Jew Store (5 page)

It was also in Savannah that he learned about other Southern customs, so there were few surprises when he came upon them later in Concordia. The thing with the Negroes had been a real eye-opener. Until he had gone to New York, my father had never seen a Negro, while here in Savannah there were more Negroes than whites. In New York, Negroes were to be seen in the houses he delivered coal to, where Negro women worked as domestics; and he had seen them in Harlem when he was going past it on the streetcar. Some place, this Harlem, he had thought then: really a town in its own right and populated exclusively by Negroes. He also came to understand that among the Jewish people he knew, Negroes were spoken of, with a touch of disparagement, as
shvartzerim
.

In Savannah, Negroes also lived to themselves, in ramshackle houses in an area called Niggertown, which was, when my father thought about it, a place pretty much like his shtetl.

When my father spoke to Bronstein about this, Bronstein said he didn't rock the boat. “I'm here for a living, not a crusade,” he said. In Concordia it was a question that my father was often called upon to ponder, and though most often he went with “a living,” he would sometimes, in ways he felt able, come down on the other side, meaning in personal ways, not in crusades. He never liked the picture of himself out on the parade grounds waving a flag with no troops following. What he did was keep quiet about it and do the best he could, though there was one time when he made a bold statement indeed.

My father settled into Savannah very quickly. He liked his job, he liked Bronstein, he liked his customers. He felt as if he were living on a featherbed.

He even had a friend—Pinchas Shapiro, nicknamed Pinky—a young Jewish-American man who shared his rooming house and who worked in another Jewish-owned store. Pinky, a chubby young man with very curly dark hair and dark eyes, was born in Waycross, Georgia, and spoke in idioms half Southern, half Jewish; his standard greeting was “How's by y'all?” The two boys got together on their day off and went together to shul on Friday nights.

My father was at first struck by the number of young people who turned up in the synagogue, finding it hard to believe that all these teenagers were so strong in their beliefs. He soon understood that they were drawn there not by religious fervor, but by social needs. Marriage was clearly the dominant goal of the girls' lives, and a Jewish groom sine qua non, so the shul was simply a convenient marriage market.

By no means did the local shul provide the entire pool of the area's young Jews, since the “area” embraced all of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, even North Florida. All of the area's eligibles were on lists that were constantly brought up to date and pressed into service for a dozen or so parties each year. Guests came from as far as two hundred miles away, and from these parties a match was often orchestrated.

When I first heard about these lists, I assumed my father must have been at the very top of them. After all, with hair so light it could almost be called blond and eyes blue, blue, blue, how could he not?

Well, on the lists he was, but nowhere near the top. He did well at the parties, but when he took out these girls one on one, it was not a success: His stories did not interest them, and his accent did not fall agreeably on their ears. No, my father was not fighting off the girls with a stick.

Still, after a year he yielded to the badgering of his customers and decided all right, he would see about getting married. There was one girl, Esther Glatstone by name, who seemed responsive, and though it was a feeling he was not sure he returned, he thought to have a preliminary talk with her father.

My father was shocked by the response. Mr. Glatstone liked him, but Mrs. Glatstone didn't. She told her husband, and he told my father, that he was not a catch but just a man to be a clerk the rest of his life.

My father's brain went reeling. Was there a perception in the Jewish community that he was planning to forever be a clerk? Repugnant as the thought was, he finally had to admit it was a possibility: Perhaps at Bronstein's his drive had been becalmed by a sense of comfort and security.

He gave up on Jewish girls. But he was young and he craved a social life, and he was not averse to looking beyond his natural order. Out there in the larger city he found a huge crowd of young Gentiles dedicated to a dynamic social life. In summertime, much of this centered on Tybee Beach, where on Saturdays there were boisterous whiskey-and-oyster parties that lasted until dawn. When news of these pleasure-filled nights filtered through to my father and Pinky, they decided to go after work on Saturday night and try to get invited. They found themselves immediately waved into the group.

After the summer, my father continued to see these young Gentiles, especially the girls, the shiksas, as Bronstein's Jewish customers called them. He was taken on, in fact, as a project by one of the Savannah service leagues, and “Improve Aaron Bronson's English” would have been found among the other projects, like “Raise Money for the Orphanage.” The members to whom he was assigned worked with him assiduously. They taught him to read, and then they taught him to write, and then they worked on his accent. “Not ‘Mountwernon,' they would say, “but ‘Mount Vernon.'” After a while he began taking these girls
out, to a picture show, or to a vaudeville, when one came to town.

Soon his customers wanted a word with him, asking him darkly, “You ain't thinking of marrying a shiksa, are you?”

My father had indeed been thinking of marrying a shiksa, specifically the girl to whom he had been last assigned, the daughter of a city official. She gave him long stretches of time, and when she laughed at his language fumblings, it seemed in delight, not disdain.

The girl's father also seemed to like him, and one day asked him if he wanted a job with the city as a fireman. Bronstein didn't quite endorse the idea but said my father had to find things out for himself. And if my father wanted to come back, Bronstein said, he'd still be there.

The girl's father had another idea: Now that my father could read and write English, he ought to think about becoming a citizen.

An American citizen! It was not something my father had even considered, perhaps because no one had ever mentioned it to him. He had no idea, in fact, whether Eli Bronstein or any of the older Jews of Savannah, were citizens. Somehow this was not something they talked about. Perhaps, like many of the aunts and uncles in my own family, they were fearful of the tests or, being immigrants, they kept as far away from “government” as possible.

My father easily qualified for the two-year residence required in those days for what was called “taking out the first papers,” the declaration of intention to become a citizen; the girl taught him what was needed; and then after passing the tests, he stood before a judge, this time to become an American citizen, with the girl's father as a character witness.

In the meantime he had been thinking of proposing. He talked himself into believing that the girl, so interested, so thoughtful, might welcome his proposal. But on a night when they were having ice cream in the drugstore and another girl they knew
came in, his resolve was shattered. It was the girl's greeting that did it. “Hello, Pinky,” she said to him.

Pinky? Pinky?
My father was stunned. Pinky was dark, he light; Pinky was heavy, he thin. The differences were so obvious, how could she have mixed them up? He wanted to laugh, to say she was the silliest of Southern belles. But in his heart he knew the answer: When she saw him, she saw “Jew.” If, as the joke went in Savannah, all politicians looked alike, as did Negroes and little boys, then he asked himself, “And Jews also?”

It was an insight. Was the attention these girls lavished on him the same as on a pet, on a plaything? In his need to reject this new perspective, he challenged it again and again. What about Bronstein? Hadn't
he
made it, wasn't he accepted? To this he had no clear answer. He decided maybe there was no answer because the premise was wrong. Maybe it only
seemed
that Bronstein had “made it” when in truth he was merely making a living. And thanks to the Southern tradition of civility, Bronstein would feel rejection only on rare occasions, and when he did, he could run home to his family. So was the answer to have a family? The argument being inconclusive, full of
maybe
s, my father made a tactical retreat and went back to work for Bronstein, saying that anyway he was a salesman, not a fire-wagon polisher.

The customers welcomed him back, and the bedeviling began again. “Look, Aaron,” they said to him, “you want you should end up like Markowitz and Leiberman?”—Markowitz and Leiberman being a couple of rich, sixtyish Jewish bachelors known widely as unkempt and miserly. They said that if he didn't see anybody in Savannah who tickled his fancy, he should go to New York and find a nice
Yiddisher maidel
.

At twenty-three, when he could hold out no longer, my father took the train to New York to find that nice Jewish girl.

M
y mother came to Concordia by a somewhat different route from my father's—one perhaps less convoluted but at the same time more traumatic. It started with my father's cousin Schlomo.

Schlomo had been only a kid when my father had left the apartment of Schlomo's parents—the
mishpocheh
to whom my father had gone upon arrival in New York—to go steaming away to the South; and Schlomo was now selling baby clothes from a pushcart rented from the warehouse of my mother's father, my grandfather.

When Schlomo told my father that the
alter kocker
—a phrase in this case intended respectfully as the “old man,” though more often having a scatological intent—had some daughters, my father said, “Talk to him, Schlomo. What can he do to you?”

My mother was at this date seventeen. She had come to America from
her
Russian shtetl at the age of nine, had gone to school for two years, had learned to read and write, and had held two jobs. These were as a stuffer in a toy-animal factory and as a belt turner in a dress plant, neither of which had made much demand on her new skills. Currently she was a “stemmer”
in an artificial flower factory, which made no demands either. Despite working downtown she was very, very sheltered; in the ways of the world she was an innocent.

She lived in a big Bronx apartment building with parents, two brothers, and two sisters. The building was almost completely occupied by Jewish families. Although there was a sprinkling of Gentile families, my mother never spoke to them. She most specifically never spoke to the Gentile janitor, her impulse being to run the other way when she saw him on the stairs with his pliers and wrenches.

If her home did not ease her way into the larger world, her job was actually an impediment. This could not be helped. Even if she had wanted to be close to her coworkers, all of whom were non-Jewish (German, Poles, and other middle Europeans), there was her secret: At work she was not Jewish.

She could not be Jewish if she wanted to keep her job. It was a lesson learned in her first job when, during Passover, my mother, aged eleven and trying hard to do right, had brought matzos for her lunch. Naturally the foreman, Szymanski, had fired her, exhausting his lexicon of Jewish insults as he did.

My mother had to work hard to maintain the fiction of her Jewishlessness. It was often on the tip of her tongue to have a conversation with the girls, to share, for instance, surely the most memorable experience in the lives of all of them—the boat trip to America, the two weeks on a floating warehouse packed in with strangers and, in her case, seasickness so bad her clothes hung on her “like from a hook on the wall.” But she held back, fearing that some detail might be unique to Jews. So the story of her journey remained untold, like everything else. She would tell us that on those rare occasions when she talked to the girls, she would hold her arms around herself “tight like a bandage” to keep things from leaking out.

Luckily her last name was Malkin, which could be anything, and the girls could not guess. She pretended to be Russian. (This
was a real pretense, as she had never once entertained the notion that she actually was.) And then of course she worried that a Russian girl would be hired who would speak to her in Russian, which she could not speak. It was a language, in fact, spoken in her shtetl almost exclusively by the non-Jews. The few Jewish men who spoke Russian bumbled and stumbled—
pfumpfed
, she said—like foreigners.

My mother would also have denied herself cordial exchanges with her sister workers because she would have thought it not right to talk in a friendly way to girls who spoke so freely against the Jewish people. No doubt at those times she not only didn't talk, she tried not to hear.

But when one particular girl spoke—an older girl who was going at night to secretarial school—my mother kept her ears open. When the girl periodically blew a breath up to the ceiling and said, “What a way to make a living. Thank God for me it's only temporary,” my mother heard every syllable.

Temporary
. It was a comforting word to her, suggesting as it did that whatever the problem, it lasted for only so long. She applied the word to the boat trip, and it fit: The awfulness had been
temporary
. She loved the word. It gave her a modus vivendi, one that she explained to me many times: “You can stand anything,” she would say, “as long as you know it is”—and she would carefully enunciate it—“tem-po-rary.”

If there was this distance between her and her coworkers, it was but a hop, skip, and jump compared to the one between her and the cleaning people. They were Negroes. In Russia she had never seen Negroes. It's a good guess that most Russians—Jews and non-Jews alike—had never seen them.