Where Aaben on California is small, dark, and claustrophobic, Acorn, around the corner on Polk, is airy and brightly lit. In Aaben, every customer is privy to every conversation at the front desk or anywhere else, while in Acorn, in spite of the brightness, there is complete privacy within the stacks. Conversations — even those close by — always seem faint and far away. The people behind the front desk are always busy at something, tapping into the computerized inventory, going through books, completing transactions… In Aaben, the only music possible would have to come from the radio behind the front counter. In Acorn, there is always interesting music being piped in over the sound system — classical, or folk, never top forty.

Last summer I applied for a part-time job there and was given what amounted to a written IQ test which included questions about my favorite authors and the last ten books I had read for pleasure. Apparently I did well, because the owner called me in for an interview. He is a tall, handsome, serious looking man with a gray beard, an ex-radical. He reminisced once about time spent in a jail after a demonstration.

Unfortunately, for the part-time job he had to ask for a commitment of twenty hours a week. I could not afford that at what he was offering in an hourly salary, so I politely declined.

Acorn, too, is gone. It’s now a gym. I miss it terribly, have missed it for years. To this day, when I’m walking down California towards Polk, something inside me tugs me in the direction of that lost, wonderful bookstore.

I visited the two neighborhood bookstores I go to about once a week, Aaben and Acorn.

Aaben is a small used bookshop on California, right next to the Cat Clinic, which is handy because Aaben has three resident cats, fat, friendly tabbies that somehow have been taught never to leave the store, even though the door is usually propped open. The (or a) owner of Aaben, a pear-shaped bearded man, died last summer, but the store soldiers on, an idiosyncratic little place that has sections marked out with handwritten labels, among them, “Zeitgeist,” “Americana”, and “Those Kennedys.” Usually the person behind the desk is a good-looking, moody boy in his twenties.

This time I found a paperback copy of John Hersey’s The Wall, the first adult book I ever read. I was completely convinced by it at the time (I was in junior high school) and remember visting the public library in a vain attempt to track down the works of Hersey’s fictional diarist, Noach Levinson.

Someone else had also been convinced. The book was shelved, not among novels, but in the nonfiction “Holocaust” section, in spite of the fact that a previous owner had written “FICTION” in pen on the cover, bearing down so hard the word is practically carved into it. Most of the ink, however, has vanished, so it would be easy for a bored, hurried shelver to miss. In addition, someone (probably the same person who wrote “FICTION” on the cover) had circled in red felt tip the “This is a work of fiction” note on the copyright page (1950. The book’s original price was 50 cents.) and drew an arrow pointing to it, and wrote again under the title page, in cursive:

fiction
not factual

There is more marginalia. On the inside cover, in that same felt tip, is written “Page 303” with 303 underlined, and below 303, in blue ink, “664”. Page 303 is the scene where Dolek Berson tries to save his sick wife, Symka. It was circled in red and proclaimed “a masterpiece!” Page 664 is the scene where an infant is suffocated. It, too, is circled, but in blue and without comment. I bought the book.

I was always a sucker for marginalia. That edition is still somewhere about.

Aaben, alas, is no more. It’s now a carpet shop.  

THE WALL is a John Hersey novel plainly based on the diaries of Emmanuel Ringelblum, a Polish historian whose account of life in the Warsaw Ghetto was discovered after the war, buried in milk cans and metal boxes. Part of it is still unrecovered. Hersey’s book is a romanticized version of Ringelblum’s account, which I remember as a fairly impersonal, but important description of the nuts and bolts of life in the ghetto.

Unlike Hersey’s bachelor diarist, Ringelblum had a wife and children. He and his family were captured and executed by the Nazis in 1944. One account I have read is that, shortly before Ringelblum’s execution, the Polish resistance managed to break into the prison where he was held and offered to rescue him — but only him. It’s said he looked at his sleeping nine-year-old son, who was in the same cell with him, and refused.