Up From Orchard Street (4 page)
From the age of five, maybe earlier, I served as my mother’s prompter. If we had guests and she took the floor to sing, I tried to remain as invisible as possible while mouthing lyrics. I memorized every song in her repertoire. Lil needed no prompting for oldies like “Margie,” “You’re Mean to Me,” or “Melancholy Baby” and she did a fair imitation of Harry Richman singing “Putting on the Ritz.” But a song like “Prisoner of Love” stumped her—she couldn’t reach the line “I need no shackles to remind me” without going blank, and she botched “Button Up Your Overcoat,” referring to “bootleg hootch” as “hootchey kootch.” Not that anyone cared. Gifted with a cabaret vibrato that carried her along, she brought down the house with her rendition of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
She and my father always ended the entertainment by harmonizing the Irving Berlin standard “All Alone,” although my father had to carry her through the last line, “Wondering where you are / and how you are / and if you are / all alone, too.”
Once, when my father heard me singing “Button Up Your Overcoat,” he stopped me in midsong. “Mother sings, you listen,” he reminded me. Yet he agreed it was in my mother’s best interest that I stand behind her swirly skirt and when she faltered whisper the words she needed.
My brother, Willy, and I never resented our parents’ diversions and entertainments, or their fine clothes compared to our shabby ones. Glamorous as movie stars, and drawing admiring attention when they walked arm in arm through the tumultuous streets on their way to work or to the subway, they occupied their own universe. Encouraged by Bubby, who attempted to shield them from the harsher realities of the ghetto, they had the aura of visitors who sometimes invited their children to their parties.
Bubby maintained an ironclad schedule to which she was devoted. Because of chronic insomnia, she awoke at first light, turned on the gas range in the kitchen to warm the apartment, heated water in the tea kettle toward the hour when we would want to wash our hands and faces, and prepared “fendel” coffee for herself. Although her skills as a chef met no challenge, her coffee was dreadful.
We did own a percolator, which she pronounced “poker-lady,” but for herself she heated water in a
fendel
—a small pan—and when it boiled she threw in a handful of ground coffee, letting the whole seethe and bubble until it yielded a noxious brown fluid. In theory, the grounds would settle at the bottom of the pan; in fact they would find their way into coffee cups. When I was still drinking from a bottle, the not-too-clean-pan in which my milk was warmed often contained coffee grounds, which I hated. Since my parents slept late, my grandmother prepared percolated coffee for them, or my father had breakfast at some diner close to Wall Street. But she herself drank fendel coffee the day long.
She ate nothing until she returned from shopping for her daily supplies. Until I started kindergarten, I accompanied her. We set out early and she carried two large black oilcloth bags, which she held in one hand, and held on to me with the other.
Her first stop was at the poultry market, where women sat plucking fowl of every kind that had been slaughtered under the supervision of a rabbi. I hated the sight of these women with their bent backs and wan faces. From the tops of their heads to their messy aprons to their shoes, they were covered with clouds of feathers from chickens, geese and ducks. Since chicken enhanced most of our soups, Bubby bought two chickens every day—one for soup, and the other for roasting or stew, and when available, goose or duck. Her notion of a three o’clock snack for me was to take a goose liver, place it on a wrinkled brown paper bag and bake it in the oven. When the liver was crisp around the edges, she peeled it from the paper and added a few grains of kosher salt. Not until many years later did I learn that goose liver meant foie gras, an emblematic delicacy for the well-to-do.
Once we finished buying the fowl, we entered the dairy store, where Bubby tasted the sour cream from a large tin milk can whose handles sported communal tasting spoons affixed to cords that had once been white but were now black. Kufflick, the dairy man, always had a cigarette between his lips and more than once as he passed the sour cream can his ashes fell in the white cream. He sported a long beard and wore a skullcap, or yarmulke, as oily as his thick black unwashed hair.
When not ladling sour cream or cutting butter from a wooden tub with a sharp-edged paddle, he spent his moments screaming at the cats that slid into his shop whenever the door opened. They lapped up droplets of sour cream that fell to the floor from the tasting spoons. Every now and then, he’d cut a thin slice of cheese from whatever round had been reduced to slivers and hand it to me. It wasn’t that he liked me—he wanted to impress Manya. Then he retired to his dark room in the rear to candle the eggs, making sure that not a single egg contained a blood spot.
Since Bubby baked daily, it would have been prudent to buy a two-day supply of eggs and butter, but unthinkable for a woman European to the core. She counted on her food shopping as part of her social intercourse, to exchange news and gossip: what child had the pox, which woman had been widowed during the night, what Jewish gangster shot or arrested, what disease swept through the ghetto. On Saturdays, when she didn’t shop, Bubby groaned with restlessness, bereft, as if she had misplaced an object that she couldn’t find.
We could hear her sighing with relief when Sunday morning arrived and the ghetto revitalized itself, people from all over the city surging through the streets, hunting for bargains, for excitement, the endless haggling over a few cents or a few dollars. Sundays on the Lower East Side offered drama as compelling as theater. And Manya was part of it. Shopping between Orchard and Essex streets evoked a European market fair. In the bitterest weather or the most humid, she went forth with her oilcloth shopping bags. The merchants would hail her: “Manya, Manya, you should go to the Yiddish Tayater on Second Avenue, Molly Picon in
Ah Be Zum Labin
, or
Der Alta Koenik,
oh did I cry, hub ich gevanyt, such three daughters, the oldest, a tyvil, mean to her tateh.”
After the dairy store we went to Saperstein’s. It gave Manya extreme pleasure and me as well. Our mouths watered at the smell of the barrels of sour pickles, the sauerkraut, the red and green pickled tomatoes, at the vats of black olives. I loved the counter filled with lox, whitefish, sturgeon. Saperstein looked like a sturgeon, long, white, sharp-toothed. I marveled at the way he wielded his razor-sharp knife. Cutting a bit of translucent smoked sturgeon, you expected it to shred if you breathed on it.
Manya achieved status as his sturgeon expert. She had grown up with sturgeon, a staple along the Black Sea, and she pronounced a sample too salty, too mealy from being packed in ice, too strong in flavor, or absolutely perfect. Saperstein, a purist, inevitably felt sad that his customers did not truly appreciate his top-of-the-line products. He communed with Bubby over a slice of sturgeon or belly lox as if having a religious moment.
Even when bad weather kept customers away from our restaurant and we were low in cash, Bubby invested in a few slices of smoked sturgeon, not for her customers, but for our family. She could ignore lox, smoked whitefish, pickles or fresh herring, but she couldn’t do without the weekly treat of sturgeon. To prove that he was a sporting man who approved of her taste, Saperstein created a cone from white paper and dropped in some caviar, which he kept in a tin secreted in a hole under the counter—God forbid during a robbery, the thieves would never discover his hiding place. For Manya he saved his best maslinas, black wrinkled olives almost the size of small black plums, that she prized.
Our last stop was Pollack’s bakery—Greenspan had long since retired—to buy one large rye, and one pumpernickel that I carried, unwrapped. We never kept bread for the next day, giving any remnants to beggars. Staples such as sugar, flour, barley, kasha, dried beans, my mother bought at the grocery store because she didn’t mind carrying those bulky items once a week.
Plodding home, exhausted but exhilarated, we finally climbed the two flights of steps to our door. Always, before she sat down, Bubby took the breads from my hands and cut the pumpernickel European-style, the bread held to her chest and the knife flashing inward instead of away from her body. Two slices of bread cut, she would root in her shopping bags, famished for some of her newly acquired purchases.
For a number of years, Negro boys, some as young as ten, entered New York via freight cars from the South. Unable to find work and starving, they went from bakery to bakery to beg for bread. If they stumbled into Pollack’s bakery on Hester Street, Mrs. P. didn’t spare them as much as a two-day-old kaiser roll. Instead, she directed them to Manya’s Restaurant, where until she ran out of food, Bubby gave away everything that was left over from the midday dinner and the scrawny young black boys scurried down the stairs with their bits and pieces, looking like underfed birds whose skinny legs hardly seemed able to carry them.
One such youngster moved Bubby deeply. In the midst of a cold spell, with a wind that made it impossible to catch your breath in the street, he showed up in pants that were literally in shreds and with no shoes on his feet. He may have been the runt of his family’s litter because though he swore he was twelve, he appeared no more than seven: short, with a washboard chest and a pinched face.
At first we thought he was mute. He seemed incapable of answering the simplest questions, such as his name or the place from which he had come. But gently coaxed by Bubby, who embraced him and whispered in his ear, he uttered his name: “Carlton.” This was too difficult for her to pronounce so she renamed him Clayton, gave him some of my brother’s old clothes, a jar of cabbage borscht with beef in it, and as much bread as he could carry. The next morning when she opened the door to go out to the toilet in the hall, she discovered Clayton curled up on the floor, his arms wrapped around the soup jar.
Bubby could not resist nurturing him. At first he slept under the stairs or on the hallway landing and worked for his meals. He did the afternoon dishes, scrubbed the kitchen floor, took a steel brush to the oven and burners that otherwise rarely received more than a passing nod at cleanliness. Unlike the other neighbors who kept locks on their hallway toilets, we did not because Bubby hated the idea of locks. But our customers in their haste to get away often pissed on the floor, or failed to flush the toilet with its pull chain. First thing in the morning, Clayton cleaned the toilet. Bubby bought a remnant of linoleum, which he cut and fit around the base. He found lye to bleach out the stains in the bowl and seemed to be a master of domestic knowledge. And whatever he didn’t know he soon learned from Manya.
My grandmother’s purveyors often cautioned her against Clayton, sure he would cut us to pieces in our sleep. To these admonitions she responded with merriment. “I lived through the czar, I lived through the Cossacks and pogroms, now I should be afraid of a little boy? Forget such foolishness!” she said, laughing.
Because of the rats that inhabited all the tenements, she worried about Clayton sleeping in the hall, so after a few weeks she walked to the Bowery and found him a room close to Chinatown that would rent to nonwhites. The exploitative rent was a dollar a week, but she admitted to me that she lied and told everyone that it cost her fifty cents. Customers would say, “Manya, that boy will take advantage. You shouldn’t be so kind to him.” But Clayton became a permanent fixture in our lives.
Evidence of Manya’s generosity was part of ghetto lore during the weeks before the High Holy Days in early fall that marked the Jewish new year. As we grew older, the kitchen grew smaller, but every year when Rosh Hashanah came, Bubby collected or bought Mason jars that she scrubbed and stacked beneath the kitchen window, and filled with single-course meals: chicken soup with homemade noodles, carrots and chicken breasts or thighs. Three or four cauldrons simmered on the gas flames. When the contents cooled and were poured into jars, Bubby, Clayton and I set out to distribute them, together with quarter-loaves of challah.
Walking from tenement to tenement, Bubby whispered the names of the needy, those sick, without a mate or with ailing children. Clayton carried the food. I opened the apartment doors, sought the nearest clear surface and deposited the holiday meal. We left no calling cards. Almost every recipient knew the bounty came from Manya.
For days our motley little band—a white-haired woman in a brown cardigan, a small girl in an ill-fitting spotted skirt and too-small sweater, and a black boy dressed in castoffs who carried oilcloth bags full of clanking jars wrapped in newspaper—trudged from street to street. We quit only when Bubby couldn’t advance another step, or Clayton had run back two or three times to replenish our stack of jars until we had given all our food away. The following morning we began again.
Bubby considered these meals sparse, and they did not compare to our own Rosh Hashanah repast: chopped liver, gefilte fish, matzo ball soup, roast chicken, brisket of beef, stuffed cabbage, sweet potato and prune tsimmis, two kinds of kugel—noodle and potato—as well as knishes and kasha varniskas. She also baked rugulach and mandelbrot.
Neither Bubby nor my parents were much for formal ritual. My parents attended Rosh Hashanah services as briefly as they could. The synagogue was poorly ventilated and men and women were separated, so Jack and Lil could not sit together in their splendid outfits. They always aroused curiosity, as if they had wandered in by mistake.
In this congregation, it was the custom for the Orthodox men to stand in place and to sway their bodies from right to left while beating on their chests with their right fists. Although the rabbi with his long beard and sidelocks led the prayers, almost everyone knew them by heart.
Then came the moment when the scrolls—the Torah—were removed from the ark. We had read that in uptown shuls built for the wealthy the Torah scrolls were lifted up for all to see, and then returned to the ark in pristine condition. Not so here. Selected elders carried them up and down every row of seats, while some congregants leaned over and kissed the sacred writing and others put their fingers to their lips and then to the Torah.
