Grandpa Yosef wrinkled his nose when he saw Attorney Perl giving Ronnie the entire encyclopedia set, because he was the tree of knowledge in our family and encyclopedias were supposed to be his domain. When Grandpa Yosef himself bought me a very fancy book, Sayings of Wisdom, he suffered yet another setback, because that was exactly what Sammy the greengrocer had given me. When it turned out that Uncle Menashe had bought me yet another Sayings of Wisdom, an inquiry was conducted and all the Sayings of Wisdom givers issued a joint statement: It was on sale at Goldberg’s on Shapira Street. An appendix to the statement clarified that the book was still expensive even after the discount.
We forgave them quite easily:
Grandpa Yosef, because of the money, of which he had none. Whenever he had a penny, he would find someone who didn’t and give it to them.
Uncle Menashe, because he lived far away and there was an unwritten, dimly comprehended rule that defined a correlation between mileage and gift-size. Various distances and degrees of familial relationship were plugged into this formula, resulting in the appropriate expenditure for a gift.
Sammy, because when his son, Tzachi, had his bar-mitzvah, Dad had given him a very fancy Interpretations of the Torah and Prophets that was on sale at Goldberg’s on Shapira Street.
Besides, Dad could never be angry at Sammy, because of all the people with whom he bought lottery tickets (they faced God in pairs, hoping He would hand out a measure of good fortune in proportion to their joint rights), Sammy was the only one who didn’t cheat Dad when they won, or rely on his indulgence in financial matters. Hillel, the barber from Herzl Street, cheated him. And a guy from the army reserves cheated him. But Sammy would always run to find Dad and announce the winnings.
Sammy had a little fruit and vegetable store at the edge of Grandpa Yosef’s neighborhood. He wore a gold chain around his neck and had a thundering voice, and his potbelly always stuck out of the bottom of a shirt that proclaimed, in English, “Harvard University.” With his mustache and bald head, Sammy looked like a hardened thug, but he had small, green eyes that took on the color of tea in the sun. Inside the store, his eyes had a strained tone of green, sometimes Ganges-green, reminding everyone that Sammy was half-Indian. He kept two different kinds of tabs for his customers in the neighborhood: one for those who had to pay, and another for those who didn’t have to pay because they had suffered enough in the Holocaust. Sammy spoke of the Holocaust like normal greengrocers talked about soccer. The Holocaust, for him, was a physical entity, a body with character traits. A transparent globe which you could hold in your hands and gaze into to see figures and snowflakes and all sorts of colorful things. “The Shoah…” he used to say, and coming from his lips the word sounded different. Finally, here was the perspective of a man with both feet on the outside, with true compassion and unexaggerated kindness. “They suffered over there, the poor souls,” he explained, and nothing was hiding behind his words. “Suffered” did not conceal two-days-under-a-mountain-of-bodies-with-his-mother-and-father-dead-on-top-of-him-until-he-got-out-and-ran-to-the-forest. “Poor souls” was not their-children-died-in-the-ghetto-and-after-the-war-they-tried-to-have-children-and-could-not-something-in-her-body-or-her-mind-the-doctors-gave-up.
Sammy employed three assistants, and they were told to be nice to the customers. When he said “customers,” it was clear that he did not mean the ones in sunglasses who stopped their cars outside for a minute to run in and get something for Shabbat, but rather the ones like Gershon Klima, for example, who would sometimes stand among the crates of produce without any idea of what he wanted. They had to let him stand there like a waxwork, with his own rhythm of confusion, no urgency, until a healthy thought about plumbing drew him out of the confusion and instantly cured him, and as if on the wings of Superman’s cloak he would take hold of his six-inch pipe and emerge a regular customer, grumbling, “How much are the tomatoes today?”
Sammy worshipped Grandpa Yosef, and personally delivered his groceries for free. In the middle of the workday he would sit down with Grandpa Yosef and discuss the affairs of the day, the political situation. They explored various possibilities, like a truce between Sammy and Littman from the corner store. (Sammy’s fight with Littman, who owned the corner store next-door to the vegetable store, had been going on for thirty years, ever since the business with the pickles. Sammy had attempted to market pickles made by his sister-in-law, thereby diverging from his legitimate domain of fresh vegetables.)
Littman was also a saint. Prices, with Littman, were a flexible matter. Bills were totaled in pencil on a little roll of paper, quick computations in Yiddish, impossible to follow. The neighborhood residents came, looked at a product, and whatever was reflected in their pupils — their past in the camps, the sum of their compensation payments, their pensions — formed an image that was turned into a price. They ran tabs that sometimes lasted a lifetime. Debts were dropped, erased. At Littman’s, they could come and chat, and he would always ask how they were doing; this was as important as the shopping. His corner store was a valley of sorts, where shepherds came to rest with their herds in a place virtually untouched by the winds. Even Crazy Hirsch found refuge at Littman’s, where he would idle with his elbow leaning on a barrel of pickles. Sometimes Linow Community and Sarkow Community came too. Littman encouraged them, reminding them that he had seen the greengrocer in the Turkish market buying spoiled pickles and then putting them in hot water to make them look fresh.
In the conflict between Littman and Sammy, the neighborhood’s heart leaned towards Littman, who, after all, had a number on his arm from Auschwitz, and had also been in Buchenwald. But I preferred Sammy because he looked normal, like Dad, and a couple of times he took me to play soccer on the beach with his team, “Maccabi Sammy Vegetables and Son.” Sometimes, when the store was empty, Sammy would ask me to toss him a mandarin orange, and he would cheerfully head-butt it back to its place. Sometimes he missed. Then we would look sheepishly at the mandarin as it rolled across the floor.
“You shouldn’t throw away food,” I said.
“You shouldn’t say ‘yuck’ about food,” Sammy retorted.
“People died for a bit of cabbage,” I escalated.
“Bread is sacred,” Sammy giggled.
We shouted out all the battle-cries, only after making absolutely sure we were alone.
A little of Sammy’s hegemony was disrupted in favor of Littman during one of our trips to Tel Aviv with Grandpa Yosef, when we were delivered into the caring hands of Hezi for our day at the amusement park. We found Hezi in a garrulous mood. Until that day, we had believed that Hezi was created only once a year to welcome us in Tel Aviv and take us to the amusement park, then disappear into thin air until the next year. But there he was, not only talking and taking on the form of flesh and blood, but very quickly also revealing a solid connection to our life: he announced that he was the son of Littman from the corner store, didn’t we know? He told us offhandedly about Buchenwald and the mad hunger. The people who ate corpses. Ate clothes. Ate wood from the hut walls. Their teeth crumbled as they gnawed on the wood but they could not stop. Only those who gained the protection of criminals or Russian POWS, the kings of the camps, could survive.