When One Apartment Becomes a Parable

I collect books; it’s a big part of my life as an academic.  Whenever I travel—whether around New York, across the country, or overseas—I almost always come home with another volume or two. My home and office are lined with books, and friends and family have spent years sending me t-shirts that read, “So Many Books, So Little Time.” My students even regularly comment on the  New Yorker cover Bookopolis , where skyscrapers are replaced by towering stacks of books, that has been hanging in my office for years.  So it wasn’t surprising that many friends almost immediately sent me the recent New York Times story about Mendel Uminer, a 31-year-old scholar who lost his Upper East Side studio after his landlord objected to the 10,000 books inside it.  I felt for him. Every serious collector understands what it means to build a library one book at a time. To collectors, books become more than objects—they become memories of places visited, ideas pursued, questions asked, and lives lived. I recognized a version of myself in him.  What troubled me with the article, however, was not in its sympathy for Uminer. It was in the meaning attached to his life and books, for it simplifies and then exaggerates the real New York story here.  The article details Uminer’s choice to move from his studio. During the book packing, Julian Cosma, a filmmaker and friend, asserts that there is an element of the city which is “hostile to the life of the mind, to the eccentricity that might produce it.”   To be fair, those are Cosma’s words, not the reporter’s. But the article gives them considerable weight and space. The reader is encouraged to see Uminer’s move as more than a difficult housing dispute. It becomes a story about a city that no longer has room for quirky intellectuals like myself.  I think that’s an overstatement. Certainly, New York has become obscenely expensive, where teachers, artists, writers, nonprofit and essential workers, and young professors increasingly struggle to build lives. It’s also true that wealth can produce a certain kind of uniformity and preference set in areas like the Upper East Side.  Of course, we should have a conversation about whether rising costs are squeezing out some of the city’s eccentric characters, but this Times story asks one apartment situation to prove a general case, and it simply can’t.  The details here matter. The Times describes a fairly large 600-square-foot studio with stacks lining the walls, piles of books filling the prewar bathroom and blocking a window, and a mattress on the floor surrounded by novels. The landlord was concerned with the volume of material in his unit, and there are legitimate questions about fire safety and responsibility to neighbors in a dense apartment building. Uminer was given notice to de-clutter but he “he did not heed the warning” and “eviction proceedings began.”   That is the key point that is underemphasized. Uminer chose to fight in court rather than declutter. While Uminer stated that “reading is part of my culture,” it is part of mine too. But there were safety concerns here, and his books aren’t evidence of hostility toward scholarship; there are limits and rules in rental spaces which Uminer didn’t follow.   The Times story ends on a positive note with Uminer finding a new, larger apartment. “More books,” a friend jokes.   This reveals that New York did not exile him from the life of the mind. It absorbed him—like me and many others—at a cost of finding the right apartment, but the city absorbed him in the end.   Too often, our media stories turn compelling personal stories into sweeping cultural diagnoses. A landlord-tenant dispute becomes proof that America no longer values scholarship. A painful personal setback becomes another chapter in a story of national decline. Sometimes those larger stories are true and sometimes they aren’t. The challenge is knowing the difference.  I came away from the Times story feeling exactly what I should have felt: sympathy for a young scholar who spent years assembling a remarkable library and then faced the reality of losing the home that contained it.  Uminer chose to leave his apartment rather than thin his collection, but this story does not prove New York has become hostile to the life of the mind. If anything, the opposite seems closer to the truth. Uminer built his library in New York because the city remains one of the world’s great centers of ideas, books, museums, universities, and conversation. He is still in New York, still collecting books, and still making a life of the mind. This is little more than a story about the practical realities of living in a dense city, not about a city that has declared war on scholarship or eccentricity.  The post When One Apartment Becomes a Parable appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .