The historic Strand Bookstore in New York City. Photo by John Nacion/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect

Behind many of America’s best independent bookstores have been proprietors from Jewish families.

In New York, The Strand is owned by Nancy Bass Wyden, whose family built the business. Dane Neller is an owner of Shakespeare & Co. and Ezra Goldstein bought Park Slope’s Community Bookstore. A Florida institution, Books & Books, is run by Mitchell Kaplan. In Boston, Ken Gloss is in charge at the Brattle Book Shop, and Hillel Stavis owned WordsWorth and Curious George. Carla Cohen built the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. Moe’s Books in Berkeley, California was founded by Morris “Moe” Moskowitz. Growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, I loved going to the Tatnuck Bookseller, owned by Larry and Gloria Abramoff. The Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Bernard Bailyn has written that as a child he became addicted to reading in part because of “Hartford’s biggest and best bookstore, which once had sold books to Mark Twain,” and was owned by Israel Witkower.

It’s somewhat easier to make sense of all that now having read In Praise of Good Bookstores. The book, by Jeff Deutsch, the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, is just out from Princeton University Press.

Independent bookstores are facing a decline even steeper than that of American Jewry; Deutsch reports that the number of such stores declined to 2,500 in 2018 from 7,000 in 1994. During that same span, Amazon.com, of which Deutsch is decidedly not a fan, has earned a dominant role in bookselling.

Deutsch writes beautifully about the relationship between the Jewish people and books. “The rooms of my childhood in Flatbush, Boro Park, and Elizabeth, New Jersey were all book-lined; my childhood homes, my yeshiva, my shul, my relatives’ homes, and the homes of my friends’ families were heavy with large books,” he writes. “These books were read — books are for use, after all — and were treated with reverence and love. Observant Jews are accustomed to kissing the cover of a book after closing it.”

Deutsch also draws a parallel between the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, NJ. “The two institutions share certain values about learning for its own sake,” he writes.

Concern about commerce displacing scholarship has a long history. Deutsch quotes the second century Israeli Rabbi Judah bar Ilai, who worried, “the former generations made the study of Torah their regular concern and their daily work their occasional concern, and they succeeded in the one and in the other. The recent generations have made their daily work their regular concern and their study of Torah their occasional concern, and they have succeeded neither in the one nor in the other.”

Deutsch describes himself as an apikores, a heretic. But he comes off in the book as not heretical but faithful — or mostly so. “Without a homeland, the Jewish people made of the book their homeland,” he writes toward the end. I’d edit that slightly to suggest that it has been books — primarily the Torah — that have allowed the Jewish people to remember that they have a home in the land of Israel. (I mean this as “commentary primarily, not criticism,” to borrow another phrase from Deutsch.)

The most evocative image in In Praise of Good Bookstores is from a visit by Deutsch to his grandparents’ Boro Park apartment before the building was demolished. “As I climbed the staircase and entered the vacated apartment, I was struck by the indentation in the carpet along the living room wall. My grandfather’s books had made their impermanent mark and, for the better part of an hour, I beheld that indentation, formed in space by weight and time, as though I was considering the stars and the blossoming fruit trees, reflecting upon that which remains and that which passes.”

It’d be a shame if someday all that is left of America’s great bookstores is an indentation in the carpet, the mark of a full bookshelf left in place for a while and now gone. As Deutsch explains, “the good bookstore sells books, but its primary product … is the browsing experience.”

How does one put a price on that: “the experience of immersion in a physical space devoted to books”? It’s hard to say. I do plenty of shopping on Amazon, but it felt right to pick up my copy of In Praise of Good Bookstores by walking into the Harvard Book Store and paying the full retail price.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.