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Chapter 2. The Jew Baby
- The University of Tennessee Press
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C h a p t e r 2 The Jew Baby In comparing notes on “how it was,” on how our lives had proceeded before the Depression came, Jack and I gave each other equal time, even if I had first to overcome Jack’s notion that his Biggest City stories were more significant, definitely more interesting than my Small Town ones. Still, to my surprise, Jack in the end proved to be a good listener and a crack interrogator. As we talked, we understood that our experiences before and after the Depression basically resembled each other in only one way, and that was that we were both offspring of once-comfortable middle-class Jewish entrepreneurs . But there the similarity ended. Jack’s father was, after all, a savvy New York wholesaler of fur skins, and mine was a tactful Union City, Tennessee, retailer with a store that sold everything from shoelaces to men’s Sunday suits and women’s Easter hats. But no furs, definitely no furs. Indeed, if a customer had walked into our rough-and-ready store and said, “Can I see something in a mink or sable?” my father would have alerted the Tennessee Home and Training School for Feeble-minded Persons in Nashville to come get her. * * * I told Jack that before I was a Depression kid, I was a “Jew baby,” and to my surprise I discovered that the boy that I thought knew everything didn’t know about Jew babies, or even about Jew stores. And so I explained to him that Jew stores were modest dry goods stores catering to the lower economic elements of the town—to blacks, farmers and sharecroppers, and 8 The Jew Baby factory hands—and operated by immigrant eastern European Jews; they were in almost every small southern town, and a “Jew baby” was what southern townspeople called a child of “Jew store” owners. When I told Jack what I knew about Jew store history, which was that they had dotted the whole of the southern landscape in the 1920s and 1930s, it turned out that Jack had in fact heard of Jew stores; he just didn’t know they were called that. “Come on,” Jack would say to me, “were you so polite that you couldn’t tell people to stop using that terrible expression?” Through the years I came to know that terms like “Jew lawyer” were considered unambiguous signs of anti-Semitism, but “Jew store” and “Jew baby”? I explained to Jack that since among southerners a face-to-face insult is considered a sin, to which Jack would add, “At least if the face is white,” I could only assume that no insult was intended. I do know that aside from a very few disagreeable incidents, my family got along extremely well in our little town in northwest Tennessee, and we were eventually comfortable enough to call ourselves “Jewish southerners ” or “southern Jews” depending on the circumstances, although I must admit that saying “Jew southerners” never entered our minds. Still, when I would say how comfortable we were in our little southern town, the New Yorker in Jack would show up—that part of him that didn’t quite trust gentile displays of goodwill toward Jews—and he would say, well, generous thoughts in prosperous times do not prove very much. And indeed, when we came to Union City, times were prosperous indeed. The Good Years My parents had come to Union City in 1920 with my mother, my brother Will (in Union City he was called “Willie”), and my sister Minna (“Minnie” in Union City) to open our store—Kaufman’s Low-Price Store—and my sister Ruth and I were born there a few years later. My father had brought the family from New York by way of Nashville, where he had been hired as a clerk in a Jew store, and a man oddly named Johnson (oddly because “Johnson” is a name definitely not typical among Jews) took him under his wing. We always figured that, like many immigrants, Mr. Johnson carried such a surprising name because he had come to America via Ellis Island and the official there could not spell Schlomo Ehrenplotz (or whatever was Mr. Johnson’s real name) but could spell “Johnson,” so Johnson it was. At any rate, Mr. Johnson was a part-owner in a St. Louis wholesale house and as such was ever on the lookout for a town that needed a Jew...