[2] He began his career in the book trade working with his father, operating a Hebrew language bookstore on East Broadway.
[1] In 1926, after hearing about the sale of Russian books from imperial collections, Perlstein traveled to St. Petersburg to purchase volumes.
[8] In 1932, he sold 1,200 volumes to the Harvard University Law Library, including an important 240 volume set of Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire) owned by the Russian royal family.
[9] Due to Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, it became difficult for Pelstein to buy books directly from Moscow.
[11] In 1966, Perlstein was working as a consultant for the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, helping them build a collection of 100,000 rare Slavic books.