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.