THE OTHER BIBLIOMANIA OF DAN FREIDUS

When Dan Freidus walks into Bookstock, Metro Detroit's beloved used book and media sale, he is not just browsing for something interesting to read. He is hunting for history, often tucked between stained pages, spiral bindings and recipes for kugel, brisket or "Aunt Rose's mandelbread."

For Dan, a longtime collector with deep roots in the world of books, Jewish community cookbooks are more than kitchen guides. They are records of Jewish life: where people lived, what they ate, how they adapted, what organizations they built and how communities preserved memory through food.

As a child, Dan's father collected books, opening a door to a world Dan might otherwise never have encountered. "I met librarians and book dealers through him that I never would have met," he explained, "so I got a peek into that world when I was pretty young."

That early exposure eventually grew into a wide-ranging passion for books and ephemera, and, over time, cookbooks. Today, one of his most meaningful projects is finding and donating Jewish community cookbooks to the New York Public Library, which holds the most extensive Jewish cookbook collection in the U.S.

The effort began during the pandemic, when Dan read an Atlas Obscura article about Roberta Saltzman, a collector who donated more than 800 Jewish cookbooks to the NYPL before her death. Curious, Dan looked at his own shelves and realized he had five or six Jewish cookbooks the library did not own. He contacted the head of the Jewish collection to ask whether the books were utilized and whether the library wanted to continue developing the collection. The answers to both were yes.

That was about three years ago. The following spring, Dan went to Bookstock and found 50 more that were not yet a part of the collection.

Since then, he has donated more than 300 Jewish cookbooks to the NYPL, whose collection now numbers more than 3,000. The library, he said, has "virtually every Jewish cookbook with an ISBN," meaning commercially published cookbooks are usually already represented. Its greatest weakness is community cookbooks, the kind put out by synagogues, sisterhoods, Hadassah chapters, Jewish schools and other local organizations. Those books often lack ISBNs and were printed in small numbers for local fundraising or community use. As a result, Dan explained, many never entered library systems at all.

That is exactly what makes them valuable. A synagogue cookbook from Detroit, Cleveland, Manila or Johannesburg may not be rare in the traditional antiquarian sense, but it can be historically significant if no library holds it. Dan has learned to "think like a librarian," checking catalogs carefully and paying attention to details such as the title page, publication date and sponsoring organization.

Among his most memorable Bookstock finds was a 2019 discovery: a Hadassah cookbook from Hibbing, Minnesota, containing a fudge bar recipe from Beatty Zimmerman, Bob Dylan's mother.

 

For Dan, the work also has a personal dimension. It connects him to the legacy of Abraham Freidus, a pioneering NYPL librarian and bibliographer in his family history, who served as the first director of NYPL's Jewish Division, and as a way to continue a Jewish commitment to collecting, organizing and sharing knowledge.

Ultimately, the cookbooks are about more than recipes. They are about people: the committees who assembled them, the families who contributed to them and the communities that left behind traces of themselves in flour, onions, schmaltz and memory. Dan's efforts to preserve Jewish community cookbooks both connect him to his own family history and leave a legacy of knowledge connecting current and future generations to the foods and people described in their pages.

To read the complete article, see:
Metro Detroit Collector Preserves Jewish Community Cookbooks One Recipe at a Time (https://www.thejewishnews.com/community/metro-detroit-collector-preserves-jewish-community-cookbooks-one-recipe-at-a-time/article_d80ce01c-0d5a-4abd-9ead-c2cd93579a61.html)

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