Up From Orchard Street (5 page)

The moment after Jack touched the Torah, he pushed his way to the exit with Willy. This was the signal for the women in our family— Bubby, Lil, me—to press into the aisle to be the first females to reach the Torah, allowing us to escape quickly, too. Bubby attended services for the sake of continuity with her past, for a nod to her origins. She especially wanted to hear mention of the Book of Life, in which she hoped our names would be written for the coming year.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, ten days later was another matter. It demanded sacrifice. Bubby and Lil fasted the full twenty-four hours, not even brushing their teeth or taking water to their lips. Children were not required to fast but I did so from the age of five, finding the prospect uplifting.

At noon, just as we started to grow ravenous, our family left the shul, and rather than be tempted by food or the possibility of a nap at home, we walked across bridges during the afternoon. Our favorites were the Brooklyn Bridge and the Williamsburg, where we met thousands of other worshipers doing the same thing. The Orthodox always cast bread upon the water for the new year. Our family’s version was to walk one bridge or another to cast off our transgressions. Our clothes new and stiff, our hunger palpable, we took pride in our pale faces and visibly parched lips.

Toward dusk we walked back to shul to hear the blowing of the ram’s horn, the shofar, that marked the exact moment Yom Kippur services ended. Calling out “L’ shana tova” and “Gut yontif,” we hastened home to eat at last.

For breaking the fast we ate cold dishes. Bubby’s specialty was pickled herring, which involved weeks of preparation. She personally selected the fresh herring from large barrels at Saperstein’s and we carried them home wrapped in newspaper. For days the kitchen was full of fish scales, bones and discarded heads and tails.

Bubby boiled vinegar, sugar and pickling spices in an immense vat and then poured the mix into five-quart jars in which she had already placed the cleaned fish slices and countless pounds of sliced onions. We kept a daily watch on the jars as the onions softened and grew translucent and the herring lightened from gray to white. Lil was the official taster and decided whether the marinade or the herring needed more sugar or spices. Manya’s pickled herring became known citywide. We could rarely fill all the orders that we received from private parties and restaurants.

We always suspected that Jack and Willy cheated during Yom Kippur, that when they ran home for a pee they gobbled a few pieces of herring, using their fingers instead of telltale forks. But Bubby invoked our silence. It was one of her “Don’t tell” strictures.

Later in the evening, the table was laden with platters of food. We welcomed neighbors, a half dozen of my mother’s brothers—Grandma Rae never came—friends from Division Street, Bertha and the Lipinskis, who feasted until every scrap was gone.

We opened our folding beds with relief as soon as our guests departed, climbed in, and Bubby sang into my ear, “If there is a God, he sent you to me.”

The restaurant paid for the rent of our apartment and for our outrageously large gas bills. Since my father’s selling job was seasonal and he rarely worked in the summer, when business was slow in the stores on Division Street, his salary went for the indulgences that he had adopted as a youth—movies, theater and clothes—often for doctors, and some for our vacations in the summer.

Bubby didn’t count her labor as deserving of wages. It didn’t occur to her. Accustomed to work she adored, she would have been shipwrecked without it. She didn’t need praise for the sake of praise, but when a customer told her, “Manya, that’s the best duck and red cabbage I ever tasted,” she blushed and lowered her eyes as if the man had flirted with her. I often marveled that she could cook day after day without tiring of it. When I asked her about this, she replied, “What else would I do with myself?”

No sooner did Bertha marry well to a pocketbook manufacturer she always called by his last name than they moved to the wilds of Yonkers. She and Goodman had a house with a porch, two floors—the top reserved for bedrooms—and two indoor bathrooms. Bubby and I visited this Arcadia twice a year. Though Bertha did her best to wait on her during these visits in her Yonkers home, to entertain and pamper her, Manya could hardly wait to return to Orchard Street.

Unexpectedly, Bubby’s sense of continuity, self-worth and purpose trembled when a cafeteria was installed in a vacant bank building on Canal Street; the bank had failed during the Depression. A real estate company bought the building and decided it was the perfect spot for a cafeteria.

Cafeteria! The very word caused Bubby to shudder. Still, no one in our family or in the entire neighborhood could ignore the renovations taking place kitty-corner to our apartment. Men showed up with scaffolds, drilled off the name of the bank and blasted out chunks of cement from the solid walls to replace them with clear windows.

In the beginning, Manya and her faithful customers mocked the cafeteria’s prospects and laughed at the uptown boobs who invented the idea. Who would want food that sat the day long on a steam table? What did they take the merchants and businesspeople for, hicks from Hicksville, they should pay their hard-earned money for goyishe dreck?

Nevertheless, when The Grand Canal opened, we watched from our windows with alarm as hordes of people—even Jacob, who ate at our restaurant for nothing in exchange for calling us to his phone in his clothing store—shoved their way inside. Flyers had been jammed into every neighborhood mailbox, offering Grand Opening Specials and Blue Plate dinners at discount prices—thirty-nine cents for meat loaf, gravy, mashed potatoes, canned string beans.

To placate his mother, Jack scoffed, “Who would eat there three times a day? It’s probably terrible stuff, worse than the Automat.” My grandmother made no reply, but after ten days of diminishing lunch business, she told him, “Jack, go there and eat. And Elkaleh, too. Between your two heads I’ll find out everything.”

We went on a Friday afternoon for lunch. Compared to our restaurant with its wobbly folding tables, the cafeteria in the bank dazzled us—marble floors, a vast counter displaying daily specials, tables with Formica tops, dozens of spotlights in the ceiling. My father and I split an “American” sandwich, tuna on factory-sliced white bread, and American apple pie, prepared from canned apples, a cornstarch filling and a crust that my father perceived as containing lard. We could hardly hear ourselves think, let alone talk, because of the noise. Three or four busboys carted away soiled dishes and wiped off the Formica tables with white terry-cloth towels. Ice water ran from a dispenser at the end of the counter. No one drank seltzer the way they did at our restaurant, and tea meant a cup of water plus a tea bag. Tea bags! It was my first experience with one.

We raced out, crossed the street by darting between the cars and trucks, and took the steps up to our apartment two at a time. “Ma,” my father called out, “the place is a mausoleum! White walls, white ceilings, white plates. I’ve seen people laid out on slabs in better places than The Grand Canal. And the food!” He shuddered. “The butter is so salty you can’t put it to your lips, the bread is like eating cotton balls and their spring salad is cottage cheese with radish and cucumbers. A fancy name for a whole lot of nothing.”

My grandmother studied me without flinching. “Und vuz zucks du? What do you have to say?”

“Everything made me sick, I have to lie down.” I went into my parents’ bedroom and closed my eyes. A wave of queasy anxiety swept over me. My father and I had both told the truth—the food was inedible compared to my grandmother’s. On the other hand, the fancy lighting, the busboys, the ice water from a machine, even the tea bags swirled in my head. What my grandmother offered had unaccountably become dated, out of fashion, like an item of clothing relegated to the back of the closet.

Lil, without a worrisome thought to mar her seamless brow, rose to the occasion and added to the family’s coffers by becoming a weekend salesgirl at Palace Fashions on Division Street. She thrived on her new status and loved walking “up the marble staircase” every week—her way of referring to the Bowery Saving Bank at which she deposited her salary.

My father proved correct about one thing—The Grand Canal did poorly at breakfast and soon decided to close after 5:00 P.M. But for the noon meal it continued to thrive, diners darting in either for a full meal or a nosh.

To nosh is to seek a treat or a snack. Consume it and it’s out of your mind forever. Some men ran into The Grand Canal for commercial pastries, say, a runny éclair or so-called strawberry shortcake with tough sponge, strawberries like red pebbles and fake whipped cream. But Willy and I learned early on that a nosh meant something else to our father. For Jack it was a sexual dalliance that took no more time than it would to gulp down coffee and cake.

If his female customer was pretty and vulnerable, if she blushed when he asked her how it felt to be beautiful, if he told her she looked stunning and began to remove her junk jewelry, or remarked that the color of her new garment did not make her skin look sallow—if she seemed receptive, then he maneuvered her into the broom closet, or onto the table in the alteration room and slipped it in and out as quickly as possible. Then he ran home to report to my grandmother that he had had a nosh and like fake whipped cream, it made him “naw-shus.”

It would be unfair to say that Jack was a compulsive nosher, that he noshed every week, or every month, routinely. He did not. But when the fever came upon him, whether on a snowy day in February with one lonely woman seeking to kill an hour in a store before she went home to her family, or a spring day when he felt charmed by the turn of a customer’s shoulder as she shrugged into a coat, then the desire for a nosh overcame him.

Jack’s easy confessions did not strike Willy or me as odd because my grandmother assured us that the incident meant nothing, like passing a little water. But my father, my brother and I were under strict rules not to hint to my mother about these noshes. “It’s a don’t-tell,” Bubby warned us.

“Would I hurt Lil, would I hurt her smallest finger?” Jack protested as he disappeared into the dark room where we stored the beds and folding tables, took a quick wash with hot water from the tea kettle, and changed his underwear. If forced to take a lie detector test, he could pass easily over whether he had been unfaithful. “No,” he’d answer with resounding conviction. “I love my wife.” Which he did. And my mother, who didn’t understand the word
paradox
or its implications, agreed.

3

Shanda, Shanda

IF BUBBY’S DAYS belonged to her restaurant, to the endless stream of customers, friends, neighbors, her nights belonged to me. Her past was inexplicably wed to the present and during the winter months when it grew dark early and the last visitor left our apartment, Bubby suggested that we roll our folding beds into the dining room.

A dark alcove, not wired for electricity, led off the front room. Possibly it had been intended as a bathroom, an idea that the landlord may have abandoned to save money. Instead he installed two toilets in the hall on each floor of the five-story building. The unlit alcove inside our apartment held a skinny closet with shelves for my father’s laundered shirts and his vast assortment of ties. Next to them was a chest of drawers with Lil’s finery: her chemises, always called shimmys, her satiny one-piece undergarments named teddies and her silk stockings. Against the darkest wall stood my brother’s cot and a double folding bed for Bubby and me. The springs of our bed were soft and the mattress mushy, and a supporting iron bar under its center had lost some of its screws so that it slid from side to side capriciously. Lil, skillful with the Singer sewing machine, made a curtain from some drapery material to hide these sorry beds whose condition deteriorated with the years.

Bubby’s historic feather comforter, the perrina that she had brought with her from Odessa, had a decorated cutout in its center trimmed with cotton lace. Feathers escaped nightly through this cutout. In the coldest weather we piled wool blankets and even our overcoats over it. My grandmother, strongly attached to the perrina, called it her “wedding blanket.” Feeling it close to her skin brought her ever-flowing recollections of her dead husband, now gone for decades.

My fifth year had significance for me. Not only because I first began to help Lil with the words of songs, but because I tried to muddle my way through the meaning of time. My brother, Willy, always taken for younger than I, was two years older. My father had passed thirty: thirty, a vast age because I considered someone sixteen fully grown and someone ten almost out of childhood. And my grandmother related stories that happened before she gave birth to my father with the same passion, the anxiety, the rage and despair, as if the oncoming tragedy occurred on a day of the week before.

Other children of immigrant grandparents or parents may have heard tales of shtetl—village—life, marked by isolation and rigid religious ceremonies. But my grandparents came from a cosmopolitan city, a bustling trading seaport with transients from foreign lands. True, Jews in Odessa lived in a separate quarter, but many of them were freethinkers, political radicals, and among them was my grandfather, Misha.

As if it were an established folktale, Bubby told me how she met Misha as he tore through the streets of Odessa distributing anticzar pamphlets. One day, blinded by a snowstorm, he ran into Manya and knocked her to the cobblestones; his pamphlets went flying. His first thought was to retrieve the papers. With the wind at his back he jumped up and tried to catch them as they swirled like black flakes from the sky. But the unexpected contact with the young girl’s body impelled him to run after her. She had already picked herself up and was plowing ahead along the storm-swept street. Misha caught up with her and asked whether he had seen her at a student meeting, or perhaps in the cellar of the clandestine printer who ran a hand-set press.

One glance at the tall young man with piercingly intelligent eyes and hair that fell in waves over his brow left Manya breathless. If she could, she would have hurled herself at him so they could tumble down again, arms and legs entwined. He must have experienced the same jolt because he seized her arm and demanded to know her name. Then he whispered lovingly, “Manya, du bist fah mir.”

She was fifteen and he seventeen, a “brenfire.” My grandmother never uttered
bren
alone or
fire
alone, though they both meant the same thing, a burning flame. Although the woman for whom my grandmother worked as a kitchen helper in no way boasted of royalty, my grandmother had nicknamed her “die czarina” because of her imperious manner and her arrogant condescension toward her servants. One of the first things my grandmother confided to Misha was that “ven der czarina gayt pishern, dofen mir shtanden”: when the czarina goes to pee, we have to stand. Misha adored her irony. She, on the other hand, adored everything about him: his fiery looks, his ready discourse, his knowledge of the world, all of which she lapped up as she did the delicious taste of his skin. Their lovemaking verged on the miraculous.

“We both believed in frya libbe,” she told me at an early age. I translated the phrase
free love
to mean that she loved him as much as possible, that is, freely. I heard the joy in my grandmother’s voice as she whispered these words in the dark. Free love with Misha made her desperate years as a cook’s helper in the czarina’s kitchen almost bearable. As for her beloved, he was impatient, restless, always on the move. He would pace the floor holding a book in one hand while he gesticulated with his other, explaining lengthy passages of Bakunin the political theorist or the hammering words of the poet Pushkin.

During the summer, they strolled the seaport wharves, but rarely for long. Cossacks rounded up “strays” regularly, particularly Jewish students, all of whom were suspected of being bomb-throwing anarchists. Although Misha skittered around the city unafraid, he was always wary, always on the alert for possible danger.

A year after he knocked Manya down in the street they were secretly married. She continued to live with her family, and he with his. Periods of calm would invariably be followed by surprise roundups of students, who were beaten and jailed. Manya pleaded to leave for America. Misha worked at any menial job he could find to save money for their voyage— he had an uncle in New York whose address he held on to as a talisman. Yet whenever Manya brought up the subject of their migration, he would answer, “Not yet. It’s not yet time.” Another year went by.

Then an incident in St. Petersburg determined their fate: students rushed the czar as he rode in his carriage. The repercussions were felt from the frozen steppes to the Black Sea. Manya didn’t hear from Misha for ten days, although he had no part in the attack and had not been informed in advance about the plot. It came as a relief when at last he tapped on her window in the middle of the night and whispered, “Now. It’s time now.”

She wrapped her feather comforter around things she regarded as her dowry: a bronze mortar and pestle and brass candlesticks with curlicued stems. She slipped into her clothes, a long shift, an ankle-length sweater, a head kerchief and an extra pair of long underwear. She neither said good-bye nor left a note for her parents. Once they discovered the vacant place left by her perrina, they would understand.

It was one in the morning, uncommonly dark, the air tinged with frost but not yet too cold. They pressed themselves against buildings as they silently made their way to the port. The sky paled as Misha motioned toward their seagoing vessel. With shaky fingers he tapped his coat pocket for their tickets.

After the hours of silence and anguish, the rattle of their footsteps on the gangplank startled them. Hastily, they scrambled below deck, where they found body crouched next to body on the cold planks. Exhausted, apprehensive, uncomfortable, they counted their every breath.

How long did they sit there? An hour? Five? Suddenly they felt the roll of the ship. The hundreds of passengers cried out in relief. Every swerve and rock of the ship meant a movement toward freedom. It was during the midst of this communal jubilation that Manya, the kitchen helper, realized that she had forgotten to pack food.

“So what did you live on?” I asked, lying close to her warm body in the folding bed we shared, as if I hadn’t asked the question a dozen times before. “We lived on love,” came the answer.

I neither enjoyed nor cared for the second half of my grandmother’s saga, what we called “the sad part.” Though Misha had contracted a mild cough during their long journey, he passed the medical tests at Ellis Island. To see whether immigrants commanded average intelligence, Ellis Island clerks handed them crude pieces of wood, a puzzle to fit into a wooden frame. Misha finished his in less than a minute and Manya followed a few minutes later.

Then, to enhance their anxiety, men and women were separated during their physical examinations. A doctor probed Manya’s vagina with an iron apparatus that resembled tongs, the metal crude and unyielding and causing intense pain. The overworked doctor poked his skinny moist finger up her vagina and the same finger examined her teeth and mouth. Then he directed her to a cage where children, young women and the elderly waited, shaking with fear.

The worst sight—and she told me this over and over—were the women with pox or coughs that yielded blood, who were told they either had to be quarantined for several months or sent home. “They screamed, they pulled their hair,” she recalled, as if still seeing their misery before her eyes. “They didn’t know whether they would find their husbands or parents or children again. The men too.” Informed that they couldn’t come into America, they cried like babies.

“I cried the whole time until I saw Misha again,” Bubby admitted. “ ‘Animals,’ the clerks called us. ‘These people are animals.’ ”

They hadn’t bathed for more than a month and cold water without soap left their hands grimy. But my grandparents were elated, expectant, eager to begin their new existence together. An indifferent clerk translated their Russian name, Rakidovski, into Roth, the formalities ended and they boarded the ferry to Battery Park.

No one waited for them, but almost every passerby on the sidewalk spoke Yiddish and directed them to the Jewish quarter. The uncle, whose name and address they clutched so proudly, could not be found.

Having exchanged their rubles for dollars, they rented a basement room on Ludlow Street. It was so dark, so dank, it reminded them of the cellar back in Odessa that housed the hand-set printing press. Their room contained a mattress, one chair and a patched-together table with a small gas cooking unit. They found a communal cold-water faucet in the outside hall near the toilet. But after the weeks of being surrounded by hundreds of others, their privacy felt like a gift. During their furtive years of lovemaking in Odessa, they had never spent a full night together.

“For two, maybe three days on Ludlow Street,” my grandmother explained matter-of-factly, “we slept and made love.” When they finally ventured out into the street, the daylight half blinded them. They bought black bread, one enamel cup and black tea—Russian tea, chai, that could be as dense in color as coffee.

Misha immediately found work on an ice truck, using a hammer and a pick to break off irregular chunks of ice that he wrapped in a torn burlap sack and heaved over his back. He carried the ice up and down stairs to deliver it to apartments and stores. Manya cleaned pots and scrubbed floors in a bakery located one flight down from street level. In the summer the heat left her skin dry and her hair singed. The worst day at the bakery came late on Friday afternoons, when the ghetto women arrived with their cauldrons of cholent—meat and beans, barley and potatoes submerged in water—to leave in the bakery oven to simmer overnight.

Shortly before noon on Saturday the Shabbas goy, an underpaid gentile hired to do work forbidden on the Sabbath, opened the bakery. He pulled the pots out of the oven, gave them to the waiting women, and afterward cleaned up any mess that had spilled on the floor, scraping the oven itself for food that had boiled over.

One day Manya asked the bakery owner, Greenspan, for the job. He was furious that a woman could make such a suggestion. For a woman to work in a store on Saturday was considered sacrilege. “It’s a shanda,” he cried. “A shame. A disgrace.”

Bubby paused at this point in her narrative. “A shanda?” she asked rhetorically. “We needed the money. Misha had this terrible cough. His whole body shook from the coughing. So what was the shanda, that I should work on Saturday or that my husband should have medicine from the clinic?”

The doctor from the clinic at Gouverneur Hospital, which the ghetto inhabitants called The Hospital as if it were the only one in the city, recommended that Misha leave the ice truck job. The ice, the cold, the damp rag on his back day in and day out incited the cough.

Next he worked at a kosher butcher shop, lifting heavy carcasses and washing away the bloody water in which the meat had been ritually koshered. For families where women worked and didn’t have time for koshering at home—the rabbi’s stamp on the meat was considered insufficient—the meat was soaked in pans filled with water and kosher salt for at least three hours.

Carrying the heavy pans as well as the carcasses was exhausting, but Misha enjoyed the company of his boss, Stein, pronounced “Shtein.” Stein encouraged Misha to read the daily papers in Yiddish and summarize the news for him. He enjoyed talking to Misha about the Russian writer Gogol, whose stories reminded him not only of Russia’s lower depths but of the Lower East Side. Stein would shake his curly red hair—which had earned him the nickname “rayta hund”— red hound—and say, “Boychick, it’s a shanda that someone gebilded should be working by me lifting pans with bloody water.”