunately, corresponded chronologically with the anti-Jewish repressions of the Counter-Reformation. Each of those Italian haggadahs has a different dateline — as Jewish printers were forced to move from one town to the next, always just a step ahead of their persecutors.
That’s a lesson worth remembering when sitting down to read the haggadah in a land of peace and prosperity, Durchslag noted.
“As a people, we Jews have known so little freedom,” he said, having returned the last of his haggadahs to its place. “These are the record of our tragedies — and of our tenacity.”
