Jew Store (4 page)

My father's bar mitzvah turned out to be a small event taking place after Saturday services in the tiny hut that was the shul. My father handled the readings competently but found himself hard-pressed in the obligatory speech of gratitude to name people who had helped him thus far in life. In the end he was able to come up with only his grandfather and his boss. For becoming a man, a rite of passage marked by the giving of gifts, my father's entire take was a penknife (from his grandfather), a ruble (from his boss), and a few kopecks from the few others in attendance. Afterward the guests repaired to the dark dwelling that was my great-grandfather's house for tea and sponge cake.

If a conventional education was denied him, an education in salesmanship was fully provided. His boss was a good model, and my father discovered that he was a good mimic. He watched and he listened, and soon he knew better than his boss how to fit the customers, how to banter, how to soothe. It was a talent that came early and stayed late, all the way through the Concordia days, indeed the thing chiefly responsible for the living he
made there. In Podolska it is no wonder that with such industry and enterprise he was called a
geborner ferkoifer
, which he translated for me as a “born salesman,” an accolade that stuck in his head and occasionally lit up like a storefront sign.

In his middle teens he had his first serious epiphany. It came when business began falling off and his boss turned sour, frequently raising his arms to the heavens and wailing, according to my father, that the country's economy was
farshtunken
(it stank). It was then that my father clapped himself on the forehead (he told me) and connected the country's rotten economy to a transformation in the pogroms: They had become more frequent and worse. “So bad there was no place to hide they didn't figure out,” he said.

He then began to listen with a more receptive ear to the talk about America—how it was a land of opportunity (though he couldn't quite swallow the widely held vision of gold-paved streets) and how it was a place where one could live with a reasonable expectation of physical safety. So at sixteen he got from the rabbi the address of some members of the extended family—the
mishpocheh
it was called—who had already cleared out for New York. He then took his savings, said good-bye to his grandfather—who had at any rate been expecting this turn of events—and struck out by train to Hamburg and by steamboat steerage across the ocean. He sincerely hoped his
mazel
was making the trip with him, but of the presence of his
zutz
—a word invented by my father to mean his hustle—he had no doubt.

On the boat his hustle made an appearance immediately, in time to solve the problems of the bottlenecks, the jostling queues at the galley door, which threatened to turn chaotic. My father hatched a plan for taking plates back and forth, clicked on the
BORN SALESMAN
sign in his head and, through some creative gesticulations, sold the idea to the steward. When his system worked, he was paid twenty-five cents a day—American money!
—although it was not net, since he had to split it with the boys he had talked into carrying plates with him. This plan of his and how it had worked so well was something my father talked about a lot, and when in later years Concordia also needed a plan to head off chaos, he again set himself to hatching one, as if he saw himself as the designated hatcher of plans.

Still, at the end of the journey, when he landed in New York and was dumped into the immigration scramble at Ellis Island, his apparatus for problem solving labored in vain. Though in addition to Yiddish my father could speak a little wobbly Russian, the immigration officials were competent in neither, and he was all at once in a muddle, which was on one memorable moment embodied by a man in a white coat coming at his eyes with a small pointed stick. As my father bobbed and weaved, he managed to ask what it was all about of a nearby fellow passenger, who, he knew, had picked up a little English somewhere and might therefore have learned something.

The man had learned very little, only that it was some kind of craziness—
meshugass
, he called it—and that the white-clothed assailants were doctors looking under eyelids for something. The man told my father, “If you got it, you don't go nowhere but back.”

My father apparently didn't have it—signs of a communicable disease called trachoma—and he could go forward. This took him as far as a man at a desk who was looking with no discernible enthusiasm at my father's papers. “Name?” the man asked my father.

My father had not even understood the question and so simply stared back.

It came again. “What's your name?”

Some of my father's wits returned. “Droskowitz. Avram Droskowitz.”

The official pushed at the papers in a show of irritation, wrote a line on a card, picked up a rubber stamp, brought it
down, hard, and authorized the entry into America of a man called Avram Plotchnikoff, a name no doubt already mastered by an official not eager to work on yet another one. It looked as if my father's good luck had not made the trip with him after all.

Actually, it was getting ready to show. As he searched the cavernous hall for help in getting to the
mishpocheh
, there appeared under a stairwell a sign—not an omen kind of sign, but a cardboard one with letters that were unmistakably Hebrew. This was miracle enough. My father put to use the Hebrew letters learned for his bar mitzvah and decoded the words—
MIR HELFEN MENSCHEN
—as a Yiddish phrase meaning assistance was offered. The man behind the sign, speaking Yiddish, which, my father reported fell on his ears like balm, told him to first take the ferry to Manhattan, then wrote
EAST BRONX
on a paper, and advised him to take the streetcar that had those words on the front. He wanted to know if my father had any money.

My father held out the coins earned on the boat—several pennies and some dimes.

The man, no doubt surprised, said, “Well, well,” took one of the dimes from my father's hand, held it up, and told him to give it to the streetcar conductor and wait for change.

Waiting for change from the streetcar conductor was not a walk in the park (not that my father had ever walked in a park, there being no parks in his shtetl). The conductor, perhaps an early example of the legendary New York streetcar and bus conductors who treated passengers—especially non-English-speaking passengers—as creatures sent to earth for the purpose of vexing them, spat words at my father as if they had been sores on his tongue. But my father had heard angry men before, so he stood quietly until the tirade subsided, got his nickel in change, and sat down.

In the East Bronx he found plenty of Yiddish speakers. They led him to the very apartment he sought, and, after identifying
himself to the
mishpocheh
he found there, he followed the poor Russian-Jewish practice and rented the corner of one of the rooms. A few days later he got a job.

It was not a job as a salesman in a store, though he had at first gone looking for such a job. He had looked in the Jewish stores around Delancey Street on the Lower East Side because naturally he could work only in a store where Yiddish was spoken. At the first store he had given the owner a rundown of his experience only to be greeted by scorn. “Forget about it,” this owner said to him. “All those years you put in in your pipsqueak town is
bupkis
over here.” Just goat dung in America.

The job he got was delivering coal from a wagon, a job for which a grasp of English was a very low priority. But from the first day he knew that as his new name was terrible, so too was his new job. He was never out of the cold, and with the coal dust around his eyes holding fast even after a scrubbing, he knew most surely that this was not a job he would grow to love. Soon he felt burdened by the whole idea of New York. “Too big,” he said to the extended family, “and no future here. I feel like I'm walking around in somebody else's coat. It don't fit and it don't keep me warm neither.”

After a couple of years, he began to plot a getaway. Daily, in the very early mornings before work, his quest took him down to the docks. He was not choosy; he would go anywhere. He went into one hiring hall after the other, working his primitive English to the limit. He had no luck. The hiring bosses scarcely looked at him.

Desperation looming, he one day plopped down on a bench next to a man he had seen around the docks. He wanted to talk to him, but since he was in New York, he first had to find out if the man would talk to
him
.
“Bist du ein Yid?
” he asked, having some confidence that the man
was
Jewish, there being, as my father told the story, something Jewish about him. He always declined to say just what this was, but I would guess that it was not
the possession of a hooked nose or kinky hair, because he would have discovered that any number of Mediterranean types also showed these characteristics. It was more likely that he saw the look of anxiety and uneasiness unique to the pale, pale faces of Jewish immigrants—the same looks that I saw in my mother's photographs of my immigrant ancestors.

At any rate, when the man said that he was indeed Jewish, my father asked, rather more rhetorically than purposefully, “
Nu
, so what's it take to get a job around here?” The man took this as a serious request for information and after calling my father a “greenie,” informed him that he had to slip the hirers some money.

When my father wondered how much, the man said that a five-dollar bill was the least.

My father stared at the man. “So?”

“So I ain't got it yet,” the man admitted.

My father had to admit he didn't have it yet either. But he thought that if he skipped meals, he might be able to get it. And before too long he had passed a hirer a bill and was put on a boat going to Miami. Ah, Miami. Good-bye Russia, so long New York. By the time the boat got to Savannah, the air was mild and in fact balmy, the wharves looked warm in the sun, the black men as they unloaded the freight were laughing and calling out to one another, and he decided he didn't have to go all the way to Florida after all, that Savannah warmth was good enough. On the wharf he asked one of the Negroes the way to town. The man looked at him in an interested way and said, “Just walk along the river, look away pretty soon, and you be there.”

My father made his way in, assessing the town's size by the number of houses he was passing. He thought with satisfaction that it looked like a good-sized place, meaning that it would have a real shopping street and maybe a job with his name on it.

In a few minutes he found himself on Broughton Street, exactly the kind of street he had anticipated. He strolled up and
down it, then went into Whitaker Street, where he made out a sign that said
BRONSTEIN'S READY-TO-WEAR AND HOUSEHOLD
. He recognized Bronstein as a Jewish name, walked in to see what was what, and after a few words with the owner, got himself hired.

Eli Bronstein was a fatherly man who had lived in Savannah for eighteen years, had raised a family there, and had earned a living almost from his first day. He, like my father, had had an initial stay in New York, had in time soured on the city, and had finally come south with his family and opened a store. In Savannah, while the term
Jew store
was not in common usage, that's what Bronstein's store was, though it was not
the
Jew store, Savannah being big enough to have a couple.

My father at once felt at ease with this man and poured out the tale of his New York woes. Summing up, he said to him, “It was like I had a rotten egg sitting with me the whole time.” With Bronstein he spoke a little English here, a little Yiddish there, so that it emerged as a kind of Yidlish.

Bronstein remembered his own bad times in the big city, the chutzpah he found there, the hordes of uncaring strangers. He said to my father, “If you don't watch your rear end, they grind it into kasha.” Among his grievances was that at Ellis Island they had put the name Krapchnik on him, a name he got rid of as soon as he came to Savannah. He made it Bronstein, because that was the name of the man who had given him a hand to go to the South.

My father was cheered by this story and decided at once to rid himself of the detested Plotchnikoff. And since Bronstein had given him his first hand in the South—except for the Negro dockhand (name unknown)—he decided to go for Bronstein.

Bronstein's advice to my father was to forget the
stein
at the end. “It tells the world you're Jewish. This is one thing it don't pay to advertise.”

My father and Bronstein talked it over and decided on Bronson. Bronstein's next idea was that my father should change his
first name from the old-country Avram to the new-country Aaron. “Don't worry about it,” he told my father. “‘A man of peace' it means either way.”

To which my father answered, “You don't remember Avram also was a man lost in the wilderness?”

So it was that in a few days my father stood before a judge, the judge gaveled, and Avram Plotchnikoff became Aaron Bronson.

W
hen my father arrived in Concordia, he had already learned at Bronstein's how a Jewish merchant operated in the South. The first law was that unlike in New York and Russia, where Jewish stores, in observance of the Sabbath, were closed on Saturdays and open on Sundays, here it was the other way round. He didn't especially care, first because as a born salesman he would do what was required in order to sell, and second because he really didn't take religion seriously.

He really didn't take God seriously either. Though I often heard him make supplications to “God,” as the years went on I realized they were coming not out of faith but out of custom. In later years his arguments about the existence of God with my Uncle Meyer, my mother's brother, a man who really loved an argument, were legendary, at least to me. They were not about a God of creation, because both believed this was a subject that defied debate. How could you argue about what got it all started? What were they,
scientists?
they asked, though they agreed also that scientists didn't know what to make of it either. But when Uncle Meyer talked about an intervening power, said things like, “I'm leaving that up to God,” my father was quick
with the rebuttal. “God has time to put his two cents in?” he would say. Or when Uncle Meyer offered, “God will take care,” my father would counter with, “He gives us Cossacks and typhoid epidemics, this is the way he takes care?” Once in trying to explain his views on God to me—a rare occasion—he said, “God is like when those in Russia said America's streets were paved with gold. Did they see? Did they know? Of course not. It was only a rumor agreed on by everybody.”