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.