Edyth Geiger founded an English-language lending library that started from her one-bedroom apartment and expanded to house 30,000 books over several rooms.
By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAEDYTH GEIGER with her giraffe collection.(photo credit: Rafi Schreeuwer)
Giraffes and books. These are Edyth Geiger’s passions. When she first moved to Safed in 1970, giraffe knickknacks and hundreds of books vied for space in her one-bedroom apartment. Today, the books – grown into a collection of 30,000 – are housed downstairs in the English-language lending library she founded.At 92, Geiger no longer descends the steps to the library every day, but with the help of three dozen volunteers representing a cross-section of Anglo-Israeli society in the region, she keeps abreast of all its activities – including a biweekly stamp-collecting club for local children that she started years ago.FROM ARMY TO ALIYAEdyth Hollender was born in Wisconsin and raised in Chicago. When she was 19, her family moved to Miami.She earned a law degree at night while enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. From 1943 to 1945, she served in England and France as an army secretary.“My boss in London drew up the supply plans for D-Day,” she relates, “and we were the first group that went into France behind the troops.” While in Paris, she brought movies and candies to children coming through from Germany on the “secret train” to Palestine. “They were housed in a castle en route, and we’d drive out and show them a Laurel & Hardy movie or something like that.” After the war, the UJA in Miami invited her to speak about this work. Another speaker that night was Leo Geiger, a chaplain and native of Safed. He later liked to joke: “I was Jewish, you were Jewish; I appealed to you, you appealed to me; so we got united: the United Jewish Appeal.” Married in 1946, the couple honeymooned in pre-state Israel and remained in Jerusalem for a year. “When I was in England, British soldiers were our buddies, and then I came to Palestine in 1947, where British soldiers hated us. It was extremely strange for me,” she recalls.The Geigers returned to Miami when the pregnant Edyth got amebic dysentery. Miriam (Shlesinger), now a translator/interpreter on the faculty of Bar-Ilan University, was born in 1947, followed by Jonathan (an author and consultant in San Diego) in 1949 and Aliza (Spiegel), now a neonatal intensive care nurse at Hadassah, in 1951.“I read to them every single day, and I think it matters,” she once told an Israeli TV interviewer.Leo died in 1952, and she took the children to Israel, where she remarried and gave birth to Aryeh in 1954.Five years later, following a divorce, she returned to Miami and supported her children as a fund-raiser for the Hebrew University and the Miami Jewish Federation.“I always wanted to come back to Israel,” she says.“One by one, my children came, and I encouraged them. Aryeh returned when he was only 15. I followed in 1970, and bought the apartment I’m in today.” Though Leo and his parents were no longer alive, “the Geiger family’s distant relatives headed the [Safed] post office, hospital and municipal swimming pool, so it was very easy for me. If I walked into a store and said I was a Geiger, I had no problem.”Intending to spend winters in Miami, she brought along just two convertible couches and “unlimited” cases of books. The giraffe collection accumulated over the years.A LIBRARY IS BORN“In 1970, there was almost nowhere to buy an English book in Safed. If you loved books and wanted to read in English, forget it,” she says, recalling that she used to lend books to her grade-school friends for a penny.“I wasn’t here very long before somebody knocked on my door and said, ‘I hear you have a library.’ Somehow, the shaliah [aliya representative] in New York knew I had books, and people began coming.” Not wanting to be tied down, she resisted starting a library until a retired Christian librarian named Harriet Goddard offered to take charge. “The secret of the whole project is volunteers,” Geiger says. “We have always had volunteer librarians.” Last year, the first paid librarian was hired.The apartment library was cramped; patrons hung their coats on the shower rod. In 1998, the operation moved into a rented basement storage area lined with rickety old metal bookcases.Patrons range from hassidim to kibbutzniks, and nobody pays a fee. All books, CDs and magazines are donated, many from the United States. Operating expenses are covered by contributions. “We had to establish an amuta [non-profit corporation] immediately, and I am a fund-raiser, after all,” she says.Two years ago, the amuta – chaired by an anthropology lecturer from Amuka – bought several additional basement rooms and then the two-level store above, so the library is now greatly expanded. “A couple of very lovely people from Chicago sponsored us,” she explains. “We now own all of it.” She has never invested in computerization. “We use an ancient system, where every book has a card in it.
The borrower fills out the card, and a volunteer transfers that information to a notebook so we always know where each book is.” The books are alphabetized within categories denoted by colored dots on their spines. Purple is for “highbrow” material, black for Holocaust, red for thrillers. If duplicate titles arrive, the older copy is given away – never sold.She even mails requested books, for free, to people unable to get to the library. But they arrive from far and wide. “Thursday, a group is coming from Kibbutz Barkai [near Hadera],” she says. “They take lots of books and bring them back on their next visit months later. They not only return those books, but bring me new ones, too.” She has also helped set up English libraries at a moshav and a kibbutz in the Golan.“The library takes all my time, and what makes it wonderful is that there are people in and out of here all the time.” Suffering from macular degeneration, she cannot read as voraciously as she once did. She depends on large-print books and e-books on her iPad, and has reluctantly given up collecting stamps.WORLD TRAVELERGeiger has traveled extensively, visiting 70 countries. “My best friend in London was from New Zealand, and 32 years later I visited for the first time. I’ve now been there five times, and to Tahiti, Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa – all the islands.” Despite completing several ulpanim, her Hebrew is not fluent, and her biggest frustration is dealing with health-care and medical forms in Hebrew. “If you live far from the Center, you do not have ready access to English-speakers, so I go to Jerusalem on occasion,” she says.Three years ago, she lost her son Aryeh to cancer. “He was an amazing person who put pluralism on the map in Israel,” she says. He founded the Re’ut School in Jerusalem in 1999, where seventh- through 12th-graders receive a grounding in Jewish learning, social activism and respect for others.If there is one thing she would still like to accomplish in her life, says Geiger, it is to help out her son’s school – and of course, to encourage more people to contribute books to her library.
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