A Rusyn-American Life in Books: George Sabo in New York and Florida

Abstract

ABSTRACT As the Soviet Union and its challenge to the West recede, we still have much to learn about the Slavic book trade and about the rise of the great Russian, East European, and Eurasian area studies collections in academic libraries in 20th-century North America. Who were the book dealers behind these collections, which still inform so much discovery and knowledge-making today? What can we learn about these personalities and their work? One such book dealer was George Sabo (1896–1983), who followed two brothers to Pittsburgh in 1913 but made his career in New York after 1920, first with a “steamship agency” for fellow immigrants. As a Carpatho-Rusyn from the Kingdom of Hungary, Sabo took his outlook and cultural capital from an ethno-religious group at the very center of the Slavic world and in remarkable symbiosis with nearly all its peoples, languages, identities, and states. Sabo’s native village (Orechová) became part of Czechoslovakia after World War I and his wife’s (Haidosh) part of the Soviet Union after World War II. Sabo’s Carpatho-Rusyn-ness equipped him well as a Slavic-American book dealer and enterprising New Yorker, and we can illuminate much of his life, family, network, surroundings, and career in the city and beyond from many kinds of sources.