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Oct. 28, 2011
More than one destiny
Gelbart started MW Books from scratch.
OLGA LIVSHIN
In many cultures, a name defines a man. Occasionally, a name even influences the man’s decisions or shapes his destiny. But what happens when a man has more than one name? Would such a man have more than one destiny? The answer seems, as evidenced by Zeev Gelbart, to be yes.
Gelbart is the owner of a local publishing company, MW Books, although publishing is only one of his many occupations. At other points in his life, he has been an engineer and an artist, a book illustrator and a photographer, a teacher, a moviemaker and more. Many of his professional personalities bear a different name, each name reflecting a unique entity.
“I have a fear of displaying my name, don’t want to stand out,” he explained to the Independent. “Maybe it’s the influence of the Holocaust. My parents were both survivors of the Lódz ghetto and Auschwitz. They were afraid to be noticed.”
After the war, Gelbart’s parents stayed in their native Poland. They gave their son a Polish name, Wlodzimierz, but the name was slotted to disappear soon, and for many years. When Gelbart was 10, the family had to immigrate to Israel. It was 1956, and the young Jewish state was struggling desperately to survive. “People urged us to change our names to sound more Hebrew, so my Polish name, Wlodzimierz, became Zeev.
There was also a suggestion to change our last name to sound more Hebrew, like Bar-Gil, but it never took.”
After high school, Gelbart served in the Israeli army as a medic in a combat unit. “I participated in the Six Day War in ’67 and the War of Attrition in ’69 and the Yom Kippur War in ’73. I saw so many friends die beside me. After the last war, I didn’t want to see more blood, more death, so I immigrated to Canada.”
Between the wars, while still in Israel, he studied engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and, arriving in Vancouver, he began work as an engineer at TRIUMF, the particle and nuclear physics research facility on the University of British Columbia campus. To fit in better, he changed his first name again, anglicizing it, becoming William. His scientific papers are signed by this name, and it’s a well-known name in the field.
But Gelbart was already looking beyond engineering. “When I lived in Israel, I published my artistic photography in photo magazines,” he said. “I also taught photography and movie making in college. I wrote plays and scripts for the movies.”
He continued writing plays in Vancouver and he wrote his memoirs, as well. “They’re my manual for immortality,” he joked. But he never tried to publish his writing, in keeping with his aversion for displaying his name. He also has painted his entire life but never signed any of his paintings or participated in any exhibitions. “I admire Middle Ages painters,” he said. “They created wonderful art, cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts, but nobody knows who they were. They never signed their work.”
Such painters were his role models. Being anonymous suited his personality until quite recently, when his life with MW Books began and perforce changed his attitude towards publicizing his name.
Gelbart opened shop with MW Books nine years ago, after retiring from TRIUMF. Books, he said, have fascinated him since childhood. He remembers reading Voltaire and Diderot, even when he was a child. “I’ve always loved books,” he said, adding that he not only likes reading books but also holding them in his hands, leafing through the pages. “They’re beautiful objects,” he said.
Rivaling his love for books is his love for science. To bring together his affection for books and his reverence for science, Gelbart founded a publishing house for out-of-print scientific books from the 19th century.
“About 70 percent of modern science – physics, math and chemistry – was discovered in the middle of the 19th century,” he explained of this endeavor. “That’s when the fundamentals of modern science were developed. We lost or forgot so much of that knowledge, and I wanted to preserve it. It is rediscovery time now.” MW Books became the means to resurrect the old books, to pay tribute to the giants of science of the past centuries.
Gelbart sold these publications on the company website and on Amazon, but the sales were poor and the demand minimal. “My publishing has never been for profit,” he said. At the time, he subsidized his publishing venture through his engineering consulting and the trend continues to this day, although he has added fiction and other genres to his publishing roster.
This shift to fiction and poetry happened four years ago, when Gelbart published a novel by his friend, an Israeli physicist named Avivi Yavin. Gelbart created the cover art for his friend’s book, but still managed to avoid exposure. On the credits page of that book, he used an alias, a relic from his Israeli days: Zeev Bar-Gil. The sophisticated, emotionally charged cover matched the solemn tone of Yavin’s novel, but Gelbart said he still felt the need to widen his expressive range.
At this point, another artistic persona emerged. This one produced bright and whimsical illustrations for MW’s children’s picture books. Another of his friends, Marina Sonkina, authored two of these books, including The Violin that Wanted to See the World. Another children’s book, The Clockmaster and the Mouse, he wrote himself, the only exception to his resolve not to publish his own writing. The charming illustrations for these books, however, have no kinship to Bar-Gil’s earnest cover. The name of the illustrator is another Gelbart alias, this one a reminder of his Polish roots: Wlodzimierz Milewski. Milewski was his mother’s maiden name, and the name of his company – MW Books – is an acronym of this name.
Proud of his publishing endeavors, Gelbart also produces some special editions, hand-bound in tooled leather. “I love binding books, love making things with my hands,” he said. “I’ve always been impressed by stories of shipwrecking. Those people did everything themselves, and I wanted to do it [all], too. I wanted to be independent from the world.” In a bid for independence, he built his own house and its furniture, and he binds his limited-edition books.
As a man who loves the tactile experience of paper books, Gelbart said he is not overly happy with the current direction of the publishing world’s e-books, although, as an engineer, he knows that technological progress is unstoppable. “E-books are the way to go,” he said with a sense of regret. “I like physical books better, but I see many people reading e-books. Not only young, but older people sometimes prefer them. You can enlarge the font in your e-reader, so it’s easier to read. I might make some of our books available in digital format.”
As well, it’s possible he may at last publish his own writing, although he’s not convinced yet that he will. “It wouldn’t be ethical to publish myself,” he said, smiling. “Maybe under a different name.”
“My only goal in life has always been to remain true to myself, not to be dictated by conventions,” he explained. “I think I mostly achieved it, but there was a cost: a financial cost and a career-related one. I always refused promotions because I preferred to stay anonymous. I never succumbed to any temptations, and that’s probably my biggest accomplishment.”
If ever asked the multiple choice question “Who is Zeev Gelbart and what’s his name?” the answer would probably be neither A, B, C nor D, but “All of the above.”
To learn more about MW Books and its authors, visit mwbookpublishing.com.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
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