Jew Store by Stella Suberman Read Free Book Online Page A

was tedious in the extreme, as the older girl said, “enough to make cockeyed the eyes.” Still, my mother actually loved those gaudy-colored, scratchy-paper flowers. When she looked at a finished pile, she somehow managed to see tender blossoms of delicate petals. It was perhaps the first hint of a deep love for flowers, one that reached passion status in the Concordia years.
    As for social life, for my mother and her sisters there was the shul and the relatives. Friday night and Saturday morning without fail, my mother and aunts went to the shul. There they sat in the women’s balcony and joined in the prayers with the other women. Few of them could read Hebrew, since the cheder, the school where Hebrew was traditionally learned, was the exclusive preserve of boys. The women therefore prayed by rote, though this was not discernible as heads stayed bent over prayer books and pages were turned.
    Praying did not mean they knew their religion. This was not only because the cheder was closed to them but also because their fathers were not eager to teach them. Most fathers felt itwas not their job, and some shared in the view that it was not necessary for girls to be informed.
    I never heard my mother offer an impromptu prayer, though she was keen on ceremonial ones and felt that God was listening. And judging. Her idea was that like the authorities in her family—her bearded father and her superbearded grandfather—God was big on judging. And how did He judge? He judged on the basis of your participation in the religion’s rites and ceremonies, its
traditions
.
    Afternoon calls to and from their female relatives made up the girls’ social lives, though in these visits few social skills were mastered. The girls simply stepped forward for the hello kissing and then sat and listened to the gossip and the old wives’ tales—the
bubbeh meisses
, as my grandfather called them—until called upon to help serve the obligatory tea and cake.
    Refreshments were certainly looked forward to, but gossip was what the women came for. In my mother’s tales of these klatches, it was clear that the women had family matters on their minds. Marital difficulties were openly discussed, the blame most often coming to rest on the husband’s compulsive gambling or on his terrible temper. Not so open were the discussions of sexual matters, and it was here that the girls were obliged to decipher code words, head shakes, and tongue clicks. My mother once told me that she and her sisters had had a big moment when they decoded the phrase about a Cossack having “business” with a Jewish girl, which meant he had raped her; though when my mother divulged this, it was with an understanding that no more questions would be asked.
    My mother was immediately dazzled by this Aaron Bronson. Most of the girls she knew had only the pool of immigrants to choose from, and a dispiriting pool it was—men with untidy beards, unshaven faces, stained pants and button-shy vests, and voices hoarse from hawking wares on the sidewalk out of a peddler’s backpack. And here was my father, fresh from adventuresin the South, and
handsome
. His five feet, four inches said “tall” to her, and in truth he had an inch or two on most men of her acquaintance. Surrounded as she was by a people of dark eyes and dark curly hair, she was instantly smitten by eyes blue as skies and hair straight as straight—no twist, no twirl, no spirals—and gleaming as if with sunlight. If she had known the word, she would have called him dashing. Had he stayed in New York like most after being dumped by the boat? No, he had not. “He went to the South!” my mother cried to my aunts, as if penetration of the South was only for explorers in geography books.
    On his part, my father clearly found delight in sharing memories of the old country with this young lady who could laugh with him over the frozen bread that had to be