The View From The Cash Register

Let’s say it’s a Sunday afternoon in 1957 and I get the chance to be the cashier at Schmulka Bernstein’s Kosher Meats & Provisions.  The regular cashier, a distant, elderly cousin, has gone out for a late lunch.  I am eleven years old. 

The cash register stands in its own oval, shielded by a glass partition. To reach it I take one step up, becoming immediately taller than I was before and this makes me feel important, almost regal, the mistress of all I survey.  My red tile kingdom with its fine covering of clean sawdust lies before me, its borderland the delicatessen counter on my left with its hanging salamis above and the slabs of brisket turned into pastrami and corned beef pressing against the glass on the counters.  Before me the counters display rows of fresh lamb chops. 

Behind me, sloping down to darkness is the hallway that links to the smokehouse factory. Why the hall is dark, I can’t tell you. Perhaps an error in the design no one bothered to correct.   Where I stand, in the center of the store, all is bathed in a bright fluorescence, without shadows.

No customers appear though I am eager to do the retail rituals of reading receipts, taking in cash and making change.  Then my uncle Harry emerges out of the darkness of the back hall.  He is cradling a stack of individually wrapped rib steaks in the crook of one arm and moves toward the giant meat locker at the back of the store. At almost the same moment a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit pushes open the front door, loosening his tie as he enters.

“You here again?!”  Says my Uncle Harry and turns to open, one after another, the three steel handles on the locker. Enters, the door slams behind him. He's gone but his hoarse baritone hangs in the air. It could indicate an amused hello because the guy comes in often or it could mean go away don’t bother me.  There's a silence, broken only by an undercurrent of electric hum from the light bulbs. 

Maybe Harry intends to be funny the way on television Groucho Marx is supposed to be funny when he insults people, or maybe Harry is really happy to see the guy. I can’t tell. The guy looks uncertain too.  

My uncle comes out of the meat locker. Again the door slams shut.  

“Good to see you too, Harry,” the customer replies with a dryness in his voice which could be sarcastic or merely hello.  For all I know they’ve been doing this back and forth for years.  After all, an ambiguous greeting from Groucho makes his audience hoot with laughter. Why insults are funny is one of the mysteries of adult life.

Another mystery is the absence of shoppers.  The man with the rumpled suit is the only consumer I get to take care of during the hour that I stand by my station. Later, driving home I overhear my mother and father talking about things not going well.  Those who once lined up two and three deep at the counters have moved to the other boroughs.  The uncles want to close the retail store and focus on the smokehouse products – salamis and bolognas.  But this would mean laying people off and Zayde won’t hear of it.  They quarrel with their father, with each other and, finally, with whoever comes near. 

My uncle Harry never meant to make his career in kosher meat. After graduating City College with a degree in physics he worked in Washington D.C. in the National Bureau of Standards. There he tested light bulbs, searchlights and other electrical devices.  

This was during World War II. In 2005, when we spoke,  he told me he would have stayed there but he had  “the wrong attitude. When you go to work for the federal government you have to look to go elsewhere all the time. I was happy to stay where I was which was not good. You have to make friends, which I didn’t make too many friends.  They all knew each other. It was an exclusive club so to speak.”  I am thinking he was too Jewish, too New York to make it into the club. But he doesn’t say this.  

Meanwhile, on Rivington Street there was a mother and father who missed him and could offer a job in the family business at much higher than a government salary.  In this way he was drawn back into what his wife, my aunt Edith called “the gravitational pull of the Bernstein family.”  She did not mean it as a compliment. She did not want his science training wasted among beef carcasses.  To resolve their disappointment Uncle Harry and Aunt Edith planned for their older son, Herb, to become a physicist. And he did!  Quite lauded and published as well.  A miracle in itself, that what two parents longed for the child, as an adult, accomplished.  

Harry Bernstein in his mid-fifties. 

When the retail operation and the smokehouse finally closed of its own weight in 1966, Uncle Harry was a vigorous fifty.  He eventually settled into the New York State bureaucracy where he worked as an arbiter of unemployment compensation disputes.  On vacations, he and Aunt Edith traveled. They studied modern Hebrew and volunteered in immigrant settlement centers in Israel.  Toward the end of his working life, this former physicist and former kosher butcher, was studying Spanish so that he could speak directly, without an interpreter, to the petitioners who came looking for justice at the modest desk that was his courtroom.

DOES IT MATTER HOW YOU SLICE IT?

"Watch your fingers!” Uncle Ben says to me, almost neutral, slightly hurried, as if it’s his obligation as a relative and an adult, but not as if he’s really worried. So I continue pushing the steel blade of the slicing machine back and forth while thin, perfect rounds of liverwurst stack up on the matte side of the wax paper.  This interchange is happening on a Sunday afternoon at the delicatessen counter of Schmulka Bernstein Kosher Meats and Provisions, circa 1957, I’m twelve years old and have achieved my full height of just-tall-enough, five foot three. My uncle Ben is in his forties, sports a handsome moustache, he is my grandparents’ third child, the first to be born in the United States.   At this moment he is on his way somewhere else, maybe to the back hall that leads to the smokehouse he now manages because he “has had enough of the customers,” in retail.

           

I love to slice the cold cuts thin, my favorite setting on the blade is number one. Number one slices are elegant, shapely. They take a little more time to produce but, on the positive side, they make you feel you’re getting more for your money. Salami, bologna and liverwurst slice easily. Each one has a perfectly circular, clear edge and is plump and glossy to the touch when you push tight against the blade.

The counter man has gone out for a smoke and I have permission. That’s the wonder of it, looking back to this time. Zeide gave me permission. In this era adults do not spend excess time worrying about liability and safety. Children ride bicycles with the breeze moving past their hair because safety helmets are only associated with dire calamities like war. Even Uncle Ben doesn’t insist I stop what am I doing. 

           

“Butchers have lost fingers that way,” he calls over his shoulder as he moves down the dark hallway at the back of the store. But his fingers, all the uncles’ fingers, are intact. So I’m not worried. Besides, I’m very good at it.

           

My Uncle Ben speaks with a New York accent. Well, we all do. He has a strong warm, baritone with a hint of rasp and a touch of the nasal.  Nothing I would have ever noticed one way or the other except that it was this voice that kept him from becoming a high school English teacher which was what he aspired to after he graduated City College into the Great Depression.

Whenever my mother told the story she would begin in a sorrowful tone,  “He always had that voice.”  Then, “In those days it was very hard to get a teaching job.” Then, with disgust, “Now they’re begging for teachers.”

           
Only in graduate school do I read a history of Jewish teachers in the New York City school system and learn that it wasn’t personal to my uncle. The oral exam was designed to keep Jewish candidates from teaching. “An applicant’s voice had to be ‘audible, pleasant, well modulated, without being nasal, high-pitched, strident or noisy.’ Dropping the ‘g’ at the end of gerunds was considered a serious cultural defect. And though this could have applied to candidates from a variety of ethnicities, the criteria were perceived as being applied particularly to Jews.”

Did Ben know that it wasn’t personal to him? Did he know he was a victim of a seasoning of antisemitism? And would that knowledge have made it easier to bear? My own historical air became a little clearer after I studied the wider circumstance, as if I had satisfactorily pushed a missing piece of the family jigsaw puzzle into place. But maybe, if it’s your heart’s desire, it doesn't matter that it wasn’t a personal flaw.

           

My uncle Ben remained a kosher butcher all his life, working first in the family business and then, when the business closed, he worked as a kosher butcher for others. Sometimes this made him terribly, tearfully unhappy. 

           

He solaced himself for a disappointing work life by being a good family man and an educated person. He read a lot. He and my Aunt Anne attended opera and ballet. He collected antique figurines from the Mediterranean basin. And then, when he was sixty-five and happily retired with a sturdy pension from the New York Kosher Butchers Association, he became the librarian of his quite large West Palm Beach condo association.  Woman, particularly women, asked him for suggestions as to what they should read.

           

“They all love him,” Aunt Anne said. She was somewhat gleeful about it. Perhaps because he was hers, perhaps because she liked seeing him blossom into the mentor he had always wanted to be. “He loves to talk about culture and literature, so they love him.”

           

More than a quarter century of fruitful retirement awaited him.  In a time when most of the adult males of his generation were incapable in the kitchen, Uncle Ben was also a superlative entrée chef and an expert appreciator of the best cuts of beef. A man who could bake an outstanding brisket and serve it sliced, against the grain, elegantly thin.

           

Zayde's Communal Moment

Our grandfather, the man who rarely traveled more than fifteen city blocks from home, once considered starting an intentional rural community.  Yes, really. This was the most surprising fact I learned from Uncle Harry when I interviewed him in 2005.  Schmulka Bernstein, an heir to the oh-so- American idyllic vision of Bronson Alcott or Robert Owen?   Who could imagine such a thing?  But maybe his openhanded wallet, his moniker, the Robin Hood of Rivington Street indicated a secret spirit of daring. After all, he did create and market a wholly original food product -  fry beef. 

Here is that moment, for it was only a moment, as Uncle Harry relayed it to me. “It was probably brought to his attention by a rabbi, no one else. So we come to this place in Somers,New York. It was about an hour from the city. I had a car by then. Me, and my brother Benny went.  Maybe Murray went. It was set up with different buildings, a main building like a clubhouse. It was like a condominium set up. Big buildings, some smaller buildings. My father wasn’t fazed by the amount of money. It was not cheap.  From his point of view, we would all live there, be religious, keep kosher.”

Notice the phrasing “From his point of view…” This didn’t indicate what Harry might have wanted and I wasn’t a savvy enough interviewer to ask him what now seems to me some obvious questions about his own point of view. When I play back the tape I can hear the exasperation rising in the back of his throat.

           

“He was going to bring his own rabbi up there – the Ostrower. Did you ever meet him? A little old grey haired man, white beard. We would go to him for advice. About kosher.”

           

And then the exasperation grows clearer. “About anything! You’d go to the old man. And the old man had sons. Lots of sons! And then my father took one of the sons in to be a mashgiach, and then he took another one in.  He was paying them all a lot of money.”

           

For this is what Zayde did. Although Harry, Ben and Murray were now ostensibly the managers of the business, Schmulka made all sorts of financial decisions without consultation. If someone needed a job and that someone was a religious man or the son of a rabbi, our grandfather would find him something to do. Or put him on the payroll with nothing much to do. It was the way to run a fiefdom, not a modern, profit-generating organization.

The brothers didn’t want to live under the rule of a rabbi. But this is not what they told their father.  In their own new married homes in Brooklyn and Queens they could leave father and mother and orthodoxy behind, join a synagogue with a moderated point of view, even go out on a Saturday night to try Chinese food. But they could not tell their father this outright. Instead they argued logistics.

“We were against it. When we got home we pointed out some of the flaws. His plan was not practical. You were going to live up there – all of us – and have the business on the East Side and travel up and back each day. For a change, he listened to us, maybe because my mother didn’t like the idea either.

           

“My mother had a best friend, Mrs. Sanchek. She lived upstairs on Rivington. She was a midwife. She delivered all of us. Anyway, Mrs. Sanchek was like our mother’s rebbe. They were together every day. Whatever Mrs. Sanchek said was the truth. And Mrs. Sanchek had to earn a living, as midwife. She wasn’t going to move upstate.”

           

What was Zayde looking for? Not the typical immigrant reward where the children do better than the parents. More like the idealist’s dream of the perfect shtetl where daily life is like a Marc Chagall painting, harmonious and charged with mystery.  Our Zayde was, after all, orphaned at a young age.  Maybe he wanted to keep all his children as close as possible. Maybe he wanted to take the memory of that poverty-stricken hamlet in which he had spent his childhood and recreate it as it should have been - safe, clean, prosperous.

           

It wouldn’t have worked out of course. I know because I’m a member of a rural intentional community and have been for twenty-five years.  Just like being part of a family business, living cooperatively is as annoying and difficult as it is satisfying. Success is rare because it requires enormous flexibility. So even though Zayde’s community wouldn’t have worked, I love that he had the idea.

                                       

TZITZIT STORIES

My brother Arne, recently, told me about his and our boy cousins' trial by tzitzit that took place during Sunday afternoon family visits to our grandparents on Rivington Street.  Tzitzit is the fringed ritual undershirt that observant Jewish men wear in accordance with Numbers 15:38 "Speak to the children of Israel and say to them that they shall make themselves tzitzit on the corners of their garments." The fringe is supposed to remind the wearer of the Divine Will.  It is also the fringe at the bottom of the prayer shawl that, until recent years, only males wore in religious services in the synagogue.

        

It was during the arrival kisses and hugs that Zayde would reach down under my brother's waistband as if to tickle, but  really to assess whether or not Arne's tzitzit were in place.   They were, so Arne passed the test, A-plus. A smile from grandpa, an extra squeeze and hug.   The reason he knew to wear these is that our Mom, Ida, Schmulke's youngest daughter, would remind him the morning of the visit. She knew her father, our Zayde, would inspect.  Perhaps he had checked up on her brothers when they were small. So, even though our mother "didn't want religious," meaning Orthodox in her life, she also didn't want her father to know that.         

        

Arne could bask in our grandfather's approval even though this came at the price of deception. The deception being the implication that he wore the undershirt in his daily life.

"I always felt comfortable with Bubbie and Zayde," Arne says now. "And I still like being around old people."

        

In contrast, our Aunt Natalie, who was only a daughter-in-law and was Jewish but not Jewishly educated, did not know to warn her sons. And so when Zayde moved to search a waistband his fingers met only cloth. Then came an old man's sigh.

        

Was it the mother's job you may ask. The answer is yes, it was. Besides, on those Sundays our fathers had already left, hours earlier, for work. The uncles to the butcher store or smokehouse, my own father two blocks away at his wholesale paper products warehouse.  Orthodox or not (and none of us were by then), our family work week went from Sunday morning to Friday afternoon.

        

The tzitzit incidents created a small gulf, a short, sad juncture. "I always felt I was a disappointment," cousin Dennis writes to me, "because of this."

        

Nothing else changed.  Other than that sigh, there was no punishment. Zayde continued to present each of us with the special two dollar bills, continued to give hugs and Irish Sweepstakes lottery tickets. Nothing changed except there were these moments, still remembered, of failed connection.

        

In my Jewish Study Bible it says that in the BCE time, fringes were common on clothes. And when most people couldn't write, pressing your fringe into a clay tablet was a legal sign endorsement for whatever the tablet stated. This means that in a prayer service where you are called to the Torah and you press your tzizit into the parchment you are making an ancient gesture of assent.

Whoever scribed Numbers could not imagine, then, that in the far future writing implements would be common as salt. That salt itself would be common and easy to obtain. That women would, if they wished, wear the fringed prayer shawls in the synagogue. That a direct descendant, and a female, myself, across an unknown ocean would be talking about the family problems caused by this holiness decree.

        

Years ago, when I asked Uncle Harry about his earliest memories, which would mean the nineteen-twenties, he also mentioned the tzizit.  "It was strictly religious. You had to obey. Before you went to sleep you said your prayers, there were four prayers. You had to wear tzitzit, you wore that. We didn't have peyes (long sidelocks). Thank goodness, we were spared that."

        Between the lines of those last sentences and the accompanying sigh I could hear the soft burden of difference that was, for him, the significance of the tzitzit.

        

In my current, easy going and egalitarian synagogue, there is no presiding rabbi.  Members guide all ritual functions. Women can and do lead or participate in any aspect of worship. There are prayer books for Reform, Renewal and Conservative services, and the service leader, male or female, gets to choose.  Some women wear a tallit to pray.   I'm not one of them.  In this congregation we're all what the sociologist Steven Cohen calls "postmodern Jews." Personal meaning is our arbiter of Jewish engagement. And my personal meaning, for who knows what reason, doesn't involve a prayer shawl.

        

For many years one of our members was an older Jewishly learned and observant man.  A man who, for all I knew, actually wore tzitzit.  He sometimes led services, but other times would just be part of the congregation.   After the Sh'ma was read aloud he had the habit of murmuring indistinctly the long paragraphs that followed, while the rest of us tended to read them silently or daydream.  He mumbled except for the word tzitzit that appears three times in the passage. Tzitzit he would pronounce distinctly and with gusto, as if it were a tasty treat.  I once mentioned this to him, but he just smiled without explanation.  

        

He has since re-married and moved away. But, even now, many years later, when I read that word in the text I hear his voice with its strong emphasis on the hissing, crunched sound of the tee pushing against the zee. It seemed to me that in that particular word he was relishing his special relationship to Divine purposes. As, perhaps, did my grandfather.  An option not available to me, at least not through the traditional fringe channel.