Love for a librarian who helps immigrants

Good morning. It is Wednesday. Today we meet a librarian recognized for his work with immigrants in Queens. And we’ll look at the legal issues as the National Rifle Association goes on trial in Manhattan.

The I Love My Librarian Award has found Fred Gitner.

Gitner, who has worked in programs to assist immigrants at the Queens Public Library for 28 years, is one of 10 national librarians cited by the American Library Association for “profound impact on the people in their communities.” The recipients were chosen from nearly 1,400 nominees from library users across the country. Gitner is the assistant director of the Queens Library New Americans programwhich coordinates informative workshops on topics such as immigration law, parenting and tenant rights.

“I consider Fred our international ambassador,” he said Dennis Walcott, the president and general manager of the Queens Library. “His sensitivity to the asylum seekers who come to libraries and what Fred was able to do with his staff to connect with them is extraordinary.”

Library officials said the latest round of 5 percent cuts proposed by Mayor Eric Adams would force cuts to services like English and citizenship classes that immigrant communities have come to rely on. Demand for these programs has increased as the coronavirus pandemic has subsided: English classes were up 35 percent last year compared to 2022, with more than 62,000 attendees across the library’s 66 locations.

Walcott said the proposed cuts could also have an effect on services offered on Saturdays, which would affect immigrants who have jobs that make it impossible to go to a library during the week. (Sunday hours at the two Queens libraries that were open seven days a week ended with the budget cuts announced in November.)

Gitner, 72, didn’t write the book on how libraries can help immigrants, but he co-authored one book in 2001 and another in 2013. And in his more than 25 years at the library, he has changing immigration patterns in Queens.

When the library hired him in the 1990s, many of the immigrants moving to the neighborhood were from Russia. The mix of languages ​​is different now. Spanish is still the most in demand, but “French is now number 2 as migrants from West Africa arrive,” he said. But librarians also hear Wolof, the language preferred by many in Senegal, and Fulani, spoken in Guinea.

The library conducted a voluntary language survey of employees last year and found they spoke nearly 50 languages, Gitner said. More recently, he has been working to set up a translation service with a toll-free number that branch library staff can call when someone comes in who speaks a language that no one in the branch is fluent in.

Gitner and the other I Love My Librarian Award recipients will each receive $5,000, along with a $750 travel allowance to attend the American Library Association meeting LibLearnX Conference in Baltimore in two weeks. The awards are sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and administered by the New York Public Library (which is separate from the Queens Library and has branches in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island).

Weather

It should be a sunny day, mid 40s. Expect it to be partly cloudy at night, with temperatures in the low 30s.

ALTERNATE PARKING

Valid until Saturday (Three Kings Day).

The latest New York news

The National Rifle Association and its longtime leader, Wayne LaPierre, are on trial in Manhattan. Jury selection was scheduled to begin on Tuesday. The case, filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, accuses the gun rights group of corruption.

LaPierre, 74, has led the NRA for more than three decades. My colleague Danny Hakim writes that a lot has changed since James started investigating the NRA. It shuttered its NRATV streaming service amid a feud with its longtime advertising and PR company, which operated the NRA.

NRA membership has dropped to 4.2 million almost six million five years ago. Sales have fallen by 44 percent since 2016 its internal auditsand legal costs have skyrocketed.

But LaPierre’s legacy as a lobbyist endures. Under his watch, the gun rights movement became a centerpiece of red state politics, and even after mass shootings, gun control measures were not a starting point for Republicans in Congress.

The NRA filed for bankruptcy in Texas in 2021, part of a strategy to short-circuit James’ investigation by leaving New York, where the group was founded shortly after the Civil War. But a Texas judge dismissed the case, saying the NRA had used the filing “to address a regulatory enforcement problem, and not a financial problem.”

Last week, a state appeals court filed an appeal rejected the group’s attempt to end James’ investigation. She first tried to shut down the NRA entirely, as one of her predecessors had managed with the Trump Foundation, a scandal-plagued offshoot of former President Donald Trump’s financial empire.

Supreme Court Justice Joel Cohen rejected James’ attempt to force the NRA to disband in 2022.

But more recently he seemed to lose patience with the NRA. writing on December 28 that his latest motion to dismiss the case was “late and procedurally questionable,” and expressed concern that it could disrupt the trial schedule.

A cascade of revelations about the NRA will loom. For example, LaPierre had been a regular at a Zegna boutique in Beverly Hills, California, for more than a decade, where he spent nearly $40,000 in NRA money on a single outing in 2004. He also charged more than $250,000 for trips to other places, including the Bahamas; Palm Beach, FL; and Reno, Nev. He has argued that the trips were all legitimate business expenses.

LaPierre is one of four suspects in the case. Others include John Frazer, the NRA’s general counsel, and Wilson Phillips, a former chief financial officer. The fourth defendant, Joshua Powell, was for a time the organization’s second-in-command. But he later turned on the NRA, even calling for universal background checks for people looking to buy guns and so-called red flag laws, which allow police to confiscate firearms from people deemed dangerous.

Dear Diary:

I was walking my dog, Mango, early one weekday morning when I burst into an Upper West Side post office to drop off a pre-labeled package. I brought Mango inside.

The post office was almost empty and I expected to stay there for only a minute, as long as it took to take my package to the designated counter and have the label scanned.

But the counter I needed was full of packages, so I had to wait in a short line while an employee cleared it away.

As I got to the front of the line, a man came up to me from behind.

“Is that a seeing-eye dog?” he asked.

I thought it was a strange question, since Mango is small and fluffy, not what you would think of as a seeing-eye dog.