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sold kosher meats, the particulars of the shul, and where there was a room to rent.
    The room was around the corner in the apartment of the Moskowitzes. It was furnished in the same spare way as the family’s bedrooms in the Bronx, though this one, since all members of the family would be sleeping there, had, besides the dresserand double bed, a cot, four straight chairs, and an enameled-topped table. My mother never failed to describe the mattresses as “thick like a piece of matzo is thick.”
    At the end of the hall was the bathroom, here serving two families, not six, as in the Bronx. At last an improvement, my mother thought.
    There were “kitchen privileges” (which my mother had never heard of and always called “kitchen preventleges”) that allowed her the use of the coal stove at certain hours and one very small corner of the icebox. But they were to eat in their room, on the table there.
    The next morning they had a little breakfast with the Moskowitzes, with the Moskowitzes’ food—“as a favor,” Mrs. Moskowitz said—and afterward my father left to see what was what, Joey and Miriam went outside in the hope of finding other children, and my mother returned to the room to unpack. She was soon feeling the old heaviness. She tried to retrieve the bit of cheer from yesterday at the rabbi’s house, but it was impossible in this dark room with the torn window shades; and in another moment she was calling yesterday’s sentiments foolishness and going about her work through eyes full of water.
    Greenglass in the meantime had taken my father around to Edelstein of Edelstein’s Ladies, Gents, and Children. As soon as Edelstein and my father had shaken hands, Edelstein wanted to know if my father was looking for something to do.
    My father said, “Naturally,” and Edelstein said, “So stop looking already, you got a job.”
    Edelstein’s Ladies, Gents, and Children (which also sold domestics) was on the street around the corner from Greenglass’s. Unlike Greenglass’s it sold to the poorer people. It was, then, a store like Bronstein’s in Savannah and, also like Bronstein’s, not the only store of its kind in the city and not called a “Jew store.” Still, it was in Nashville that my father learned the term and came to understand how it was used in small towns like Concordia.
    Edelstein’s was a very busy place, and my father could see that Edelstein was making money there. He figured that if he kept his eyes open and his step lively, it was not out of the question that Aaron Bronson could be a Charlie Edelstein someday.
    After only a few weeks, Edelstein took my father on a buying trip to St. Louis, something that added to my father’s “education and sal-es-man-ship,” as he told my mother, giving the latter word his patented four-syllable pronunciation. But my father had something else in mind: He wanted Charlie Edelstein to know that he wanted a store of his own.
    This was a three-alarmer for my mother. She was just getting used to everything, and now look.
    She once said to me, “What could I do but make believe it could never happen?” She shoved my father’s plan into the pigeonhole marked “Maybe Someday,” then into “It Could Never Happen,” and went back to settling into Nashville. To her surprise, she was finding the settling “a little not too terrible,” the best part being the afternoon visits with the rabbi’s wife (where she saw the other Jewish women as well) and the Friday nights at the shul.
    The shul experience in Nashville was the same as in New York, except the building was smaller. Seating was the same: My mother sat upstairs with my sister; my father and brother with the men downstairs.
    My parents got to know a good number of shul-goers and after services accepted invitations to visit. Soon my father said he and my mother should take a turn. My