The first to sour on kehlehktink was Elye. He was fed up with the biznis. I mean it wasn’t the biznis, it was the kahstemehz. Some stopped paying. “You can take your firnitsheh back,” they told him. “We need it like a hole in the head.” Others were full of complaints. Why did the bed squeak? Why did they see two faces in the mirror? Why didn’t the chest of drawers open and close? How come the stool weighed a ton and was hard as nails to sit on?
Some kahstemehz disappeared. They had moved to another epahtment and go find them. Even worse were the ones who wanted to keep up the payments. They liked the firnitsheh, they just didn’t have the money. The man of the house was sick. Or out of work. Or on streik. What was Elye to do? Nobody wants to lose a kahstemeh. And so he paid for them out of his own pahkit. There was no end to it. You can imagine what it was like.
You think Pinye likes his dzhahb any better? Think again! It’s easier to cross the Red Sea, he says, than to land a kahstemeh. You talk to some idiot for three days and three nights, you explain what inshurinks is all about, you finally get him to fill out an eplikayshn — and the next day he’s changed his mind or been ridzhekted. That means some lowdown doctor wrote the truth. He saw the fellow naked and didn’t like what he saw.
The biggest disaster for an inshurinks eydzhent is a leps. A pahlisee lepsiz when a kahstemeh stops paying. Now it’s the eydzhent’s turn to pay the kahmpeni fifteen times the primyim. If not for all the lepsiz, Pinye says, he’d be a rich man. And it’s just his luck that several kahstemehz have lepst together. You would think they planned it that way.
“They can all go to hell, the kahstemehz and the inshurinks and the lepsiz and the kahmpeni!” Pinye says. It’s time he and Elye struck out on their own. They’ve each managed to save a few dahlehz. That’s enough to start a biznis.
It’s official. We’re going into biznis!
WE GO INTO BIZNIS
Whatever you’re looking for, you’ll find it in the noospeypehz, even if it’s bird’s milk. Work? It’s in the peypehz. Workers? They’re there, too. A husband or a wife? Also. A biznis? Try the peypehz again. That’s what we did for days until we came across the following ed-vehteizmint:
Sigahz — Stayshenree — Kendee–
Sawdehvawdeh Stend For Sale.
Across from a Skul. On Account of
Family Trahbelz. Gehrehntid Gud
Biznis. Hahry!
Leave it to Brokheh to think of everything that could go wrong. For one thing, she said, how did we know the edvehteizmint was telling the truth? And besides, why crawl into bed with a bunch of family trahbelz? It was probably some husband and his wife. Why get involved in a divorce case?
Maybe you think it was only this edvehteizmint that Brokheh didn’t like. Believe me, there were a hundred of them. She found something wrong with each. She was against whatever Elye was for. Just because he had gone and shaved off three-quarters of his beard, she said, he shouldn’t think he was such a big shot. “So what if I did?” Elye said. “Your father shaved off all four!”
That brought Pinye into it. “You know what?” he said. “I’ll give you odds that out of one hundred million Americans, you won’t find half a dozen with beards. Call me a blahfeh if I’m wrong.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” my mother asked. “If ducks go barefoot, that means I can’t wear shoes? Let’s change the subject.”
It was bad enough, she said, that Peysi the cantor’s son had wiped the beard off his face. To think her enemies had lived to see the day! Why make it worse by talking about it?
Our new sawdehvawdeh stend had several strong points. One was that Elye was an experienced soft drink manufacturer. Since he made the sirip himself, we could afford to sell a big glass of plain sawdehvawdeh for a pehni and a glass with a flavor for two. And we bought the cheapest kehndeez and could sell them for a pehni a handful.
They were so cheap we ate them ourselves. I mean Mendl, Pinye, and me. All three of us worked at the stend and took kehndee when no one was looking — that is, when Brokheh wasn’t there. The trouble was that she was there all the time, helping out with the biznis. Everyone helped, my mother and Taybl too. You might think so many biznismen serving a kahstemeh all at once would frighten him to death, but it worked out pretty well. Kahstemehz like a crowded establishment.
The best time for our biznis was summer. A hot summer day in New York is worse than a furnace in hell. Everyone wants to cool off with an eiskrim. For a pehni we sold a senvitsh with two chocolate crackers and eiskrim in between. Half of that was our profit. It wasn’t our biggest item, though. The real moneymaker in a sawdehvawdeh stend is a drink called seideh. It’s sweet and sour and has bubbles that tickle your tongue. All the experts say it tastes like champagne. Even though it’s an American drink, Elye knows how to make it.
There’s nothing Elye can’t make. Don’t let Pinye tell you otherwise. He keeps teasing Elye that the only good thing about his seideh is that it’s cold. Apart from that, Pinye says, it’s for the birds. “If it’s for the birds,” Elye says, “how come you drink it all day?” “What’s it to you what I drink?” Pinye answers. “How much can one person drink? If I drank it from morning to night, it still wouldn’t come to a nikl’s worth.”
That’s when Brokheh butts in. A nikl, she says, is money too. So of course Taybl has to stick up for her husband. Pinye, she says, is a full partner in the biznis and can be allowed a nikl’s worth of seideh. It’s a good thing my mother was there and said: “Why, I wouldn’t touch that seideh if you paid me! It looks like bread kvass and tastes like death!”
We all laughed so hard that we stopped quarreling.
Biznis was even better when the vawdehmehln season began. We cut the mehlehnz into slices and sold them for a pehni a slice. If the mehln was a good one, we made a nice profit and had enough left over for supper. You have to finish a vawdehmehln the day you open it because the next morning it’s nothing but red frizz. Mendl, Pinye, and I prayed every day that the kahstemehz would leave some for us.
Some items have a sizn. As soon as summer was over, the seideh and vawdehmehln disappeared. Others sell all year round, like sigahs and sigehrehts. We kept up a good biznis in them.
There are all kinds of sigehrehts. Some are one for a pehni and some are two. Mendl, Pinye, and I sometimes cop a few toofehz. Who has to know?
In America it’s called smawkink. Once I was smawkink a toofeh with Mendl, a puff for him and a puff for me. It would have been fine if God hadn’t created Brokheh. She smelled the smoke and ratted to Elye, who gave me a smawkink I’d rather forget. It wasn’t so much the smawkink that upset him as its being Saturday. It seems that if Peysi the cantor’s son is caught smawkink on the Sabbath, you’re allowed to beat him to death. Even my mother agreed that this time the dog deserved the stick. That’s why I gave up smawkink. I can’t even stand the smell any more.
Our stend also sells peypehz, Jewish dailies and magazines. We don’t make much on them but it gives Pinye something to read. Once his nose is in a peypeh, that’s it. Noospeypehz affect him like magnets, he says. He’d like to write for the peypehz himself. He’s even been up to Ist Brawdvey, where they’re printed. He won’t tell us what he did there. I sure hope he didn’t bring them his poems.
I’ll bet he did, though, because whenever a new batch of peypehz arrives, Pinye grabs them and goes through them with a fine tooth comb. His hands actually shake. After a while he jumps up and rushes off to Ist Brawdvey. “What’s on Ist Brawdvey?” Elye asks. “Biznis,” Pinye tells him. “I thought our biznis was here,” Elye says. “You call this a biznis?” Pinye says. “Seven people eating their way through one stend — some biznis!” “Where do you get seven?” Elye asks. Pinye counts them on his fingers. He and Taybl are two. Elye and Brokheh are four. My mother is five. And the two little men — that’s me and Mendl — make seven.