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One, he doesn't care at all for the store or, for that matter, books.
And two, the only reason he has run the store for 18 years is because it was tied up in a baroque estate war among him, his sister, Liza, and a revolving cast of attorneys and administrators after his father, Tuvia, died in 1979. Hence, the reference to the Dickens novel, which tells the story of a tortured estate battle so complex and lengthy that at a certain point it loses all meaning for anyone but the lawyers involved.
The bookstore reminds Volansky of his unhappy family. Indeed, it brings to mind another literary reference: the famous first sentence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina -- "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Both of Volansky's parents survived the Lodz ghetto and, later, Auschwitz. Tuvia saw his father murdered during a Russian pogrom. Itzhak's mother's father died when she was a small girl. "The home environment was very ugly, very dysfunctional," he says.
The files on the Volansky estate war -- which involved both the estate of his father and his mother, Zenia, who died in 1990 -- fill more than five thick, booklike volumes. The upshot of the situation is that his mother dies in 1990, and all hell immediately breaks loose among the Volansky siblings. They are appointed co-executors of the estate and, according to the dictates of Zenia's will, they are to split the assets of the estate. After paying back taxes and nursing home bills and other expenses, the two siblings split everything in the estate (two buildings, some furniture, Israel bonds) except for the bookstore.
Itzhak and his attorneys fight with Liza and her attorneys; later, Itzhak fights with his own attorneys; further on, his attorneys do battle with his former attorneys. Everyone generally vexes, hectors, accuses, annoys, and bullyrags one another, generating lots of paper and bile, but few results.
At one point, in 1991, Liza storms into McDonald's Books wielding a statue of a cat and attacks Itzhak, his assistant and girlfriend, Carol Powell, and another employee, according to a police report. She is taken away by police for psychiatric observation, and Itzhak eventually has a restraining order slapped on her.
Finally, in 1996, the two siblings, who at this point are speaking to each other only on paper or through lawyers, agree to the following: Liza gets a cash payment for half the value of the store; Itzhak gets the store and all it's worth, which, according to tax records and other documents in the court file, is approximately $50,000.
After nearly 20 years of acrimony and delay, this is what Volansky is left with: a bookstore in a run-down hotel in an extremely dangerous part of town, whose inventory is so huge and unwieldy that it could never be placed anywhere else.
Volansky says he wants nothing more than to leave the bookstore and go to Los Angeles, and, even at the age of 47, take a stab at being a songwriter. (He won a songwriting contest there in 1978.)
But the force of inertia that has held him here for years can't seem to let him go.
He has contracted with an antiquarian bookseller to take over management of the store. The bookseller, Rich Wilkinson, is already spending one day a week at McDonald's, where he has begun the arduous process of weeding and evaluating the store's inventory.
Yet during a recent lunch, Volansky says, "I said I was going to leave in July. Well, it's July."
He makes a gesture with his hands that says, I'm still here.
Last month, an agitated man in a suit named Victor Lopez, a retired technical illustrator from Southern California, came into McDonald's Books and asked for a 1948 LIFE. He didn't know what date exactly; it was in the spring or early summer he said. He said it had to do with "Gaitan's assassination."
Volansky's brow drew up into a pinch. "Who?"
The man grew suddenly perturbed, standing there with a look of disgust on his face that suggested the words did not exist to express his shock and dismay that such an important event was not immediately remembered. Seeing the man's distress, Volansky sent an employee down to the basement to get a sampling of 1948 LIFE magazines.
Lopez eventually calmed down and, taking pity on Volansky, explained the whole Gaitan business. Jorge Gaitan was the president of Colombia in the immediate postwar period. Lopez lived in Colombia at the time. He was 11 years old when the Liberal Party leader was killed by a supporter of the Conservative Party, and the whole country broke into chaos and violence for months. "My father's shop was burned," he said. "The Christian school I attended was burned."
Suddenly, he found the issue. April 9, 1948. Looking at the pictures -- including an eerie black-and-white shot of the assassin's naked, bloody corpse lying alone on the wet pavement as the mob that killed him moves into the distance -- Lopez lit up. Memories dislodged and came pouring forth like water.
He remembered his father, who knew that the economy would grind to a halt and money would be useless until a new government was formed. So he bought sacks of rice and stored them at the house to barter for other goods.
He remembered his maid, and how her unfortunate choice of a blue hair-braid on assassination day -- blue was the color of the Conservative Party -- led angry Gaitan supporters to cut off her ponytail.
"I'm buying this to show my nephews," Lopez said. "I want to show them that they should stop crying about things. I always tell them, 'You live in a cocoon. You live in Disneyland.' "
A day later, a man bearing a strong resemblance to Burl Ives enters McDonald's and inquires about the store's collection of the English porn mag Mayfair. "I have a friend who catalogs them," he says.
