Have you ever eaten sugared egg cookies? That’s how good those rolls were. Maybe better. And the coffee! I can’t begin to describe it. A taste of Paradise! My mother perked up with each sip and gave me half her butter roll.
You would have thought Khaneh had been knifed. “What are you doing?” she cried. “Eat, eat! There’s plenty for everyone!”
She handed me another roll. That made two and a half. While I ate I listened to them talk. It sounded pretty familiar. My mother spoke about being a widow with two sons, one swimming in chicken fat and the other the poor little fellow sitting next to her. I tried to picture Elye in a pond of fat. How big was it? How did it get there?
Khaneh listened and shook her head. After a while she began to gripe about her own luck. She had always been her father’s favorite and now she had to cook for others. Her father had been a wealthy man until he was ruined by a fire and took sick. Next thing, he died. To think of him rising from the grave and seeing his Khaneh slaving away at a stranger’s oven! Not that she had any reason to complain. She had a good job. The one thing wrong with it was old Luria. He was a bit …but I never found out what old Luria was a bit of. Khaneh put a finger to her forehead and now it was my mother’s turn to shake her head.
Then my mother talked some more and the head that shook was Khaneh’s again. When we left, she gave me another butter roll. I showed it to the boys at school and they stood watching me eat it with big eyes. A person would think they’d never seen a butter roll before! I gave each of them a little piece and they licked their fingers after eating it.
“Where did you get that from?”
I popped the last piece in my mouth and chewed and swallowed it while sticking my hands in my stiff pockets and doing a barefoot jig. If it had had words, they would have been:
“What a bunch of beggars! A butter roll, big deal! You should try it with coffee some time. Then you’d know what a taste of Paradise is!”
SWIMMING IN CHICKEN FAT
Now that old Luria’s is history, all that keeps my mother going is my brother Elye. Thank God he’s still swimming in chicken fat! That’s what my mother says, wiping her eyes as usual — this time with a bit of pleasure. Elye, she says, is set for life. Not that his wife is anything to write home about. (I happen to agree with that.) But Elye has a rich father-in-law, Yoyneh the baker. Yoyneh doesn’t do the baking himself. He has bakers for that. He buys flour and sells bagels. On Passover he bakes matsos for all Kasrilevke. He’s a fiend about his bakery. In fact, he’s a fiend, period. Watch out for him.
He’s a maniac, Yoyneh is. Once he nabbed me while I was with Elye. I had just helped myself to an egg bagel — a hot one, fresh from the oven. Don’t ask me what got into him, but all of a sudden he had the face of a murderer with these I’ll-settle-your-hash-for-you eyes. I never went back to his bakery. I wouldn’t go there again if you paid me. What kind of Jew grabs you by the collar and boots you through the door with three swift kicks?
I told my mother, who went running to give Yoyneh a piece of her mind. Elye saw her and stopped her. He actually took Yoyneh’s side! He said I was a disgrace who did nothing but eat bagels all day long. If I had to eat bagels, Elye said, he would give me a kopeck to buy one. My mother told him he had no pity for an orphan. Elye said being an orphan didn’t give you the right to anyone’s bagels. My mother told Elye to pipe down. Elye said he would shout as loud as he pleased and let the world know I was a thief.
That’s one word my mother can’t stand. She turned every color and told Elye to remember there’s a God above. God is not to be trifled with. There’s nothing he doesn’t see. He’s the father of all orphans and stands up for them and Yoyneh the bagel maker wouldn’t be worth the price of a bagel without him. That’s what she told my brother Elye. She took my hand and slammed the door and we went home.
Didn’t I say don’t trifle with God? Listen to what happened to Yoyneh. I’ve already told you he didn’t do his own baking. He had workers, two men and three women.
Well, something began to go wrong. I mean, a lot of things did. Yoyneh’s customers started complaining that his bagels had feathers and ribbons and cockroaches and bits of glass in them. Then some Christian found a big black hairball. A Christian is no joke, especially when he threatens to go to the police.
There was an investigation to see whose hair it was. The men blamed the women and the women blamed the men. The women said they were blondes, all three of them. The men said that no man had such long hairs. Then the women started to quarrel among themselves and more charming facts came to light. One of them had baked a sock band in a hallah. Another had dropped a bandage into some dough. A third had used a ball of dough as a pillow. Naturally, she denied it. She swore to God it was a lie, and anyway, she had only done it once or twice. It was Yoyneh’s fault for not giving her a pillow.
The town was in an uproar. Yoyneh was making in his pants. All his hollering to high heaven didn’t help. No one wanted to touch his bagels. Everyone said they weren’t fit for the dogs. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.
Yoyneh was no pushover, though. He fired the bakers, men and women alike, and hired others in their place. On Saturday he had an announcement made in all the synagogues that he had a new staff and would be personally responsible for the hygiene. He even offered a ten-ruble reward for any hairs found in his bagels. Business picked up again. Everyone was looking for a hair. No one found one and anyone who did was told by Yoyneh that he had planted it himself. Just what you’d expect from a slick operator! But God was keeping score and struck again.
One fine morning Yoyneh’s new bakers woke up, took their things, and walked out. They wouldn’t come back for love or money — not unless he raised them a ruble a week, let them sleep at home, and promised to stop knocking their teeth out. That was something he had a habit of doing when he was sore.
Yoyneh lost his temper. In all his years of running a bakery, no one had ever told him who to slug. And a raise was out of the question. For every worker he fired, he said, ten were waiting in line to be hired. Hungry workers were not a rare commodity.
But when Yoyneh went to look for more bakers, he couldn’t find a single one. No one wanted to work for him. All the bakers had banded together. They said he had to take back the workers he had fired and meet all three of their demands: (1) A ruble raise; (2) Sleeping-at-home rights; (3) No more knocking out teeth.
It was a grand sight to watch Yoyneh froth at the mouth, bang on the table, and curse a blue streak. Revenge is sweet. But that’s nothing compared to what came next.
It was a hot summer day. The melon season had just begun. That’s the best time of the year. After it come the High Holy Days. Forgive me for saying so, but I could do without them. I’d rather have fun than be high and holy. And what’s more fun than a market full of melons? Wherever you look, there’s a honeydew or a watermelon. The honeydews are yellow inside. The watermelons are red with little black pits and sweet as honey.
My mother’s not wild about watermelon. She says honeydew is thriftier. A watermelon, she says, fills your stomach with water while a honeydew is breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two. She’s dead wrong about that. If I were the Tsar I’d eat nothing but bread and watermelon all year round. I don’t even mind the seeds. Give your melon a shake and they fall right out and you can eat all you want. Boy oh boy!
But all this talk of watermelon has gotten me off the subject. I was telling you about Yoyneh the bagel maker. Was he in for it! No one dreamed it was coming. There we were at the table, my mother and I, eating bread and honeydew, when who opens the door and walks in but Elye, holding my father’s Bible. His wife Brokheh is dragging after him. In one hand she has a fur stole with a tail and in the other a pour-through. That’s a kind of noodle sieve. Elye is white as a sheet. Brokheh is red as fire.