Jew Store (39 page)

On the sidewalk, he walked past the bank, past the feed store, crossed the cobblestones to the empty store that had been Dalrymple-Eaton's. He did what he always did at this point—looked back at the store for his final glimpse of the day, at what the windows said (in two places and in gold):
BRONSON'S LOW-PRICED STORE.

When he came home, he said to us, “So I said good-bye to the store. And on Monday it belongs to somebody else.”

A
nd so we left. T-Dog went with us; Willy stayed and returned to Miss Brookie's backyard. Some things went, and some things stayed.

We rented an apartment in the West Bronx, one that affirmed what my father had said about everybody being willing to deal down, down, down in these times, as the apartment came with two months' free rent—a concession, it was called. And my father took a little money from the sale of the store and bought a garage. Joey, unable to find an after-school job (he was in college now), worked there repairing cars, thereby totally astounding my mother's family. My father didn't much like his new business—“What kind of business is a garage for a sal-esman?”—but then he went out and “sold” contracts to taxi-fleet owners, which made him feel better and enabled him to make a kind of cold peace with New York. Still, he would often pull out the clipping from the
Sentinel
and read it, to company, to us, no doubt to himself if nobody else was around.

F
or a long time (for her) Miriam stayed submerged in depression. She had no use for food and went to bed right after supper. She had energy only for writing to T, reading his letters to her, and hugging T-Dog. My mother worried that Miriam might turn to green eyeshades.

But in the fall of 1933, when school started, Miriam began slowly to improve, no doubt helped by all the attention she was getting from the high school boys, a lot of whom offered to be her beau from the moment she enrolled. For most of them it was their first encounter with a Southern belle, and they seemed not able to get enough of Miriam's accent, which, it must be said, got ever thicker, until it was as thick “as weevils on a cotton boll,” as Miriam herself would have described it.

Before too long she had turned into her old self again, and when she did, the letter writing slowed, and then stopped. The letters from T did the same. But, as Miriam will say to this day, her memories of T have stayed with her vivid and sweet.

My new school was not a four-room schoolhouse but a four-story one, and I came to it underprepared in fractions and over-prepared in Tennessee geography. The teachers made a fuss over me, not, as in Concordia, because I had made a declaration for college, but because they too were smitten by Southern accents. Still, they felt duty-bound to ensure that I spoke mainstream (read New York) English and sent me to speech therapy, where I sat with other foreign arrivals—Chinese, Poles, Romanians—and was taught to say “chawklit” for “chocolate” and to hang on to my final
g
's.

In certain ways my mother's dreams did come true. Miriam soon married a Jewish boy and Joey a Jewish girl.

When I was ready for marriage, I married a Jewish boy, thereby ensuring peace with my mother, though it could have been just coincidence. And though it has never been a secret that my husband is and always has been more a member of Miss Brookie's congregation than of anything else, my mother didn't question my choice: He was born Jewish, and my mother, like Miss Clara, subscribed to “born a Jew, always a Jew,” though she wouldn't have said it quite that way.

I wonder what would have happened if I had married a Gentile—a dreaded
shaigetz
. Would I have been disowned by my mother? Disavowed? Disemboweled? There's no knowing. But I do know that with my husband's and my decision to live in the South, my mother had no quarrel.

I think that of all of us, she was the one who most missed Concordia. Though there were things about it that she did not miss, there were many more things that she did. As she grew aware of this, she would say, “Go know the upsy-downsies of things.”

As for me, while I lived up North, I did not spend my time yearning for Concordia or for the South; it was more subtle than that, more like a gravitational pull. I confess that, like Miss Brookie, I have moments when I pine for the attractions of the big city, but when I do, unlike Miss Brookie, I can just get on a plane and go there. And I have never come back home without being glad that this neighborly land is where my home is.

I sometimes try to hear what my father would say about my life in the South. When I do, there his voice is, where it has been all the time, I guess, tucked away in my head somewhere, telling me that old saying of his—and I don't deny that he may have made it up himself: “Know when you're happy, and the rest is easy.”

And yes, I still see Jew stores. Whether the townspeople call them that, I don't know; but in small Southern towns there is the occasional sign that says
MANDELBAUM'S FAMILY STORE
or
SCHECTER'S DRY GOODS AND READY-TO-WEAR,
unmistakably Jew stores left over from the golden age of Jew stores. It occurs to me to wonder how they managed to make it. Did they have the same Sturm und Drang over bar mitzvahs? Did they not have daughters?

When I see these signs and these stores, my feeling of connection is very strong, and I try to imagine how my life would have proceeded had our store been among these survivors; and I think how close it came. Somehow I have the feeling that if my father's shove had managed to outmuscle my mother's push, Bronson's Low-Priced Store would still be on First Street, and the letters on the windows would still be shining forth.

S
TELLA
S
UBERMAN

The title
The Jew Store
must have raised a few eyebrows. Why did you choose a potentially controversial title for your book?

Some people are put off by the title, but that's because they aren't seeing it in the context of the time. That's what people really called the store—it was the convention. They didn't know about political correctness in those days; that was just what it was called. The Jew store was where farmhands, sharecroppers, and factory hands could buy inexpensive clothes, piece goods, and linens. Most small towns had a dry-goods store run by a Jewish family—in some cases the only Jews in the town. It was a calling for Jews who moved to the South. Some started out small and their businesses got bigger and bigger over the generations, like Rich's department stores, and some Jew stores stayed small.

How was your family's experience different from that of other Jewish immigrants of the era?

Most immigrants who came from Eastern Europe did not go south; New York was the “mother city” and if they went anywhere else it might be Boston or some other northern city. But some went south, simply because New York was too big for them. Jews went wherever a living was to be made, and the South was virgin territory. My father didn't want to be one of the crowd; he really wanted to strike out on his own. Once Jews came south, they loved it—the comfort, the ease of living. Many of them had come from very tiny villages in the old country and the rural South, in many ways, was more like home. Prejudice might have been a challenge, but they had already been dealing with that for centuries.

Did your small-town childhood in the South make it hard to adjust once your family returned to New York?

We were considered very strange, indeed, and somewhat glamorous because we had lived among the gentiles. Because we had been the only Jews in our little town, we had learned that the
world was made up of all kinds of different people, and we had learned to get along with all kinds of people. The vast majority of Jewish immigrants in New York had experience only with other Jews in New York, which of course has the largest Jewish population of any city in the world.

In an author's note at the front of the book, you mention that you changed the names of the people and the town. Why did you do this?

Not every character is benign by a long shot, and there are some who did some really nasty things. When I started writing, I took my first trip back since I was a girl, and the town had not changed one bit, and the families are still there. So I changed the name so they would keep their privacy. I know there's still a town historian at work, and I wouldn't want her figuring out all the names in the book. And I thought that if I was changing the names of the people, I should change the name of the town.

Why did you wait so long to write this book?

I kept waiting for someone else to write this book and it never happened, so one day I thought, “I'm just going to write it myself.” So much has been written about the Jewish experience in this country, to the point where people think they've heard it all, but this is a special story that was waiting to be told, and one that happened in little towns all over the country. Our town was always in my mind, and we talked about it all the time. My parents passed down stories in great detail, and my mother kept up with everyone. There were letters and Christmas cards. I have a feeling about small towns in the South and the people—there's a civility and courtesy, a neighborliness, and this great culture of storytelling and conversation.

l. Aaron took his family to a place where he knew they would be outsiders, if not outcasts. Do you see that decision as a courageous one, or one that was inherently selfish and foolhardy? In what ways can you identify with the Bronsons' position as outsiders, either racially, religiously, socially, or economically?

2. What's your impression of Miss Brookie? Why was she so welcoming to the Bronsons? With her education and worldliness, why did she continue to live in Concordia?

3. Miss Brookie and Aaron Bronson have very different explanations for why the Klan did not march on the Bronsons' store. Why do you think the KKK chose not to march?

4. Miss Brookie asks Reba to accompany her to the factory to speak out against child labor, but once there, Reba doesn't say a word and forever changes her friendship with Miss Brookie. Why do you think Reba did not speak out? How do you feel about her decision?

5. With pressure from Sadie, Reba's sister Hannah made the painful decision to not marry Manny and to stay in New York. What were Sadie's reasons for discouraging the marriage? Do you think they were valid? To what extent would this kind of thinking prevail today?

6. Joey was sent to New York for a year in order to be bar mitzvahed. Why do you think this was so important to Reba?

7. Concordia was hit hard by the Great Depression. What lingering effects has the Depression had on you, your parents, or your grandparents?

8. What did you make of Aaron's ability to turn his Jewishness into an asset during the pledge night for the factory?

9. What do you think would have happened if Miriam had married T? How would Concordia have reacted? How would Reba and Aaron have taken it?