Wednesday, December 22, 2021
Man proposes to fiancée in NY Yiddish library
David Frisch, 24, had the perfect plan to propose to his girlfriend, Pammy Brenner, while the two were in New York visiting her family. He would get down on one knee in the reading room at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where Brenner had been a research fellow from 2018 to 2020.
He just needed to get her to go along with it.
Though Brenner, 24, had spent hours upon hours in the institute's Lillian Goldman Reading Room, getting her to the library on Sunday wasn't as easy as Frisch had expected. He enlisted the help of one of Brenner's favorite undergraduate professors at Barnard College, Agi Lugetko, who teaches Yiddish literature.
Lugetko was going to lure Brenner to YIVO's archives under the guise that new materials had been discovered from Shomer (the pen name of Nahum Meïr Schaikewitz), the obscure Yiddish writer and bitter rival of Sholem Aleichem whom Brenner had been researching.
But Brenner already suspected she would be getting engaged that day, so she kept asking the professor to reschedule. As much as she loved her Yiddish research, she loved Frisch more, she told The New York Jewish Week, and she didn't want to miss the date they had at Washington Square Park.
"I was sending my professor emails saying 'I'm 99% sure I'm on my way to get engaged. Can we please meet up literally any other day?'" she said. "And she was forwarding them to David, saying 'Things are not going to plan.'"
Eventually, Brenner's sister just put her in an Uber. When Brenner realized she was headed for the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street — where the YIVO archives are housed — instead of Washington Square Park, Brenner figured Frisch was rearranging the plan so she could check out the documents, and then he would propose later in the day.
When she arrived at the archives, Brenner was told that there was a book waiting for her.
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