Montgomery County Public Libraries (MCPL) managers recently removed all books in Russian, Farsi and Bengali, shocking and saddening native speakers who say they took pride and pleasure in seeing literature, history and children’s books from their countries have a place on the shelves.
“They got rid of a whole part of culture,” said Marina Tyurina Oberlander, a writer, editor and translator who lives in Northwest Washington, D.C., and had five of her own books in the Rockville branch, alongside works by Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and others.
The decision to cull the approximately 3,500 books, which was made without public notice, reduces MCPL’s World Languages Collection from nine languages to six: Amharic, Chinese, French, Korean, Spanish and Vietnamese. The Russian books had been shelved in the Rockville Memorial Library; Farsi and Bengali books were in the Gaithersburg branch and a few others, according to library officials.
Now the books will be sold at bookstores run by the Friends of the Library, according to the nonprofit that raises funds to support the libraries and MCPL. Titles from the Russian collection were already on sale at the Rockville store this week for as little as $1.
Having a Russian collection sends a message that said “You’re part of our community and you belong,” said Gayl Selkin-Gutman of Rockville, a former president of the Rockville chapter of Friends of the Library and former chair of the county Library Advisory Committee whose husband speaks Russian. “By surreptitiously, underhandedly, and sneakily removing the entire collection without any input whatsoever from the community, it’s just very high-handed and insulting.”
M.S. Raunak, principal of the Maryland Bangla School in Ellicott City, which has students from Montgomery County, said “taking [the Bengali collection] out is not serving this part of the community.” Raunak, who works in Gaithersburg, added that Bengali, or Bangla, is so cherished in his community that people celebrate Language Martyrs’ Day every Feb. 21. The holiday is the inspiration for UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day and Raunak said it honors protesters who died during his country’s language movement movement for the right to speak the language.
Removing the collections was a painful decision made in an environment of limited resources, said Felicity Brown, collection manager for MCPL.
“We have to start to look at the library collection as a whole and see how can we do the most things as well as possible,” she said. “We need to do better with our other languages that we have.” And with no new funding available for the World Languages budget, “we’re already carving out of the English-language collection.”
Friends of the Library has a World Languages fund to raise money in support of the collections, according to Ari Brooks, executive director. The group also lobbies county officials to increase the overall collections budget, especially for World Languages, he added. The total annual collections budget for all county libraries is about $7.8 million, or a little more than $7 per capita, Brown said.
While the decision to pull the three languages may have seemed abrupt to the public, MCPL doesn’t usually announce collections decisions, according to Brown. “It’s not trying to be sneaky,” she said. “It’s just business.”
Brown said MCPL consulted data on the size of foreign-language-speaking populations in the county. According to the 2023 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census, there are about 9,000 Russian speakers; 7,600 Persian (including Farsi); and 6,000 Bengali. Of the libraries’ six remaining foreign languages, Vietnamese is slightly ahead of Russian.
More decisive to MCPL are circulation figures. Most of the books had not circulated in five years, Brown said. Books are typically culled after two years of languishing. She said the language collections were given extra time to gain circulation.
The 3,500 foreign-language books removed from the shelves are a little more than 1% of the 325,000 books, digital resources, and other materials removed in the past year, including some of Shakespeare’s history plays and the digital Oxford English Dictionary, according to Brown. In addition to low circulation, reasons for removal can range from materials being in poor condition to violating standards of diversity, equity and inclusion. In 2022, the libraries removed music CDs because the collection hadn’t been added to for a decade and was underutilized, Brown said.
“I had to pull [a collection of] George Bernard Shaw out of a library the other day” because it wasn’t circulating, Brown said. “It just made my heart break.” Electronic versions, or e-books, of Shaw’s plays are more popular with patrons, she added.
Supporters of the Russian collection protest that the library itself doomed circulation by not updating the collection or curating it properly for years – a situation Brown attributed to lack of funds.
“We should remember that libraries are created not only for readers but also for storing books, as their existence is not limited to current needs,” Irina Chaykovskaya, editor of the Rockville-based online Russian-language magazine Chayka, or “Seagull,” said in an email. “In the future, these books might hold antiquarian value or serve as material for research.”
But Brown said that unlike a university or research library, the public libraries’ philosophy is to be “a living, breathing thing,” reflecting patrons’ current priorities, as measured by circulation. MCPL still will order books worldwide via interlibrary loan, she said.
The Rockville branch used to attract the local Russian community for literary gatherings, but Oberlander said she doubts she’ll be back: “I don’t feel comfortable coming to the place that threw my books out – and not only my books, but books written in my native language.”
