Read Online Up From Orchard Street by Eleanor Widmer - Free Book Online

unit. They found a communal cold-water faucet in the outside hall near the toilet. But after the weeks of being surrounded by hundreds of others, their privacy felt like a gift. During their furtive years of lovemaking in Odessa, they had never spent a full night together.
    “For two, maybe three days on Ludlow Street,” my grandmother explained matter-of-factly, “we slept and made love.” When they finally ventured out into the street, the daylight half blinded them. They bought black bread, one enamel cup and black tea—Russian tea, chai, that could be as dense in color as coffee.
    Misha immediately found work on an ice truck, using a hammer and a pick to break off irregular chunks of ice that he wrapped in a torn burlap sack and heaved over his back. He carried the ice up and down stairs to deliver it to apartments and stores. Manya cleaned pots and scrubbed floors in a bakery located one flight down from street level. In the summer the heat left her skin dry and her hair singed. The worst day at the bakery came late on Friday afternoons, when the ghetto women arrived with their cauldrons of cholent—meat and beans, barley and potatoes submerged in water—to leave in the bakery oven to simmer overnight.
    Shortly before noon on Saturday the Shabbas goy, an underpaid gentile hired to do work forbidden on the Sabbath, opened the bakery. He pulled the pots out of the oven, gave them to the waiting women, and afterward cleaned up any mess that had spilled on the floor, scraping the oven itself for food that had boiled over.
    One day Manya asked the bakery owner, Greenspan, for the job. He was furious that a woman could make such a suggestion. For a woman to work in a store on Saturday was considered sacrilege. “It’s a shanda,” he cried. “A shame. A disgrace.”
    Bubby paused at this point in her narrative. “A shanda?” she asked rhetorically. “We needed the money. Misha had this terrible cough. His whole body shook from the coughing. So what was the shanda, that I should work on Saturday or that my husband should have medicine from the clinic?”
    The doctor from the clinic at Gouverneur Hospital, which the ghetto inhabitants called The Hospital as if it were the only one in the city, recommended that Misha leave the ice truck job. The ice, the cold, the damp rag on his back day in and day out incited the cough.
    Next he worked at a kosher butcher shop, lifting heavy carcasses and washing away the bloody water in which the meat had been ritually koshered. For families where women worked and didn’t have time for koshering at home—the rabbi’s stamp on the meat was considered insufficient—the meat was soaked in pans filled with water and kosher salt for at least three hours.
    Carrying the heavy pans as well as the carcasses was exhausting, but Misha enjoyed the company of his boss, Stein, pronounced “Shtein.” Stein encouraged Misha to read the daily papers in Yiddish and summarize the news for him. He enjoyed talking to Misha about the Russian writer Gogol, whose stories reminded him not only of Russia’s lower depths but of the Lower East Side. Stein would shake his curly red hair—which had earned him the nickname “rayta hund”— red hound—and say, “Boychick, it’s a shanda that someone gebilded should be working by me lifting pans with bloody water.”
    “Again a shanda,” Bubby protested. “Always a shanda this, a shanda that. The baker Greenspan, he finally gave me that Saturday job, but I had to creep into the store in the dark so people wouldn’t see me and scream ‘shanda.’ And Stein, Misha’s boss, if he thought it a shanda that this educated boy worked for him, why didn’t he try to get Misha a better job? Your grandfather and I, we didn’t believe in shandas.”
    Finally, Misha’s diagnosis came: tuberculosis. The officials with whom they dealt were either overburdened or had become hardened by so much disease and suffering that they dismissed the sick man by saying