
Walking the streets of Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, a variety of languages can be heard—Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English, and more. That same linguistic diversity is present at Golden Books, a bookstore in central Haifa that’s been run by Shmuel Golden for 50 years.
Books in all languages are piled together in Golden’s small stand. A book on Israeli history, a biography of Franz Kafka, a handwritten book of Arab folklore, and a pile of novels by Japanese author Haruki Murakami are all featured prominently in the display. Several rare and unique books can also be found in the store, including books signed by Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin.
The book stand has been an establishment in Haifa’s Carmel Center for 90 years, first as a newspaper stand and then as part of a nearby building.
Golden told Davar that the stand was established by a pair Jewish immigrants, Walter Verne from Germany and Mordechai Bauer from Poland. “Bauer died in the early 50s, and his son-in-law Tzvi Shapira took over for him,” he explained. “When Verne wanted to retire in the early 60s, Shapira brought in my father, who bought half the store. When Shapira died in the early 70s, he bought the other half.”
Growing up, Golden would help his father in the store before and after school. “I began to work there more after the army, in the 70s,” he said. “When my father died in 1990, I took over the store.”
Golden has managed the business on his own for over fifty years. He himself has three adult children, all of whom spent their childhoods in the store alongside their father, but none is interested in taking over the business.

“I don’t have anything else,” Golden said. “I enjoy it, but this whole business has no future. Reading is on the decline. Even if people came every day to buy books, you can’t make a living from it.”
Most of the store’s books come from estate sales. Golden fixes the bindings of the books himself and donates books that can’t be sold to local community centers and schools.
He relies purely on memory to keep track of all the store’s multitude of books. Once, he tried to take inventory, but it didn’t work, Golden said.
Still, relying on memory has its downsides.
“A few days ago, someone came in looking for the book A Land Beyond the Mountains by Nir Baram,” Golden said. “I remembered I had it but I started looking and couldn’t find it. I was about to tell him to look for it at another bookstore, when I climbed up on the ladder and happened to see it.”
In addition to helping readers locate the books they’re looking for, Golden also provides reading recommendations.
“This morning a young woman came in looking for books by Virginia Woolf,” Golden said. “She found one book by Woolf and wanted more. I told her I had something for her, but I recommended that she read them in a certain order, so she wouldn’t get fatigued from the writing.”
If Golden Books is a piece of old Haifa, the street around it is almost entirely different from what it was 50 years ago, when Golden started working at the store. He explained that most of the store’s customers used to be Jews from Germany who spoke “at least one or two foreign languages.”
“A very academic population who appreciated the books,” he said. “Now it’s a population that reads mainly Hebrew. Only people with higher education read in another language, which is mostly English and sometimes Russian.”
Since the advent of new technology, Israelis are less interested in reading than they used to be, Golden said. “People read much more eighty years ago, before the internet and phones arrived on the scene,” he lamented.
Inside Golden Books, though, customers get the sense they could be transported, if only for a moment, back to that golden era of reading.
This article was translated from Hebrew by Lily Sieradzki.