No Tales To Tell

     

Our grandparents rarely referred to their childhood or teen-age years, they didn't speak about their own parents or other relatives.  We knew they had both lost their mothers early and that their fathers had remarried as soon as possible. So, two half-orphans, a painful truth.  Other than that, to us the world they came from was formless and void like the time before Creation.

When I was in sixth grade, in 1956, our social studies theme was A Nation Of Immigrants. For homework, I asked my mother, "Where did Bubbie and Zayde come from?"

"Poland," she said shortly, because she knew I already knew.

        

Then I tried to stab at a puzzle no one else seemed to notice: "But we don't say we're Polish?"

        

"No. Jewish."

        

"Polish-Jewish?"

        

"No. Just Jews. Jews from Poland."

        

Oh, I see.

        

Well, not really. I'm not sure my mother did either. But she wasn't interested in the problem. The knot of it - from a place, but not of it - twisted around my mind along with other mysteries of the adult world, some of them deep, some slight - like why do we write JacksonHeights, New York as our return address and not Jackson Heights, Queens.

        

It's not that I was obsessed with these mysteries back then.  Not at all. Like everybody else in Class 6-4, the smartest in P.S. 69, I was busy piling up A's, keeping slam books hidden from my friends, having arguments and making up, playing stoop ball or box ball or going to Hebrew School three times a week. But these knots - the questions the adult world couldn't quite answer - returned now and again, year after year.

        

I was in graduate school before I understood how remote Jews and Poles were from each other, even in the same town or on the same street. Only a tiny percentage of Jews knew more than a few words in Polish and an even tinier percent of Poles spoke or understood Yiddish. Yes, in the villages and towns they traded with each other, passed each other on the road, but that was it.  You don't need much language for that.  Here's an imaginary interaction:

        

Jewish housewife: "Hello, Pan." She is thinking: You bully, you drunk. I fear you.

Polish grocer: "Hello, Pani." He is thinking: Why are you so weird looking with that ugly wig. Christ-killer. Accursed.

        

Jewish housewife points: "Potatoes?"

        

Grocer: "One Zloty."        

        

She bought or she didn't. It was a good price or it wasn't. The end.  A thousand years of minimalist relations.        

        

Once, when I was an adult, I asked my mother why we didn't have more family information. She said, "We didn't ask questions.  Bubbie and Zayde worked very hard. They made a good Jewish home. I was busy with a boyfriend or school or something. We didn't ask questions."                 

        

Occasionally I would  berate myself for not being curious when there was still time to find out. But then I consulted Uncle Harry, the only living brother of my mother's original four.

He said, "Actually, you couldn't know them too well. That was part of it. They came from Russia, Poland - it was really Poland at that time. They didn't have an easy life there. But we never got a true picture of what went on there.

        

"We tried, my brother Benny and I tried. We were always digging, questioning, never got good answers. The time would be Friday night or Saturday afternoon, after shul. That was the only time. Time for family. 

So my mother would be busy preparing, she didn't butt in at all. So if we questioned my father, how did he get out of Poland, how did he get to the boat, we never found out. My father had his own agenda so to speak. Take care of the Jews. Follow the commandments. All we knew is that his brother David, from Philadelphia, met him at the pier. That's all we really knew."

        

So nothing, even when asked directly.   Okay.  I moved on to a different kind of inquiry: Why not? The historian Ruth Gay attributes this extreme reticence about their personal pasts to the whole generation who arrived between 1900 and 1920. In her book UnfinishedPeople that is part memoir, part historical narrative she writes, "They knew that their world was primitive - without paved streets or sewers, without running water - and it made them ashamed. They were not quick to admit that they had started young to work for little wages and lived poorly. They did not think that such memories would bring them honor, but on the contrary would diminish them in the eyes of their delicately raised American children."

        

There's something to what she says. Especially if you bypass the Fiddler-On-The-Roof nostalgia and look in detail at photos from that time. The streets are unpaved, rutted and muddy, the children are barefoot and equally dirty.

But maybe a more generous interpretation of Zayde's Saturday-after-lunch refusal is possible.  May he didn't know where to begin. Not everyone is a good tale spinner. Maybe he didn't like the spotlight. I don't think he did. Or didn't consider it important.  It's a relatively modern concept, after all, that the narrative of an ordinary person's life has significance. And Bubbie and Zayde, for all that modern life had allowed them to flourish, were not modern people, did not wish to be modern people.

        

Some twenty years ago, the youngest of us, Karen Bernstein Angel, collected the relevant paper documents - ship manifests, a record of detained aliens, census lists for 1920 and 1930, evidence of citizenship.  Zayde was 24 when he arrived in 1910 on the S. S. Amerika. He was held one night, until his brother David claimed him.  Their surname was then Dmocher. 

Two years later, on July 24, 2012, , Bubbie arrived on the S. S. Leeland, her surname was Bernstein by then, and so was Zayde's. Who knows why.  Bubbie arrived with our uncle Sol, then aged four, and our aunt Yetta, then aged two. Nine months later to the day, our uncle Ben was born, or so goes the family joke.

        

To fill in around these demographics, this is what I can tell you. About Zayde, we know that he grew up in Andrzejewo, a village of maybe two thousand people, 34% Jewish in 1905, says the internet.   We know he was dedicated to that village because his religious home was always the tiny Anshe Andrzejewo shul, a renovated first floor apartment in a brownstone on Henry Street.  

        

He had other choices. He could have joined the much larger and more prosperous Bialystoker Synagogue on Willett street, since he came to manhood in Bialystok and since he himself now had a large reputation and had prospered. Instead he remained bound to those from his childhood village.  And alongside them, he and Bubbie chose to be buried, in a cemetery plot purchased by the members of the congregation.

What Andzrejewo was like in the years around the turn of the twentieth century, the internet does not inform us.  Of Bubbie's village we don't even have a name. Data being so available these days, I could probably find out. But data doesn't speak to the thickness of her experience: how she learned to read, to cook, what made her laugh, had she time to play?

        

About the city of Bialystok, where they met and married, many particulars are available in English. The historian RebeccaKobrin in Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora describes it in 1900 as an expanding industrial center that drew Jews from the many small nearby villages.  It offered rural youth every twentieth century option. There were factories to work in, small shopkeepers with whom one could apprentice, paved streets down which to stroll, Yiddish theaters to attend, motor cars to admire and yearn for. Carpentry and other work in the trades was available, also real estate to buy or sell if you could afford it.  Plus several left-wing political organizations:  Zionist, Socialist and Socialist-Zionist.

         

Which brings to mind one scrap of specific incident that I learned when I was a sullen teen-ager and my parents insisted I accompany them on a visit to relatives in Colchester, Connecticut.  There I met Zeidl Goldberg, our grandfather's cousin. He told this story: While still in Bialystok he, Zeidl, took part in a demonstration for fair wages for factory workers and was jailed for his efforts.

        

"Your grandfather," he said,  "bailed me out."

        

"Was he a socialist too then?"

        

"Schmulka?" said our cousin. "No. Always religious."

        

Now I take this moment and enlarge it. There he is - originally
Shmul, the formal Yiddish version of Samuel, called by the diminutive Schmulka, little Samuel - unusually short but robust, quick on his feet, rushing to the bailiff's office with cash tucked into those hands that look like my hands.  He was ma-tir a-su-rim, freeing the captive, an act of charity we appreciate three times a day in services.  Later, he returned to somewhere - home or work or shul - and said the evening prayers.   Many belief systems were on offer in that city in those years, but Schmulka's choice remained the Eternal One, Blessed Be He.

        

Old Men, Old Books

Sometimes, when we still live at 110 Rivington Street,  and I am already in my footed pajamas, on a week day evening after dinner, I see Zayde walk over to the glass cabinet in the living-dining room and choose one tall, leather- bound book from a row of others, all of which look exactly alike. Then he retrieves his rectangular magnifying glass, an eight by four inch object that he uses when he reads.  A knock at the door.  Of course, one of the rabbi friends.

           

Soon the two men chose one corner of the dining room table, as tucked away as they can be in this apartment that has no private spaces except the back bedrooms. They open the book. It is not only taller, but wider and heavier than an ordinary book. Its leather spine is cracked and dry so it easily flattens onto the table. In a loud mumble, something like a chant, they read together and pour and hunch over the book, sometimes pausing to talk to each other in Yiddish. Around them the business of the household goes on as usual - Bubbie in the kitchen, maybe my mother helping her, maybe my mother reading to me on the couch across from where the two men are engrossed in the pages of the text.    

           

           

Old men reading old books, is how I define this scene then. An interpretation  I breathe in from the air of my parents' attitude. It is not an activity my mother or father would engage in during their evenings or encourage me to do; they were proud to be modern people.  "I did not want religious," said my mother about looking for a boyfriend. Not that she or my father looked down on Zayde for spending his evening with an antiquated book and an antiquated friend. Not at all. If anything, they admired the piety, the diligence, admired it but wouldn't want it for themselves. It was a remnant of the old country on its way out. 

This was perhaps a decade before Tevye the Dairyman in Fiddler On The Roof  gave old world religious activities a poignant dignity when he sings, "If I were a rich man. . . . I' d discuss the holy books with the learned men seven hours every day. That would be the sweetest gift of all."

           

Many years later, long after I graduate Hebrew School, decades after I am Bat Mitzvah, - perhaps when I see Fiddler for the first time on film and afterward burst into sobs, despite my sophisticated understanding of the extreme poverty and ignorance which dominated the real villages of Eastern Europe, but probably even later when in Jewish adult education it finally occurs to me that the two men must have been studying Talmud. Only then do I learn that studying, disputing and elaborating on Talmud is at the heart of Rabbinic Judaism as it was practiced for almost two thousand years, and is still practiced by the Orthodox and Hasidim. It is only then that I recall this scene and am touched by having several times been a witness to a working man at the end of a long day choosing sacred text study as a pleasurable leisure activity.  

           

About Talmud I have now read several books, mostly written by women trying to imagine women's lives in the pre-modern era. Also the touching and informative The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen. On my bookshelf are several volumes of what you might call Talmud for Dummies. They are aspirational. I have never actually opened one. I keep thinking someday I will.

           

What I understand about the act of study for its own sake is that it placed Zayde, or any student of the text, in dialogue and connection with the many who came before.  A few of us - two Rosenfelds and at least one Abramowitz - continue to turn to the Talmud as a way to be rooted in both the past and the present. Most of us puzzle out how to live without the benefit of links to tradition. Yet when one appears, we grab onto it.  Perhaps the most popular of these is Fiddler On The Roof. For all the sentimentality in the musical, for all that we know life was much more desperate than it is portrayed on stage or in the film, still it connects us in love to those who came before us.  Those whose lives might have been irredeemably erased, otherwise. This connection is a small ballast when daily life gets, as it often does, too complicated. In the spirit of small ballast I also write this blog. In this spirit perhaps you read it.

More About Meat

 Zayde was both bemused and gratified by American abundance. At the beginning of each month he greeted his Social Security check with an incredulous laugh. Free money, what a country!  Then he scribbled his endorsement on the back and handed it over to Uncle Morris for deposit with the business receipts. His personal needs were modest.

           

He liked to watch old Hopalong Cassidy movies on television for the moments when a herd of healthy cattle thundered across the Plains. Such bounty was so different from the time and land from which he had come. 

          

In Poland at the turn of the twentieth century, "a butcher was not like a butcher here." This is what Uncle Harry said when I interviewed him. "There he would do everything, from start to finish. He would go out to the farm, buy a piece of cattle - one, not more than one. That's all they could deal with was one. Buy it, bring a truck or rent one, bring it to Bialystok to a slaughterhouse. It was by hand, everything by hand. He would oversee the maschgiach, whatever, the ritual slaughterer. I don' think he did the skinning. But had to do the rest of it. We don't know who paid it, who had the money to buy it. There must've been an entrepreneur involved. Had to be. There was a lot of money involved."

             

A wrinkled, brown paper bag of birdseed was always tucked beneath the cash register in the store.  Once a day Zayde drew this bag out and went onto the street. This was an activity we, the grandchildren, could share with him.

           

On the sidewalk, right in front of the store, he gave a shrill, moist whistle that we could never imitate, no matter how many times he showed us how to do it.  In a few seconds there were ten, twenty, fifty pigeons fluttering to the pavement, as if they had just been waiting for his call. Clucking struts and manic pecking as Zayde tossed grain in a circle.  On the perimeter, sparrows and starlings hopped up and down hopefully.  With the wide arc of his arm, he made sure that each small outlier got a share. Everybody eats.

           

In New York City feeding pigeons is illegal. Sometimes a passing patrolman gave him a ticket. This happened once while I was there. The policeman was towering, large-headed, matter-of-fact; he had done this before; he knew it was futile.  From beneath the brim of his grey fedora, Zayde peered up at the guardian of law and order and gave a small, crooked smile:  Feeding the hungry is a problem? Later one of the uncles walked over to the police station and paid the fee.  This happened many times. Fine after fine. Every penalty was paid. Everybody eats.

                                  

            

The Store

We said 'the Store,' as people say 'the White House,' a one and only.

Schmulka Bernstein's spanned 109-111 Rivington Street with two swinging glass doors and two long plate glass windows.  Entering, you came into coolness - a floor of red quarry tiles covered by clean sawdust and the mild, persistent hum of the refrigerated counters.  There was a wooden bench just inside the door that was darkened by use and age. Anyone could have a seat here and watch the world go by, and an occasional customer did.  Sometimes our grandfather, Schmulka, sat there, because by my time, the 1950s, most of the details of the business had been turned over to his sons, our uncles. Or a visiting grandchild might sit comfortably beside him and be pleasantly ignored while he greeted customers. Other days Zayde sat cozily wedged between two rabbis.  One ruddy and round, the other pale and gaunt. This threesome would sit facing forward, talking Yiddish to each other while their eyes faced the street. The two rabbis were paid a salary to certify that every beef and lamb carcass in the store and the smokehouse met kosher standards. But when all this certifying was done, they repaired to the bench. 

           

The ruddy rabbi was Levinson. He was corpulent, smiley, a cheek-pincher and a man who actually paused to pay attention to children. He had a bushy red beard, wild, unruly sidelocks and red moustaches that were always wet.  Years later I learned that with his family he had escaped Europe by going east, overland until reaching safety in Shanghai. The other rabbi was thin and pallid with a scraggly white beard. He was the younger son of a famous Talmudist who needed a job. And even though the business didn't need another certifier, Zayde hired him. Because this is what Zayde did. It didn't matter what his sons thought or the business could afford. Need came before profit.

Behind the men on the bench there was a row of immaculate white counters. Above the counters a mural of Biblical scenes covered one wall: Abraham at the opening to his tent, Rebecca waiting by the well, Joseph in the pit. Not great art, but good enough illustrations. The painted tales of our ancestors, along with the rabbis, gave the store a hallowed aura: A place of koshering, as in following holy commandments.  A place where just by standing in line waiting to choose your shoulder chops for dinner you were engaged in a ceremonial act.

We could not then imagine that we would someday find ourselves in the present world where friends state with an air of superior knowledge, "Oh I never eat red meat." Minute steak, chuck roast, shoulder or brisket, delmonico, flanken, steak cubed or rib, lamb chops baby or shoulder. We loved them all and dined on the best cuts - two, three, four times a week. Red meat was essential, like the human need for earth, air and fire. God Himself loved the savory fragrance of roasting beef or goat or sheep.  When, in Genesis, He "smelled the soothing aroma" of Noah's burnt offerings, He was convinced to spare the world.

             

           

Bubbie Comes Next

If Zayde was the captain of our family ship, then our grandmother, Bubbie, Khinke Bernstein, was the helmswoman.  In the early years, before my time, the 1920s and 30s, she stood long days at the cash register in the butcher store - if you can imagine a cash register as a navigational aid, the rudder that will bring this family to the sheltered harbor of financial security.

           

"They liked," said Uncle Harry, "a quiet life."

           

A safe life, ah! What can compare to safety when you've both been born on the lowest rung of the social order, orphaned young and Yiddish-speaking in the middle of The Pale of Settlement, which is sometimes Poland, sometimes Beloruss and Ukraine, but now has the zip code of Tsarist Russia.

           

They always lived in lower Manhattan and very, I mean very, near the store, either one flight up or just across the street.  For the family apartment was also a workplace. There, in the railroad flat kitchen, Bubbie spent her Thursday and Friday mornings making and baking stuffed dermas - which were beef intestine (yuck! spare me!) filled with chopped meat, onions and spices or meat knishes. These were sell -out items that bachelors and working women purchased for their Sabbath tables. No moment was wasted.  No penny ignored.

           

"A woman of strength," sings the final biblicalProverb, "what a rare find! Her worth is far beyond rubies. Her husband puts his confidence in her, and lacks for no good thing." That was our grandmother: Iconic in her energy and endurance.

           

Old, when I knew her, white hair wrapped in a tidy flat bun, Bubbie had a wide, pale face. She was broad-shouldered, neither fat nor thin, a sloping bosom sat on a peasant's torso, strong and rectangular. Where Zayde was all rough gabardine and scritchy-scratch, Bubbie's cheek was satiny to the touch, her skin pliable as a silk handkerchief.  

           

They met in the city of Bialystok where he was a butcher and she cooked for a wealthy family. She was a "fussy customer," which my grandfather admired. It meant she knew quality when she saw it.  She couldn't be fooled.  

           

Bubbie spent much of her life indoors at home or in the store, sometimes a visit to us in Queens - but these were rare. In later years, when she no longer had to pilot the family ship, when they were comfortable and noted, she would still bake a mound of braided challahs every Friday morning.  Each son and son-in-law - they all worked in the butcher business or down the street - would stop by the apartment and pick up a paper bag with one big and several small loaves to carry home to Brooklyn or Queens. The small challahs, which we called bulkies, were no taller than a child's hand. These were made especially for the kinder.

                       

That's the iconic Bubbie.  The one you locate these days when you tour the TenementMuseum on Orchard Street in Manhattan. The one whose historical function is to make it out of Europe just ahead of two world wars and get and beget us here.

             

But there was another Bubbie - the person beside the persona.  The one who was called by her name, Khinke, rather than her title. The one who meant something to herself.  It is that individual I also want to call up here, as much of her as I can. Less than I would wish.

           

She was not a hugger. Hello, Bubbie, a peck of a kiss on the downy, white cheek, was it. She did not make much of us. Didn't say how beautiful we were or how tall or any other observing or praise.  The story goes that my mother once left me alone with her when I was still an infant. I cried the entire time.  Bubbie said, "She doesn't like me."

           

Which, being translated might have meant she had had enough of crying babies, it might have meant she had raised six children but never liked babies. It might have meant many things, but one is for certain: an iconic female figure, a good Jewish mother cannot say directly that she's not in the mood to be nurturing.

           

Aunt Edith once said apropos of I don't remember what, "My mother-in-law, God bless her, was not a warm woman."   Once this was stated and I thought about it, it occurred to me that my younger uncles each wed buxom, welcoming women. 

           

I know Bubbie nursed a resentment against  'the Professor,' who came every week to Friday night dinner but "never brought a present." The Professor was one of many solitary old men, all bachelors, that our grandfather befriended. They were men from Eastern Europe who had washed up on American shores still alive but not suited, it seemed, for adaption to any American dream.  Of a Friday evening at least three of these elderly, Yiddish speakers would be seated at Zayde's end of the long holiday table.  They were never introduced and I don't think my mother or any of my uncles knew any more about them than we, the children, did.           

           

Did some of the other men, the undernourished, hunkered down men, bring presents? Did Bubbie resent cooking and serving them all? Am I making too much of this one mention of her resentment? Probably. I know I am deducing a lot from a little, but the little is what I have.

           

Twice, in the last year of her life, when I was 18 and she was 77, I stumbled on a glimmer of what I consider the private person - the one behind the beautiful braided challahs, the meticulous ritual observance. Not that these tasks of religion and nourishment weren't genuinely offered and part of her. They were. But, I also yearn for the subjective story, the secret story of the self.

           

Two scenes from the last year of Bubbie's life.  Number one was the surgical recovery room of Beth Israel Hospital. I was standing behind my mother, hiding really, because I didn't want to see my Bubbie or anybody looking frail and pale and pathetic. But there she was, lying absolutely flat in a hospital bed with the bars pulled up around her.   Her hair had been twined into braids that lay limp on either side of her head like frayed ropes. My mother, who must have wanted to cry out in grief and fear, was yet speaking calmly to the surgeon in his white coat.  He exuded a professional satisfaction.

           

"Clear margins," he reported about the breast cancer nodule.

           

Then from the depths of that crib-like bed, my grandmother raised her head,  "Can'n 'ir gibn mir a nyya h'arz?" Can you give me a new heart?

           

At the time I heard it as poignant plea, but when I think of it now I wonder if there was also dark humor there or sarcasm. Because it was her heart that was going to kill her and soon.  Or maybe both these meanings were present - the dark joke and the underlying prayer.

           

A few days later, there was just the two of us in her private hospital room. I was standing at the one window that looked out across the bare trees of Stuyvesant Square.  No guardrails and Bubbie was propped up on two pillows, a little improved. Her hair had been returned to its usual tidy bun.           

           

"Two weeks I've been in prison," she said to me in English, so I knew she really wanted me to understand: she objected to her situation.

           

In the histories written by the children and grandchildren it is sometimes implied that the immigrant generation accepts its destiny as one of entry and then a gallant stepping aside.  But, in fact our Bubbie didn't want to go gracefully anywhere. She didn't think of herself as a conduit for someone else's journey.  She hated being limited and diminished, just as I hated to see her like that. In her understated way she was railing against fate. She did not want to die.

             

           

Zayde: An Introduction

Our grandfather, Zayde, Schmulka Bernstein was famous long ago in the small world of observant Jews for the purity of his kosher meat products and the generosity of his purse. 

         

To come upon him in those days on Rivington Street, at the butcher store or in the family apartment that was just across the street from the store -- you would not think him a prosperous or important man. He stood less than five feet tall, with small, shapely hands and fingers that looked like my mother's hands or mine.  His command of English was marginal. Thick green-tinted eyeglasses, a treatment for easing glaucoma, dominated his face and made his expressions unreadable. This added to the sense we, the grandchildren had, that he was remote, unworldly, someone other.

        
Winter or summer, on the street or in the store, he dressed the same: a fedora, then a white butcher's coat covering a business suit jacket and beneath that a vest so that he seemed lost in his own clothes. Pockets in his white coat, pockets in his suit jacket, pockets in his vest. From one of these he would extract wrinkled two dollar bills - which were unusual even in those days - that he had saved especially for the "kinder," the children, so you knew he thought about you when you weren't there.  

         
His two famous products were notably American. One was the five pounder salami, not originally an Eastern European Jewish food. The other was fry beef, which was a kosher bovine equivalent of bacon and was sold in the same folded cardboard packaging as its pork prototype.

These were both manufactured in a smokehouse at 109 Rivington Street.. Next door to the smokehouse was the family butcher store that offered fresh meats and poultry as well. Business was good. The Lower East Side was still a Jewish neighborhood, though already the exodus to the other boroughs and Long Island had begun.

         
Zayde's other activity of note was his openhandedness to Jews in need. This was not something that I, or any of the grandchildren actually witnessed.  But we were told.

        
"They called him the Angel of Rivington Street," Aunt Natalie once said.

        
And Aunt Lillian said, "He brought people home so he could feed them." 

         
Uncle Harry described him this way,  "He had, you might say, a cultural approach, not a business approach, not a modern approach. He wasn't really interested in the American dream.  Be religious, follow God's will, take care of the Jewish people according to the Jewish law. That was his main concern.

         
"He lent money to anyone who came to him: a rabbi, a stranger. They had to be recommended of course. He lent them money. He did not expect to be paid back. I wonder how many ever paid him back. He didn't ask, my mother didn't like that, though she gave too - to women, he just gave.

         
"Levinson - you remember Rabbi Levinson? - once told me he thought he had given away at least $250,000,  maybe more. And that was really a lot of money in those days."

         
When I knew him, just after World War II and through the nineteen-fifties, he seemed impossibly old, but he was actually in his relatively healthy sixties, younger than I am now. His sons, my uncles, ran the factory.   Zayde spent much of his time either sitting on a bench at the front of the store with one or two rabbi friends or taking care of a few of the very oldest customers, usually small Yiddish speaking ladies, who would only buy their chickens if they could be sure Schmulke's hands did the cleaning and evisceration.

         
Unlike the rabbis who were his bench-sitting buddies, Zayde did not have a beard. When I asked my mother why, she said it was because he was in business.  On the other hand, he was rarely clean-shaven  - which had something to do with religious law and going to barbers instead of doing it yourself.  But what law my mother couldn't say. And I never found out.

         
As I said when I introduced him, Zayde did not look prosperous or important.  He looked confused, like a person from another planet. And so he was. The planet of Poland.  Which, like Superman's planet Krypton, had imploded, at least in terms of the Jews.        

        
The planet of Poland was now impossible to reach because it was behind the Iron Curtain which I imagined in a literal way as an endless undulating wall of steel.  You could not get in and no one was allowed to leave. In an odd way this felt like a kind of justice, since the Jews who had lived there had been put beyond speech.

        
He was our grandfather, emphasis our: our important person. Whose stature on the Lower East Side shed its grace on we. He gave scratchy kisses with that three days growth of beard. He looked often bewildered, but maybe he was not. You cannot be bewildered and at the same time build a noted and prosperous business. Or can you?

         
Strangers with heavy accents would come to the store just to shake his hand and say, "Hello, Mr. Bernstein, Hello Mr. Bernstein."   We thought they came to honor him, and perhaps that was so. Only now it also occurs to me that maybe they were asking for money.