Shakespeare and Co. Related Links

Here’s a couple of interesting posts to come out of Paris, where Lauren Elkin regularly blogs on literature. The first is a fun little contest wherein you write one of these:

Tumbleweeds” is Shakespeare and Company slang for the writers who comes through the shop and stay a night (or a few years), sleeping amidst the books and helping out in the shop for an hour a day (and reading their required one book per day). The French police required that George Whitman take the name, passport number, and photograph of each Tumbleweed who blew through, and that is how the Tumbleweed biographies began: before long they were each asked to contribute a mini-autobiography to the collection– a few of which have been reproduced here.

My favorite begins like this:

When my grandfather, David Rakovitze, arrived in South Africa in 1911 he bought a banana from a fruit seller. Having heard that this fruit was just one of the boundless pleasures available to him in this new land devoid of snow and pogroms, he no doubt had his hopes up. He hated that banana. Years later, my family found out why– he had never peeled it. How must this Jewish man from Neshviz, Latvia looked? 4 feet tall, his Semitic features standing out crude against the Dutch noses, blond hair and blue eyes of the Dutch settlers of Cape Town, eating a banana with the peel on, muttering Yiddish curses of disappointment?*

And then we have Lauren’s interview with current Shakespeare & Co owner Sylvia Beach Whitman, who seems to have a not-altogether-great father:



SW: Actually, when I first came back in 2003, my dad wrote this piece, which is very nicely written and everything, but the headline was “Sylvia Beach is back in Paris.” And he handed it out to people in the shop when I was there. And I was mortified by this. So embarrassed. And he didn’t see anything wrong with it, he thought it was really funny, and he said, “well I named you after her, of course, this is just my way of celebrating you coming back and wanting to work in the bookshop.” So it meant something really different to him from what it meant to me. But I was mortified. I kept trying to get them back from customers who were walking off with them, saying “No! I’m not Sylvia Beach!” 


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