Reva Leaves With Book at Her Side

The following column, about the recent death of Reva Previant Schwartz of Harry W. Schwartz bookstore, appeared in the August 1, 2004, edition of The Milwaukee Journal.

She was the best of readers.

As late as last weekend, on her deathbed, almost blind at age 91, she settled back to listen to the nearly impenetrable introduction of Dostoyevski's The Idiot.

She had read the novel before. But this was a new translation recently available on Books On Tape.

How could she not keep company with Dostoyevski again?

Reva Previant Schwartz died July 24 of a heart attack, just a few hours after she began reading The Idiot in her hospital bed.
For her, it was the way to go.

Since the mid 1930s, when she married little-known bookseller Harry W. Schwartz, books had been at the core of her life. They had sustained her intellectually and they had provided her family a comfortable livelihood.

Her husband talked books. Their only son, David, followed in his father's footsteps and turned their book business into a showpiece with four stores that came to be admired nationally.

There were many truths in her life. In the end, the book remained one of them.

"I think you can truly say that she sought refuge in books. It was what kept her going," said her granddaughter, Rebecca Schwartz, who took The Idiot to the hospital the morning she saw her grandmother for the last time.

"She read everything from mysteries about cats to essays to the kind of stuff like Dostoyevski to biographies of Proust and Anais Nin."

Her grandmother, Rebecca said, was "modest and moderate … smart as a whip with nearly an encyclopedic memory, and she was almost always right -- it was astounding."

What most people don't realize is that Reva was also a cornerstone of the early Schwartz book business.

"I do feel that she felt unrecognized," her granddaughter said, "and I also know that she was essential to the momentum of the early Schwartz bookshop."

Reva was born in Milwaukee and raised on the city's west side.

After their marriage, the Schwartzes lived on the east side, where they ran their bookstore. She worked at the store from the first. She was the pricer, the labeler, the inventory manager, the cashier and everything else necessary.

But everyday, she left the store around noon and took the bus home to make lunch for David. After he ate, she'd return to the bookshop.

She didn't retire until about two years ago.

For nearly two decades she was the out-of-print book searcher. In recent years, with the rise of the Internet, those skills were no longer needed. She began to sort and file publishers' invoices.

She was a twinkling presence at the bookshops, a tiny woman with a puckish sense of humor and long, gray hair knotted behind her head. She lived alone, cooking for herself, reading and watching politics on TV.

After David died earlier this summer, her world seemed to diminish.

"She was done," Rebecca said. "Her husband and her only child had died. She was 91 and she had lived a full, full life of books."

Sometimes, it is the readers whom we need to celebrate.

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By Geeta Sharma-Jensen from the August 1, 2004, edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. (c) 2004 Journal Sentinel, Inc. Reproduced with permission.