The Library

In 1993, a would-be lawyer named John Huebl serendipitously acquired a phenomenal collection of books. Fifteen years later, as he recalls the joy those volumes brought him, Huebl uncovers the story of the man who once owned them

By John Huebl

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Berkowitz shares a swing with his daughter, Rachel, in the early 1970s. “He adored her,” recalled Berkowitz’s ex-wife, Kathy.

With the end closing in, Rachel’s grandmother Mildred advised her to go to see Howard. “I was always very close to my grandparents,” Rachel says. “And so I went. It was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life.” Kathy went along, too.

At the hospice, a few weeks before his death, Howard was wheeled out to see them. “He was really far gone, physically unrecognizable,” Rachel recalls. As a nurse had warned, the disease had also taken a toll on Howard’s mind. Rachel remembers him saying: “It’s so good to see you. I haven’t seen you in a couple years.” Rachel told him that wasn’t accurate, and he asked when he saw her last. When she was three, she said. “Oh, I would never do that,” Rachel recalls him responding.

“It was one of the most emotional things I’ve ever experienced,” Kathy says. “Everybody was crying. Howard was not lucid. He asked Rachel, ‘Haven’t I been a good father?’”

Kathy adds, “The really magnificent person in this story is Rachel. She handled herself so beautifully. She did not confront him, but allowed him to say goodbye, to die in peace.”

For all its agonies, Rachel does not regret making the trip. “In his apartment, I found a box that held not only pictures of me, but also barrettes that I had worn as a little girl,” she recalls. “I had thought that Howard hadn’t cared about me, but when I found those things, I realized that he really had cared.”

Robert visited a few days before the end. “I was the last to see him, but had to return to Connecticut,” he recalled for me in an e-mail. “When I last saw him he was in a peaceful but somewhat delirious state. He was, however, alert enough to remind me to remove the cash from his wallet. When I saw the wad of greenbacks in his worn black leather wallet, it made me realize how almost to the end he believed he would ‘beat the sucker.’ That’s what he often called AIDS. Why else would he harbor the cash other than in the hope that he just might go on a last-minute holiday shopping spree for a few more hardback books and then slip out to one of the nearby neighborhood bars and buy drinks for patrons in celebration of his life and defeat of the ‘sucker’?”

Robert continues, “The thought made me smile until I realized that in surrendering his little hoard of cash it was his way of saying that his book-buying days were behind and he was okay with moving on to other things. I hugged him goodbye knowing that it would be our last hug.” The call came on Christmas Eve. “I remember sitting on my living-room couch and listening to Pachelbel’s Canon all day Christmas. It was one of his favorite pieces of music.”

Howard was buried in West Palm Beach, Florida, near where his parents were living at the time of his death. Rachel happened to be in Florida with the University of Delaware swim team. She borrowed one of the team’s vans and drove to the ceremony. “When I heard the rabbi say that Howard had been a loving father, I just sat there fuming,” Rachel remembers. She says that therapy later on helped her sort things out.

“Howard really, really cared for Rachel,” says Robert, trying to explain the mystery of his brother’s long separation from the daughter he adored. “But then—boom, he cut himself off. Probably he didn’t even know why. Some things are beyond our grasp.”

In my loft, I contemplate some of the hundreds of books that I inherited from Howard, and a few catch my eye: Franz Kafka’s The Complete Stories; Freud’s The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; C. G. Jung’s Psychological Reflections. As for my search for the man who brought these authors together, I can imagine them—and even Howard himself—saying, “Well, what did you expect?” Howard’s life was as full of holes and contradictions as that of any other man, and to deconstruct him even modestly would require a biography as long and involved as any that I found in the lobby of McClurg Court on that day in January 1993.

His posthumous relationship to me remains relatively simple, however. In our love of literature we were of the same mind, and through his lifelong procurement of books, he left a legacy that was a boon to me at my own life’s nadir. Today, during spare moments, when I sit at my writing table and try to draft literary rather than legal prose, the heft of Howard’s collection, and the timelessness of the art contained in each volume, both intimidate and inspire me. I picture Howard receiving the books in the mail at McClurg Court over 17 years, and I can imagine his pleasure upon the arrival of each. They bring me pleasure, too, and for at least some of what I’ll read, think, and feel during my own lifetime, I’ll have Howard to thank.

Photograph: Courtesy of the Berkowitz family