I love reading my grandchildren the same picture books I read to their parents, but times have changed attitudes
“The Rebbetzin,” he murmured with wide-opened eyes, “must have cried so many tears — the siddur’s pages are spotted brown.”
“I have smiled and wept for more than 50 years of davening from it,” I acknowledged, “but the true cause is acidification; most paper used from the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century turns yellow and brittle.” In fact, in 1990, President Bush signed a bill requiring “federal records, books and publications of enduring value” be printed on acid-free permanent paper, which stays white.
I hold on to old seforim, books, and ephemera, but my children bury seforim and throw the other stuff away.
On the top of a bookcase, pushing against the ceiling, hibernate three piles of soft-covered, cheaply published Gemaras my husband learned from in elementary, high school, and yeshivah gedolah. The only handwriting was his tiny, neatly penciled-in name Yehuda — spelled with an alef at the end, instead of the more modern way of a hei — inside the front cover.
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