Russian Emigré Wins First Hill-Shumate Prize
When 15-year-old Russian immigrant Lyubov "Luba" Golburt arrived in San Francisco, her family had barely enough money to buy food. Despite this, their first purchase in the United States was a thin volume of poetry from a bookstore in the Richmond district.
"Irresistibly attractive, it beckoned me," said Golburt, the first winner of Bancroft's new annual Hill-Shumate Collecting Prize for undergraduates. The treasured little blue book—a Joseph Brodsky paperback that Golburt's stepfather bought for her that day in San Francisco—became the cornerstone of Golburt's winning book collection of poetry supplemented with prose, art, and biographies.
Contest organizer Tony Bliss, curator of rare books and literary manuscripts, had no idea what students would submit when the new contest was launched last spring."I was afraid I'd get comic books and baseball cards," he said. "Collections had to be print material, but other than that, I had no idea what we would find. I was surprised not so much by the specific items, but by the significance of things the students were collecting."
All three contest winners submitted book collections with a strong emphasis on 20th-century literature, including poetry.
Lulu Golburt |
"This makes me think those who say poetry is dead are dead wrong," says Bliss.
Besides the $500 first prize, $300 went to Carolyn Babauta for a collection started with Beat Generation poets and $100 to Christina Tran for landmarks in world literature.
The prizes were funded by two noted book collectors and Bancroft supporters— Kenneth Hill of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., and the late Al Shumate of San Francisco—to encourage collecting by the younger generation.
"We're talking about kids who don't have much money and can't afford fancy editions," Bliss said. "But that doesn't matter for them now. If you're a collector pushing age 60 or 70, you don't have to be convinced of the importance of continuity of literature or history or human endeavor. But to see 20-year-olds with that conviction is a great comfort."
Collections submitted ranged between 300 and 500 volumes. Golburt has 150 titles in poetry alone, lovingly arranged behind glass in her Berkeley home.
Good books were hard to come by in Golburt's homeland. Born in Tashkent in 1978, she said stores were full of Communist texts, but in order to get really interesting books, you had to barter.
"If you collected heaps of old paper for the recycling centers, you didn't get paid money directly, but you could get newly published books," she recalls. "There were anecdotes about going to the neighbors for tea, spying an old piece of paper and taking it," she says. "I remember collecting all the paper I could find so I could have books."
Typical of the Russian intelligentsia, her family owned a large, treasured collection of books and manuscripts acquired over generations. But her parents had to sell it for just $25 when they emigrated.
"It was a really painful thing to leave our books," said Golburt, who graduated from Berkeley in May and will begin doctoral studies in comparative literature at Stanford University this fall. "They were pretty much the only thing we had. There were a lot of memories connected with them."
Kathleen Scalise is a Senior Public
Information Representative in the
campus public affairs office.
Volume 115
Fall 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft's Marvelous Medieval French Manuscripts
From the Director: Biotech at Bancroft
Cataloging the Teatro Español Collection
New (Old) Mark Twain Found in Bancroft Scraps
Eleanor Swent Puts Her Mining Expertise to Work
Russian Emigré Wins First Hill-Shumate Prize
Theresa Salazar Is New Curator for Bancroft Collection
New Oral History Catalog Covers Two Decades
Second Chronicle Salutes UC Women Since 1870
Desiderata: Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
