The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel by Susan Jane Gilman Read Free Book Online

even living in America, yet already so much to eat!”
    *  *  *
    Like most factory owners, Yacob Lefkowitz ran his business out of his tenement apartment. During the day his tiny parlor doubled as the cutting and sewing “floor,” while his small kitchen served as the pressing area, with an ironing board set up next to the stove. In a mere two years since his arrival from Lodz, Mr. Lefkowitz had gone from being a peddler to a tailor to a sweatshop owner, producing winter coats and “car dusters” for Valentine’s, Wanamaker’s, and Gimbels uptown.
    He made enough money so that he and his wife, Clara, didn’t have to take in boarders the way most of their neighbors did.
    But then Clara died in childbirth—along with their newborn girl. When the shiva—the mourning period—was officially over, the seamstress, cutters, and presser employed by Mr. Lefkowitz arrived on the fourth floor on Orchard Street at 7:00 A.M. to find themselves with nothing to do: No cloth had been purchased, no new orders commissioned. Unfinished coats lay untouched on the floor and strewn across the couch like casualties of war. Mr. Lefkowitz sat in his kitchen with his hands sandwiched between his knees, rocking back and forth, eyes fixed in the middle distance, murmuring the Shema. It was heartbreaking to be sure, but the workers took quick stock of the situation, saw the train of destitution rumbling toward them, and scrambled to secure work elsewhere.
    After receiving an eviction notice, Mr. Lefkowitz drank himself to near blindness at the saloon downstairs, then came home and stumbled around his apartment, cursing his one God. By the end of the night, there wasn’t a single neighbor in the tenement who hadn’t heard his tsuris and grievances documented loudly and in great detail through the air shaft. He contemplated killing himself. Death was the only way to rejoin Clara, to see their stillborn daughter, he yelled—death and then the Messiah, of course. It could be a very long process. Why didn’t Jews make anything easy? But then, he discovered, he didn’t own a sharp enough knife. He didn’t own any pills.
    As the purple-black sky started to bleed into a sad, filmy morning, Mr. Lefkowitz sank into a chair and shouted, “Look at me, God! I’m too poor to even commit suicide properly!”
    To win back his contracts with the department stores, he’d have to produce coats again—more cheaply than ever. As he did the math the next morning, he saw the necessity of taking in boarders, too—if boarders could be found who wouldn’t drink, run off in the middle of the night with his valuables (such as they were), or steal his sewing machine.
    Two days later, when my weary father knocked on his door with a referral from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Mr. Lefkowitz ushered us into his kitchen like six answered prayers.
    He was a twitchy, spindly man, Mr. Lefkowitz, gone prematurely bald. Behind his glasses his eyes were red-rimmed and startled. He led the six of us into his apartment with a nervous hiccup. “In this room you can sleep,” he said, motioning to a tiny parlor filled with old newspapers and rags. Bolts of c harcoa l-c olored fabric were propped against the walls and piled haphazardly atop the furnishings. By the window was a sewing machine with a wrought-iron pedal. Mr. Lefkowitz pointed to the settee in front of the fireplace. “The children can sleep on the cushions. One on the frame, maybe—”
    Most immigrant families came to America piecemeal—first a father and a daughter, perhaps, would arrive and get jobs. A year or two later, they’d send for the mother, the brothers. Lots of new arrivals were barely more than teenagers. But our family had arrived in New York intact—we were half a dozen, yet utterly alone. Six was a lot. There was barely enough space in the parlor for all of us to stand. The walls, papered with faded green and mustard cabbage roses, seemed to perspire and ripple with the heat. From the