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magnet. An exhibition of Hyman Kaplan books by Leonard Q. Ross, the pen name of Leo Rosten, displayed in its window. He entered an Aladdin's cave of rare and precious books - a pantheon of the world's most renowned authors. To him, trawling second-hand book stores for a lifetime, it was like entering the Louvre to gain an audience with Mona Lisa.
Remarkably, there was no sign of dust. No musty smell. The antiseptic wooden bookshelves seemed to have been polished daily. A framed and signed photograph of Ernest Hemingway stood on a stand, presumably for sale. In Africa, as a teenager, he had been given a book token and promptly cashed it in for two volumes by Alan Moorehead – ‘The Blue Nile’ and ‘The White Nile’. Here they were, in pristine first editions.
His iPhone-toting kids would never have understood his sentimentality, which is why he had sent them on to Bloomingdales with his wife.
Grabbing the nearest Kaplan book, he anxiously explored its pages. Yes, it was the same edition he had devoured as a boy in Africa.
A set of short stories depicted a harassed Mr. Parkhill, a night school teacher in New York in the 1930s and his class of immigrants from Eastern Europe seeking to improve their rudimentary English and his 'star' pupil who insisted on displaying his name as H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N in green stars between red letters outlined in blue. An ever-respectful student who contorted the speech and grammar of English into his own perverse logic. His favourite Shakespearean character was Julius "Scissor". One Christmas, he presented Mr. Parkhill, who was always referred to as Mr., with a gift from his pupils bearing the initials M.P. It took Mr. Parkhill a while before he realized what the 'M' stood for.
Summers for him as a teenager were spent in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, a refuge from his yearlong schooling in England.
The 1970s were a hotbed of Socialism in the country governed by an ex-school teacher, Julius Nyrere. Ujamaa was introduced as a system of self-sustaining village cooperative for the economic development of Tanzania.