The Day My Mother Cried and Other Stories: and Other Stories

My Father’s Grocery Store

186 My Father’s Grocery Store Actually my father owned half of the store. The other half belonged to his partner who was his best friend—most of the time. On the negative days, he was his worst enemy. They were partners for more than fifty years and, as I said, they got along very well, considering. His partner’s given name was Milton, a name he gave himself when he was drafted into the Army during the first world war. I think his Jewish name was Menachem, but I won’t swear to it. Pop’s name was Dave. My mother called him Doovid and his landsmen (kinsmen) and close friends in the shul called him Doovidel . Doovidel is an affectionate term for Dave or David, and most of those who called him Doovidel loved him as did most of his customers . The customers, however, called him Mister because in addition to having great affection for my father, they respected him. Especially the black people. They regarded Pop as a friend rather than a storekeeper. They knew that when they were short of money, which was most of the time, my father extended them credit and never once asked them to pony up with the money. They paid and always with a smile. “Your father, he’s gentle folk. We don’t like that other fella,” they would tell me when I delivered their orders in my Red Rover delivery wagon. More often than not, they gave me a penny or two for my “trouble,” as they put it. “That other fella,” Milton, my father’s partner, was an honorable man, but he rarely smiled and was often taken for a snob and a bigot— which he definitely was not. His best friend in the Army, he said, was My Father’s Grocery Store | 187 a black man named Fred who was with him at the Army’s cooks and bakery school. My father’s partner became a baker and Fred a cook and was the best in the school, according to Milton. Some years after the war, Fred came to our city to visit Milton who got him a job in Hotel Casey, which was the finest hotel in northeastern Pennsylvania. In a short time, Fred became the head cook and then the chef and became famed for his chowders and oysters Rockefeller. Pop’s partner would get invited from time to time to dine with his wife Bertha as a guest of Fred’s, and, according to my father, he would come back to the store the next morning redolent with the aroma of some fancy fish soup that lasted all day. My father was invited by Fred, too, but he would never eat anything that was not kosher. Each partner excelled at his own area of expertise. Pop was the fruit and produce “maven,” who learned all about God’s green thumb from his many years as a horse-and-wagon huckster. Milton was the butcher, who learned his trade from his father who had a butcher shop in some shtetl in eastern Poland. While he knew all there was to know about beef, lamb, and poultry, his father had never dealt in pork. It was Fred who took Milton into the world of swine, and in no time at all the store became known for its pork chops and hams. My father, who could also cut meat, was never comfortable with pork products. Too fat, he said, and avoided contact with a side of pork or a ham butt. Milton had no such inhibitions. The store was open seven days a week from 6:30 in the morning to 11:30 at night. Each partner worked late every other night six days out of seven. Pop’s day off was on Saturday, which allowed him to attend synagogue services at the Penn Avenue shul. Milton was off on Sunday. It was an arrangement made in heaven. My father had his weekly tête-à-tête with God, after which there was a splendid Sabbath meal followed by the luxury of a two-hour nap. My father and mother were nap people. Every day Pop, after a hasty lunch, would lie down on the parlor couch with his Yiddish newspaper, and before you could say “Gesundheit” was off in some distant planet of slumber. My mother 188 | William D. Kaufman would follow...