Local Libraries Are Taking On a Worldly Air : Foreign-Language Collections Expanding to Meet Growing Need

As a young Armenian girl growing up in the Soviet Union, Mary Asatrian read voraciously, gobbling up literature, history and colorful folk legends about her native culture.

Today, her 10-year-old son can do the same at Glendale’s Central Library, where the Armenian-language collection has grown more than sixfold in the last five years.

“I couldn’t believe it the first time I came here and found all these Armenian books,” said Asatrian, who left work early one day this week to browse in the library’s foreign-language section. “I’m glad to be able to find foreign literature in a library like this . . . It is so important for me to be close to my culture and heritage.”

Throughout the Glendale and northeast Los Angeles area, foreign-language collections are growing rapidly as libraries scramble to keep up with reading demands of newly arrived immigrants. Librarians report that budgets to acquire foreign books have doubled and tripled in the past 10 years.

Foreign-language books and magazines account for an estimated 25% of all acquisitions, up from 5% to 10% in 1980, according to Jennifer Lambelet, adult services coordinator for the Los Angeles City library system. Los Angeles’s book-acquisition budget has remained steady at about $4 million, she said.

“Demand has been increasing steadily for the past 10 years, but we’ve had a greatly accelerated increase in the last three or four years, especially in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean,” Lambelet said.

In Glendale’s Central Library, the foreign-language collection has grown from 6,087 books in 1980 to 8,789 today, according to librarian Marie Fish, with Spanish, Armenian, Chinese and Vietnamese books showing sharp increases.

However, foreign-language publications don’t come cheap, especially with the dollar falling against overseas currencies today.

In Echo Park, librarian Vivien Fiedler said she spends hundreds of dollars each month on periodicals such as Crown, a popular Chinese magazine, and about six Spanish-language magazines, including Buen Hogar and Vanidades. Some are so popular that she orders seven copies each month.

Echo Park’s Spanish-language collection now accounts for 10% to 15% of all books, according to Fiedler. Nevertheless, Carlos Franco, a middle-aged patron from Mexico, said he would like to see more biographies and novels on the shelves.

“They need a larger collection. I’ve read many of the titles already,” Franco said, as he flipped through a Spanish magazine.

From Farsi to Yiddish

Librarians in Glendale and Northeast Los Angeles said that, depending on the ethnic mix of their patrons, new acquisitions range from Armenian newspapers and Vietnamese poetry to Chinese comics, Victorian-era classics translated into myriad languages and works by contemporary Latin American authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Manuel Puig.

At the Los Feliz branch library in Los Angeles, for instance, patrons ask for books in Farsi, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish, Lambelet said, mainly because of the number of Soviet Jews and Iranians who have settled in the area.

In Highland Park, the Arroyo Seco branch of the Los Angeles City library system now has 10,000 Spanish books, according to librarian Pat Wilson. In 1980, it had only 1,500, she said.

Librarians said they are sometimes unable to find contemporary books in certain languages, like Cambodian and Laotian. Some local libraries strike deals with small foreign-language publishing houses in Los Angeles when they are unsuccessful in locating books abroad.

Seek Out Local Publishers

In the Cahuenga branch in east Hollywood, for instance, librarian John Urquidi said he arranged to buy books from a local Armenian publisher in exchange for a volume discount.

The library has for years catered to the area’s diverse ethnic mixture of recently arrived Asians, Latinos, Europeans and Middle Easterners.

“An area that just grew recently is the Arabic section,” said Urquidi, pointing to a shelf lined with novels, poetry, history and several political treatises.

The foreign-language books are neatly catalogued next to the fine-arts books in a room that Urquidi calls “our little U.N.”

Besides buying books outright, libraries in Los Angeles also borrowed from a large foreign-language collection at the Central Library downtown. But the fire that damaged the Central Library in April also stopped all such borrowing.

Library Fire Cut Access

“The fire really hurt us,” said Sarah Yamasaki, children’s librarian at the Echo Park branch. “A small branch like us with such diverse clients . . . couldn’t afford to buy everything on our own. And now we have no access to the downtown collection,” said Yamasaki, who adds that her branch is stuck with the same books until the central library reopens.

On the flip side, librarians said they are also seeing an increase in demand for books, records and tapes that teach foreign patrons English. As a result, many branches, including Echo Park, Cahuenga and Arroyo Seco, have beefed up their instructional English sections.

Raoul Navejas, who moved to Highland Park from Mexicali last year, said he drops by the Arroyo Seco branch library on Figueroa Street once a week to read Spanish for fun and English to improve his language skills. Navejas favors daily newspapers and American magazines like Omni. But he also confessed a fondness for some of Mexico’s most popular periodicals.

“I read novelas de amor and photonovelas, “ Navejas acknowledged, referring to the soft-cover books in Spanish that feature soap-opera plots and lots of pictures.