What It Is
These metal cans are witnesses to the mechanical printing processes once housed in the basement of our historic East Broadway building, which we relied on for decades to produce a broadsheet newspaper. They contained oil to keep the gears moving, and kerosene and other solvents to clean metal plates and blocks of type. Why I Love It
When I see these cans, I think of our 30th anniversary issue in 1927, in which our predecessors boasted about how machine-driven printing had transformed the crafting of our Yiddish newspaper. It took 11,000 pounds of ink and 441,000 pounds of paper to publish that 80-page special edition, the editors noted on its front page, along with the work of 80 writers who produced 430 columns. The NYC edition weighed in at close to 2 ⅓ pounds. Where They Came From
In 2010, as the Forward was moving to its current office in Manhattan’s Financial District, Louis Katz, our last Yiddish typesetter, asked me to come see him.
Arriving upstairs at the row of desktop computers in what had once been the composing room, I watched Mr. Katz, a short, voluble titan we gingerly called “Ketsele,” reach up to the top shelf of the typesetters’ closet to pull out these two cans. He’d held onto them long after the Forward made the switch from linotype press to digital typesetting — a moment of revolution in his fakh, or trade. They’re a memory of the labor required to share our forebears’ words of wisdom with the public.
Al dos guts/Best, |
