Jew Store by Stella Suberman

hard to sell her on taking a chance, my father quoted her an old shtetl saying: “If you don’t want to risk tearing your shoes, you got to sit at home.” He told her how friendly people were in the South and how she’d find friends.
    Shoes? Friends?
Right now my mother didn’t care about shoes, and she didn’t care about friends. Anyway, in her milieu, there were no friends, only relatives and
mishpocheh
.
    My father cast about for a city where there would be if not
mishpocheh
then at least Jewish people. (Why Savannah wasn’t this city was always puzzling to me until one day, while listening once more to this story, it came to me that my father had chosen not to go back to Savannah because of the girl he had almost proposed to.)
    He remembered that Nashville had been talked about as having a big Jewish population, and he thought it probably also had a synagogue and maybe even a kosher butcher. He asked my mother if she could see herself in such a town.
    One night, after hours of tossing and turning, my mother agreed that maybe, maybe she could see herself in such a town—Nashville, with its promise of shuls and rabbi-blessed chickens, and even a cheder for Joey. Her secret hope, however, was that because they had no money to make such a trip, it would all turn out to be just talk.
    My father had already worked out the money part. He said my mother should ask her father for a loan.
    â€œWhat do you think of this?” My mother had an invisible presence, an unseen third person she often spoke to, as if she were a performer on stage speaking in an aside to the audience. She spoke to this presence now. “He not only wants me to go somewhere I don’t want to, he wants I should ask my papa to lend the money besides.” All right, she would talk to my grandmother and
she
would talk to my grandfather. My mother had the hope that her sister Sadie, who would certainly be in on it, would come up with a way to nix the thing.
    What she was depending on most, however, was the idea of family oneness. She had some confidence that my grandmother would feel that leaving the family to go to such a far-off place would be too foolish to even think about. My mother saw my grandmother giving a dismissive wiggle of her hand, signaling an end to the discussion.
    T ogether with my brother and sister, she climbed the five flights to my grandparents’ apartment. As they climbed, they passed the doors of families my mother had known since she had arrived in America, all of whom had at one time or another come under the microscope of the women.
    On the second floor, for example, behind one of the four doors on the landing, lived the Bloombergs, a family characterized as living from hand to mouth because of a father capable of losing his entire paycheck in a game of pinochle on Saturday night.
    But above them were the Nussbaums, the shameful Nussbaums, the ones who turned up most frequently in the women’stalk. The Nussbaums were spoken of as
badlach
. (I have never heard this word used except by my mother and members of her klatch, and it may have been concocted by them. Possibly they put
bad
, or bath, together with
lach
, or lack, and came up with “bathless ones.”) The Nussbaums were considered low-class Jews in all manner of ways but chiefly because the Nussbaum housekeeping was judged sloppy in the extreme. It was a
shandeh
, the women said, especially a
shandeh feur der goyim
. A shame, especially before Gentiles. The women clung to the hope that the building’s Gentiles would not discover that a Jewish family had a dirty house. How disgraceful if they should know (and say “dirty Jews” among themselves) that the Nussbaums’ drinking glasses smelled of herring and that their beds were infested with bedbugs—the abominable
vantzen
.
    On the fourth-floor landing she gave a special knock on Aunt Sadie’s door, and then went on up the last flight, to the fifth