Jew Store (7 page)

The house would have been quiet. My grandfather would have been in his pushcart warehouse for hours; my mother's younger sister, my Aunt Hannah, in school; and her brother, Uncle Philip, the youngest in the family, in school as well. My mother's older brother, my Uncle Meyer, was married and no longer lived at home.

Aunt Sadie sat down. She glanced at Miriam and, to my mother's surprise, only shrugged. Aunt Sadie perhaps sensed this was to be a special, and intense, convocation and was saving her arguments. My grandmother brought her a glass of tea.

My mother was working on a way to open it up. Finally she got out that my father wasn't happy. A few words, a lot said.

To give time for this to sink in, she took a sip of tea. My mother, of course, drank tea in the European-Russian-Jewish manner: The glass went to the mouth with a finger curled around the spoon to keep it from flopping into the eye, and then, as an economy measure, the tea was sipped through a fragment of a sugar cube held between the front teeth. My mother finished her sip and repeated to my Aunt Sadie, “He just ain't happy.”

If my father wasn't crazy about Aunt Sadie, she returned the favor. Miriam and I have always agreed that Aunt Sadie's antagonism toward my father was not without its envy component. Vetted or not by a matchmaker, my father obviously had an appeal that her Izzy didn't, her Izzy having come directly from the immigrant pool.

Aunt Sadie said now to my mother, “If it makes him happy to be happy, so let him be happy.”

Even in later years it seemed never to have occurred to my
mother that what Aunt Sadie had said was ridiculous, though she said she
was
perplexed. So she answered Aunt Sadie only, “So who don't it make happy to be happy?”

After everyone had been served, my grandmother would have come to the table with her own glass of tea, moving leisurely, in an easy flow. My grandmother was never in a hurry. In the taking of tea there was a gentle sliding into her chair, a thoughtful spooning of a dollop of jam from the pot on the table, a letting fall of the jam into the glass, a slow stirring.

At this small klatch, my grandmother would, as always, be in a black long-sleeved shirtwaist top and a black floor-length full skirt. She was a little woman—perhaps “minute” is the better word—who seemed overwhelmed by fabric.

My grandmother neither spoke nor understood English. When English was spoken around her, she waved her hands about her head as if brushing off spider webs. In her presence, therefore, a rapid shuffle went on between English and Yiddish.

With my grandmother at last sitting, my mother gathered herself to tell it all. Out it came: My father didn't like New York, didn't like selling from a pushcart, wanted to go back to the South.

Aunt Sadie was a “spitter.” In Yiddish with its gargling
ch
s and exploding sibilants, she was a-splash, and even in English she sent forth sprays. “To the
South
?” she said, moisture molecules flying.

My grandmother clapped her hands to her face, and my mother's heart leaped up at what might be a promising sign. My grandmother, however, was showing not horror but interest. She had brought to mind a family story about a nephew, Zelig—my first cousin once removed—who had left New York to go to Cleveland and who, according to his mother, my Great-aunt Tillie, was doing well there. “Cleveland,” my grandmother repeated.

Aunt Sadie responded with a no-nonsense “Cleveland,
schmeve land” and asked if my father wasn't just trying to get my mother to go out and work for him. My mother immediately envisioned one of my great-aunts, a woman in her sixties who still set out daily with a pack on her back to peddle soft goods—whatever she had picked up cheap—to pushcart vendors. Did Sadie think this was what my father wanted her to do? Did she think my father was lazy, of all things? “He's just a man likes to do what he likes to do,” my mother answered.

Aunt Sadie said she knew all about the South (though it's a good guess that she knew almost nothing) and all of what she “knew” was bad. First of all, she “guaranteed” that my mother would not like it there, even if it turned out the place they chose had a confirmed Jewish population. “The Jews they got there I can imagine,” she said to my mother. And
oy
, the Gentiles—the goyim—my mother would have to associate with, “the hillybillies, the yokels.”

As my grandmother poured fresh tea, no doubt taking the usual pains to pour against the spoon so that the glass would not crack, she had a word for her daughters. Little in stature and underlanguaged though my grandmother was, she knew her imperatives. “Go, go with your husband,” she told my mother, while my mother's heart bumped around. “Be a warm stone in his pocket on a cold day.” Where, my mother wondered, where was my grandmother's outrage at somebody leaving the family?

My mother snatched at her one remaining hope, that maybe my grandfather would object. Maybe
he
would be the one to keep his daughter and his grandchildren from going God knows where.

My grandmother only scoffed. My grandfather would lend the money, of that she was sure. After all, she said, when they had left Russia, had they not left behind a father, three brothers, and four sisters? “Tell Aaron not to worry,” she said to my mother. “Pa will lend.”

W
hen my father used to describe how he felt after my grandfather agreed to lend the money, he'd say “I was on top of myself.” He immediately sat down and wrote a letter to Bronstein, who wrote back—in a letter penned by his son—confirming that Nashville had plenty of Jews and that the rest of Tennessee was “wide open.”

Miriam and Joey have said that they were wildly excited by the prospect of a trip on a train and that my father, though not
wildly
excited, having been on a train before, was nevertheless pretty well fired up. Of course my mother was neither wildly excited nor fired up, only acutely anxious. She was clinging to a single mandate: Food must be taken along. Dining-car food would be too dear, and could you expect kosher? Of course not.

The day before the two-day journey, she gathered together two large brown paper grocery bags. Except for a few things that would be eaten the first day, edibles had to be spoilage resistant. Into the first-day sack went fried fish, tomatoes, and boiled chicken; into the second-day one hard-boiled eggs, as well as jars of borscht, eggless (because raw eggs spoiled) and with an extra infusion of citric acid, or, as it was called, sour
salt—among thrifty Jewish housewives, the traditional substitute for expensive lemons and also dimly understood as a spoilage retarder. In both bags were jars of already brewed tea and coffee, canned salmon, and a can opener. Matzos and fruit were strewn throughout.

My father had scheduled the trip for a Sunday because my Uncle Philip, who attended the College of the City of New York all week and on some Saturdays but not Sundays, would be able to transport them to the train. My uncle carried the family and their belongings from the Bronx to Grand Central Station in a rented wagon behind a rented horse. When the protracted, complex trip was over, my uncle said for my mother to try to relax, to try to enjoy the new experience. “Think of yourself as lucky,” he said to her. My mother thought of herself as nothing of the sort and could barely summon up the energy to give her brother a good-bye flutter. After that she did a “plunk-down” in her seat, and stayed there, becalmed and listless.

Still, if her body was becalmed, her head was beset by strong winds. She felt, she used to say, that everything was topsy-turvy, or, in her way of saying it, “topsy-mopsy.” Only “tem-po-rary” came through clearly, and she clung to it, to keep from being blown away.

T
hey arrived in Nashville in mid-afternoon and walked into town. My father's objective was, as in Savannah, to spot a store owned by Jews. They moved on to Church Street.

From the first step, my father felt he was returning to where the very air was life-sustaining. “Celebrate! Celebrate!” he cried to the family.

Celebrate? My mother answered that what with two days on the train and now the schlepping, they were lucky that instead of dead they were just tired.

My father faked outrage. “What am I hearing? In the South, tired ain't allowed, only peppy! You hear me what I'm saying?”

If my mother thought it was a schlep, my father treated it as a promenade and as a way to get out the kinks from the train trip. He said to my mother, “Listen to your muscles. They're saying, ‘Hoo-boy! Thank you, lady!'”

My mother always said she didn't hear her muscles, she heard only my father. He was floating along, lost in admiration for the buildings, the stores, the merchandise. When he came upon a store with a black marble foundation, he seemed overcome. Peering in at the window displays, he awarded an accolade: “Merchandise the finest,” he said. It was as if fervently expressed enthusiasm would at last convince my mother of the soundness of the decision to come here. He finally summed it up: New York stores were not better; there were just more of them.

On the next block he glanced up at a sign that said
GREEN-GLASS HABERDASHERY
, flicked his head, and they went in.

Greenglass Haberdashery was a store for the better class. There was carpeting on the floor, lamps instead of overhead lights, buttery billfolds and hand-crafted fedoras on display. Barney Greenglass, as well turned out as his store, greeted the family and proceeded to what protocol demanded: New Jews in town were to be taken immediately to meet the rabbi and his wife.

At the rabbi's house, there was a welcome and refreshments. My mother told herself—and was surprised when she did—that if non–New York Jews were like Sadie had said, at least they knew from a nice glass of tea and a good piece of honeycake.

The rabbi's wife was full of the authority that came from being the rabbi's wife. She instructed my mother on important things: the location of the little store that sold kosher meats, the particulars of the shul, and where there was a room to rent.

The room was around the corner in the apartment of the Moskowitzes. It was furnished in the same spare way as the family's bedrooms in the Bronx, though this one, since all members of the family would be sleeping there, had, besides the dresser
and double bed, a cot, four straight chairs, and an enameled-topped table. My mother never failed to describe the mattresses as “thick like a piece of matzo is thick.”

At the end of the hall was the bathroom, here serving two families, not six, as in the Bronx. At last an improvement, my mother thought.

There were “kitchen privileges” (which my mother had never heard of and always called “kitchen preventleges”) that allowed her the use of the coal stove at certain hours and one very small corner of the icebox. But they were to eat in their room, on the table there.

The next morning they had a little breakfast with the Moskowitzes, with the Moskowitzes' food—“as a favor,” Mrs. Moskowitz said—and afterward my father left to see what was what, Joey and Miriam went outside in the hope of finding other children, and my mother returned to the room to unpack. She was soon feeling the old heaviness. She tried to retrieve the bit of cheer from yesterday at the rabbi's house, but it was impossible in this dark room with the torn window shades; and in another moment she was calling yesterday's sentiments foolishness and going about her work through eyes full of water.

Greenglass in the meantime had taken my father around to Edelstein of Edelstein's Ladies, Gents, and Children. As soon as Edelstein and my father had shaken hands, Edelstein wanted to know if my father was looking for something to do.

My father said, “Naturally,” and Edelstein said, “So stop looking already, you got a job.”

Edelstein's Ladies, Gents, and Children (which also sold domestics) was on the street around the corner from Greenglass's. Unlike Greenglass's it sold to the poorer people. It was, then, a store like Bronstein's in Savannah and, also like Bronstein's, not the only store of its kind in the city and not called a “Jew store.” Still, it was in Nashville that my father learned the term and came to understand how it was used in small towns like Concordia.

Edelstein's was a very busy place, and my father could see that Edelstein was making money there. He figured that if he kept his eyes open and his step lively, it was not out of the question that Aaron Bronson could be a Charlie Edelstein someday.

After only a few weeks, Edelstein took my father on a buying trip to St. Louis, something that added to my father's “education and sal-es-man-ship,” as he told my mother, giving the latter word his patented four-syllable pronunciation. But my father had something else in mind: He wanted Charlie Edelstein to know that he wanted a store of his own.

This was a three-alarmer for my mother. She was just getting used to everything, and now look.

She once said to me, “What could I do but make believe it could never happen?” She shoved my father's plan into the pigeonhole marked “Maybe Someday,” then into “It Could Never Happen,” and went back to settling into Nashville. To her surprise, she was finding the settling “a little not too terrible,” the best part being the afternoon visits with the rabbi's wife (where she saw the other Jewish women as well) and the Friday nights at the shul.

The shul experience in Nashville was the same as in New York, except the building was smaller. Seating was the same: My mother sat upstairs with my sister; my father and brother with the men downstairs.

My parents got to know a good number of shul-goers and after services accepted invitations to visit. Soon my father said he and my mother should take a turn. My mother thought this was right. If everybody did it, why not them? “Could I let them call us greenhorns?” she asked me, knowing that I knew the answer was a definite no.