Jew Store by Stella Suberman Read Free Book Online Page B

thawed in the mouth and the straw beds that made noises in the night like mice, this young lady of the fair skin and the soft dusting of freckles and the lustrous black hair, who praised his English and said, “Just like a Yankee you talk.” And wouldn’t his heart have leapt up that the nimble hands were gentle and the figure trim and the top of her head went just under his chin? And it’s my opinion that it would have been also very gratifying to my father that when he asked my grandfather for his blessing, along with a yes, my grandfather, who had recognized something in my father, said to him, “You ain’t a
shlimazel
.” A luckless fellow. “You’re a man going places.”
    A fter my parents’ marriage, it was several years before Concordia became something to reckon with. In the meantime Joey and Miriam were born, and though having two children kept my father out of the draft, fatherhood to my orphaned father meant much more than that; for despite the conventional wisdom that you don’t miss what you’ve never had, what my father had never had was a real family, and to say he had not missed one is to misunderstand.
    In that long ago time in Podolska, my father had only hisgrandfather, and he was full of envy for those children who had real families. In his little-boy fantasies of their lives, he had come to believe that no matter what misery descended upon them or, in rare cases, what joy uplifted them, the family shared. He pictured these families at the supper table offering understanding to one another and exchanging stories (even if any humor in them was often black), whereas after his day at his job (which did what it could to save his life, but it could not save everything), all he had was his grandfather’s silence (what did this man have to be chatty about?), a wordless meal, and the shuffling sound of his grandfather making for bed immediately afterward. No, my father had had his fill of “no family,” had had it up to here.
    Though the fact of Joey and Miriam went a long way toward softening things, it could only go so far, and soon the feeling that he must leave New York came to my father strongly, especially when he was at his job selling produce from one of my grandfather’s pushcarts, as that was another New York job he would not come to like if he lived to be a hundred. He was now fluent enough in English to have perhaps gotten a job as a clerk even in a non-Jewish store, but now he didn’t want it. Selling in New York might make him a hostage to New York, and, perhaps unbeknownst even to him, in his head the South had been waiting all along.
    It would be two more years before he would try to implement his idea of a return to the South. This was for my father a long time to stay put when everything in him was telling him to go.
    When he at last he began to try to sell my mother on going, he had no inkling that the South would mean a country town in the most isolated part of Tennessee.
    A ccording to my father, each year the strain of New York weighed more heavily. Every evening when he walkedhome from the subway and looked toward the window of his apartment, except for the prospect of seeing the family, nothing about it beckoned. He saw it as a place that even on a sunny day was dark, with a smell always from somebody in the building cooking cabbage. Whenever he looked toward his apartment, he said he wanted to yell
Gevalt!
—an outcry of alarm that in this case, meant, Let me out of here!
    It was time—past time—to renew his acquaintance with his hustle. He started slowly, telling my mother that his job with the pushcart didn’t feel right, that it wasn’t a salesman’s job. “Selling from a pushcart ain’t selling; it’s arguing,” my father said to her.
    What had once seemed to my mother adventurous now seemed foolhardy. The South? That place down there full of strangers and terrors?
    Trying