Jew Store by Stella Suberman Read Free Book Online

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. (Thiswas 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.
    The presence of these
shvartzerim
—as the Jewish people she knew, like the ones my father knew, called them—made her uneasy. Naturally she never spoke to them, but she also never
looked
at them except when she was sure they would not catch her. And
oy
, their speech! Like from under blankets.
    The other workers acted like bosses with the Negroes, addressing them sharply and rolling their eyes back as if whatever chore the Negroes were doing was being done in the most ridiculous way possible. When the Negroes were near, the girls picked up their handbags from the floor and put them on their laps. My mother was advised to do likewise. “You don’t know them like I do,” one girl said to her. “Take my word, they’ll steal your eyeballs if you ain’t looking.”
    In the flow of manufacture in the flower factory, my mother sat at a table and attached stems to flower heads. From a store of wires, she took one, wound green paper around it, made a “hip” with a twist of extra paper at the end, and then attached the newly made stem to the flower head by means of a length of unpapered wire. When there was a sizable pile of finished flowers, a pale and unspeaking ten-year-old boy materialized and took it away. The work