Treasured Long Island City Bookstore Rescued From Brink Of Closure

LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — Tucked away on the seventh floor of a warehouselike building in Long Island City is a space that has helped keep Yiddish alive.

Though it contains roughly 100,000 volumes, CYCO is "more than a bookstore," as its supporters recently wrote. It is a treasured cultural center, publisher of works in the Yiddish language, and a repository of songbooks, memoirs, books of poetry and political writings.

"They love this, because it connects them to a language that asks nothing of them," said Hy Wolfe, CYCO's director, describing his patrons. Wolfe has led CYCO for 23 years, more than a quarter of its 85-year lifespan.

CYCO (pronounced "Tsiko," and short for Central Yiddish Cultural Organization) spent decades bouncing around a series of Manhattan locations, most recently being displaced from its Gramercy home in 2010. It was then that CYCO arrived in Long Island City, whose affordable rents and diverse population have been a perfect match for CYCO's eclectic archive.

"It’s a neighborhood that I think of as really putting on display a range of cultural possibility, and what happens when you have spaces where a lot of different kinds of people are just seeing each other in their everyday lives," said Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky, a writer, performer and longtime patron of CYCO.

But in recent months, CYCO's future seemed in doubt. Last fall, the Atran Foundation — a nonprofit supporting Jewish causes in the New York City area — said it would cut off the funding that it had given CYCO since the 1950s, explaining that the organization was not reaching enough people.

By January, CYCO's bank account contained only enough money to cover rent through March. Scrambling to stay afloat, Wolfe began working the phones, searching for benefactors.

Meanwhile, Lang/Levitsky teamed up with the writer Molly Crabapple to pursue a crowdsourced solution. Together, they launched a fundraiser in February, seeking to raise $90,000 to "help a space for Yiddish culture bloom again."

The effort has been a smashing success — through Tuesday, it had raised $61,895 from more than 600 contributors. Donors have hailed from across North America, plus several from "the European wings of Yiddishland," Lang/Levitsky said.

Besides covering rent for another full year, Lang/Levitsky says the influx of funds will help make CYCO more sustainably run, such as ensuring that future work done for the organization is paid, rather than volunteer-based.

Wolfe, meanwhile, hopes the hundreds of donors will serve as living proof for possible funders that CYCO is, in fact, reaching people. His mind is now racing with programming opportunities opened up by the funds, from acting workshops to song and dance classes to printmaking trainings.

Wolfe, a trained actor who was raised in Brooklyn by parents who survived the Holocaust, grew up speaking Yiddish as a first language. And while the global Yiddish-speaking population is a fraction of where it stood before the Holocaust (roughly 600,000 today, compared to 11 million pre-World War II), the language is hardly dying — Yiddish has undergone a cultural revival in recent years, and some researchers believe its number of speakers may finally be rising again.

"We’re at a point in time today where Yiddish is on the upswing," Wolfe said. "To fund a book center and not close a book center down is one of the elements of the foundation of a language."

Few places have contributed as much to the language's viability as CYCO, which has published works by Isaac Bashevis Singer, hosted decades' worth of debates and performances, and welcomed countless students and scholars to browse its shelves.

"Yiddish continues," Wolfe said. "This fundraiser, we hope, is the beginning of a new generation that wants to step up."

CYCO is open by appointment only at 51-02 21st St., 7th Floor A-2, in Long Island City. Learn more at its website, cycobooks.org