LIBRARY CITIZEN
I’m an immigrant. Among other things, this means that I don’t really belong anywhere. In the United States, the first thing people ask upon meeting me, courtesy of my accent, is “Where are you from?” even though I’ve lived here for 24 years. And when I go back to Bulgaria, everyone calls me The American. But there is one place where I always feel at home--the library. Any library. Anywhere in the world. The familiar smell of books, the shelves packed with old and new tomes, the friendly staff eager to help. When I think of my childhood in Bulgaria during Communism, I picture the public library in my neighborhood where I spent so many of my days. I have a clear image of the stacks, the green spines of The Collected Works of Shakespeare neatly lined up on a top shelf, way out of reach for a 9-year-old girl. When I landed in New York at the age of 22, I barely spoke English. I didn’t know a soul except for my husband. He was the super intendent of a luxury building on the Upper East Side and I cleaned apartments, a job that didn’t exactly help in meeting people. The year was 1995, long before cell phones and social media. I was lonely and isolated. But I found old friends in the Yorkville branch of the New York Public Library. The first books I checked out were novels I’d already read, mostly Russian authors, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. I knew the stories and hoped to learn English by re-reading them. I’d dropped out of the architecture and civil engineering university in Sofia to come to New York, naively thinking that I would continue my education in America. It didn’t take me long to realize how out of reach my goal was. I had difficulties finding a job as a cleaning lady; saving enough money for college was out of the question. My break came when I told one of my clients about my background in architecture. He’d recently made a donation to the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and asked the librarian there if they could use someone who spoke Bulgarian and Russian. A couple of weeks later, I was accepted as a volunteer and soon thereafter I was offered a part-time job. The Watson library became my home and the staff, my family. I learned to type and use a computer. A couple of years later, the head of the Cataloguing Department sat me down at a computer with Internet access and pulled up Columbia University’s website. She explained that if I worked for the university, I’d be eligible to take two classes per semester for free. I got a fulltime job at the Butler Library, working on converting the card catalog, and was accepted into the General Studies program. The rest, as they say, is history—degree, citizenship, decades in New York City and, soon, publication of my first novel. Libraries are the cornerstones of democracy, where all people—regardless of income, race and religion—are welcome. To me, they’re also the one place where I truly feel at home.