Books, Too, Go From Dust to Dust : Living: It’s sad but true: There’s not much room in ‘posterity’ for the contents of our bookshelves.

The voice on the line is hesitant and heavy with grief: “Rabbi, my father recently died, and he left some books. . . . “

That simple declaration is complex and delicate. The loss of a loved one carries with it the dilemma of the deceased’s possessions, themselves freighted with sentiment. Belongings are memorials, surviving symbols of a life, and to give them away can feel like a betrayal.

Among the variety of items one leaves behind, few are at once so impersonal, and so profoundly linked with personality, as one’s books. “My father was a scholar,” I am told; “my mother was quite a learned woman.” Now they are gone, and these, the palpable symbols of their lifetime devotion to Jewish study, weigh heavily on the grieving. So they call me: “I would like to give them to you. . . . “

My first few weeks on the job at the University of Judaism, I was inclined to accept everything. I did not yet realize just how glutted the world was with books. Now my response, although delicate, can be brief. I explain gingerly that most books found in private libraries have long been in the university’s collection.

At times, however, the prospect of finding a particular volume or series, or simply the insistent importuning of an eager donor, persuades me to visit the home. Whether the books are available because of death, or moving, or a simple change in interest and life style, the same desperate air clings to the scene: Objects once dear have become useless. For books, as for people, not disintegration but disuse is the cruelest fate.

Many times the same books appear: old prayer books with cracked bindings and crumbling pages, Bibles with illustrations that formed the owner’s early images of Moses and Samson and Solomon. Almost always there are novels, many of them once obligatory reading for the culturally au courant. Now even a library will not take them. We have them, and no one requests them anyway.

Some months ago I went to the home of an old woman. She had been calling for weeks, her tones plaintive and urgent, insisting that she had books of great value and beauty. Would I please come?

I entered an old and dirty apartment. It was filled with bits of flea-shop finery, small silver baubles and colored glass bottles on window sills. She ushered me in conspiratorially, and showed me, with evident pride, her books. There were some paperback novels, and a set of 10 or 11 Horizon books, containing articles on art, literature and other cultural subjects. These were her treasures, and she made a show of reluctance in parting with them.

They could not be refused. As I offered the appropriate exclamations of appreciation, she answered the unspoken question. “I am giving them to you because I do not have family to give them to. I am afraid that I will die and someone will come in and take them. I don’t want just anyone to have them.” I nodded. I understood. I took them.

People donate books to libraries for many reasons, but I suspect that most donate because libraries are pure and promising, and to donate a book is a gesture of benevolence to the ages. Someone will pull this book off the shelf one day, and I will whisper through it again. It will be no one’s possession anymore; it will belong to humanity.

No matter how quiet a library is, it is never really silent. One can always hear the voices of all those books, all those messages that were preserved from the chorus of the past, waiting to be opened and examined. But there are those other voices, more subtle, announced at times by a handwritten name or a bookplate on the inner leaf. There is the voice of one who read the book, kept it on the nightstand or took it on vacation, talked about it, perhaps cherished it, and finally gave it to posterity.

Sometimes the story, and the pathos, of a book’s journey is greater than the story of its composition. I wonder at the books in our library that date from 200, 300, 400 years ago. What fortune or sacrifice or simple fortuity allowed those books to come to rest on a library shelf in California when so many others are gone? Some have dates and writings that tell of their journeys. Part of the trust of any library is not only to the authors, and to the readers, but to those many who, out of sadness, generosity or a need to unburden, gave a piece of what used to be their lives.

In the brief time that I have worked in a library, I have discovered what should have been obvious: that collections grow in many ways, and one of the principal ways is out of pain, and loss, and the fear of being forgotten. The Horizon books sit on a shelf in my office, and they remind me, when the phone rings, that the donation of a book can be a gesture of the soul.