Jew Store Read online

  Praise for The Jew Store

  “Suberman tells the remarkable story of her family’s sojourn as the only Jews in a small Tennessee town during the 1920s with such sparkle, it reads like a novel… . An absolute pleasure on all fronts.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “Beautifully portrays the complex web of interconnections and disconnections between blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles, Southerners and Northerners, rural farmers and big city sophisticates.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Suberman tells her family’s story with compassion and humor, in the process bringing to life an obscure bit of Jewish-American history.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “By turns charming, funny, and moving, artfully but simply written and invested with a warm glow of family love.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “Stella Suberman describes Concordia’s characters so picturesquely it reads like a work of fiction.”

  —Hadassah Magazine

  “A memoir that deserves praise not only as a sensitive portrait of the neglected merchant-immigrant families of the South but also for the wry, loving wit that Suberman brings to the craft of remembrance.”

  —The Journal of Southern History

  “Poignant, moving, funny, scary, and intelligent… . Suberman has told a powerful and transcendent story.” —Intermountain Jewish News

  “An utterly delightful book that perfectly captures a place and time.”

  —Chattanooga Times Free Press

  “Like the store, which is practically a character in its own right, the people in The Jew Store linger in the mind.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A significant chapter in our understanding of the history of the American South.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A charming contribution to our understanding of a little-known chapter in Southern Jewish history.”

  — The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)

  “A warm, intelligent portrait of a small town and study of how both insider and outsider prejudice can be overcome… . With a faultless ear for Southern dialect and a wry sense of humor, she shows that boundaries on the map are sometimes more easily traversed than those that lurk deep in the heart.”

  —The Bay Guardian

  “A perfectly tuned memoir… . Engages the reader with its freshness and immediacy. Suberman’s characters are comically endearing: set against a vivid landscape, the old world and the new, Jew and Gentile, White and Black collide, retreat, and then cautiously dance around each other in the great American ritual of grudging acceptance.”

  —Reform Judaism

  “Suberman has turned a poignant family remembrance into a rich, sometimes funny, always touching story. In addition, she has shed light on a little known facet of Jewish/American history.”

  —The Denton Record-Chronicle

  “Readers might feel torn as to whether or not the Bronsons should leave the town. But, like the natives of Concordia, they’ll come to love this endearing Jewish family, and might not want to let them go.”

  —Jewish Herald-Voice

  “Warm and funny and a reminder of how things were in the South when blacks were at the mercy of the Ku Klux Klan, and Jews found acceptance only after years of proving themselves.”

  —The Florida Times-Union

  “This forthright memoir is not entirely rosy-hued… . But the menace is leavened with Suberman’s humor and good will. Hers is not a re -visionist history of Jewish life in the small-town South but is written within the context of the 1920s, making it valuable history as well as a moving story.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “A colorful portrait… . A charming, fresh look into a facet of American Jewish history seldom written about.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A story of a family in an alien world, a reflection that tells us much about the South of the early part of this century, its tribalism, and its tendency to violence.” —Boca Raton News

  “A captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes moving record of Southern Jewish culture and the dynamics of one small Southern town.”

  —Rocky Mount Telegram

  “A fascinating look at part of the social fabric of the country.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “Charmingly captures a piece of American Jewish history that needs to be preserved… . We are indebted to Stella Suberman for telling her family’s story so well, thus greatly augmenting our knowledge about Jews in the South.”

  —The National Jewish Post & Opinion

  “Absorbing… . A lovingly told, intimate family story.”

  —Cleveland Jewish News

  “There is a wonderful sense of ritual here, and family closeness, that makes this a warm, humorous, engaging story to remember. There are better-than-fiction plot twists, tragedy, and comedy. And there is history from all sides—the South in the 1920s, rural America, merchandising, Jewish family life in a Gentile setting—that has never before been written in Suberman’s way.” —The Daily Oklahoman

  “Suberman’s fine writing and her ability to record tones and scents as well as images make this a lively and engaging story… . This will attract casual readers and serve as a useful auxiliary text in classrooms.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Perceptive and infinitely funny, a welcome glimpse into a South gone by, as seen from an unusual viewpoint.”

  —The Anniston Star

  “A singularly heart-wrenching, uplifting account of Suberman’s parents, a Jewish couple trying to find a place in a small Southern town… . A wonderfully nostalgic retelling of one family’s struggle to make it— despite the anti-Semitism of the 1920s.”

  —The Courier-Tribune (Asheboro, North Carolina)

  “If I were a Jewish parent, I would place a copy in the hands of my children. It would go far to let them understand their heritage and community from which they came.”

  —Daily Press (Newport News, Virginia)

  “A warm thoughtful portrait of what it once meant to be an immigrant Jew with aspirations in the midst of America.”

  —Lilith magazine

  “The Jew Store exposes ideals that tear families apart … and inevitably hold them together. It takes a close look at the political, economic, and societal thinking of the early twentieth century. Best, it is a rare golden-key opening to the determinations of survival and how one’s most serious determinations can ruin lives. It is a vivid representation of Jewish life in the South. It is wonderful.”

  —ForeWord magazine

  THE JEW STORE

  STELLA SUBERMAN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although this is a true story, I have changed the names of the persons whose story it is as well as the names of the town and county in which their story was set. In so doing, I’d like to think I have offered them at least the gesture of privacy.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  708 Broadway

  New York, New York 10003

  ©1998 by Stella Suberman. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Suberman, Stella.

  The Jew store / Stella Suberman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56512-198-8

  1. Suberman, Stella—Childhood and youth. 2. Jews—

  Tennessee— Biography. 3. Jewish business
people—

  Tennessee—Biography. 4. General stores —Tennessee.

  I. Title.

  F445.J5S83 1998

  976.8’004924’0092—dc21

  [B] 98-20996

  CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-330-4 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-56512-330-1 (paper)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  FOR JACK

  AND

  FOR RICK

  FOR AREAL BARGAIN,

  WHILE YOU’RE MAKING A LIVING,

  YOU SHOULD MAKE ALSO A LIFE.

  —AARON BRONSON

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1 THE DESTINATION

  2 AVRAM PLOTCHNIKOFF’S NEW NAME

  3 A NICE JEWISH GIRL

  4 FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE

  5 GOD’S (SO TO SPEAK) COUNTRY

  6 MISS BROOKIE’S COUSIN TOM

  7 XENOPHOBIA

  8 MY FATHER’S FANCY FOOTWORK

  9 BRONSON’S LOW-PRICED STORE

  10 GREEN EYESHADES

  11 NO PICNIC

  12 OPENING DAY

  13 IN CHRIST’S NAME, AMEN

  14 A GLEAM IN MY MOTHER’S EYE

  15 TWO SOCIAL CALLS

  16 A HOUSE AND NEIGHBORS

  17 MY MOTHER’S DILEMMA

  18 SETH’S NEW JOB

  19 NEW YORK AUNTS

  20 THE BAR MITZVAH QUESTION

  21 GENTILES

  22 JOEY’S HOMECOMING

  23 MIRIAM’S ROMANCE

  24 AUNT HANNAH’S WEDDING

  25 CONCORDIA’S SAVIOR

  26 MIRIAM’S RESCUE

  27 PUSH COMES TO SHOVE

  I wish to express deepest gratitude to that most expert of guides, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who helped me find my way back to Concordia.

  PROLOGUE

  If you leave the main highways and travel on one of the county roads in northwestern Tennessee—which is what I did in August of 1995—you will see endless cotton fields. I had last seen the cotton fields of Tennessee in 1933, the year my family left the South. Then the fields were small, family-owned, bounded by fences or hedgerows; nowadays they stretch out with no lines of demarcation and have the look of big business. It is, however, still a quiet place, a rural land. I was born there, in the small town I am calling Concordia.

  I left the highway out of Nashville and got onto County Road 431 because of a sentimental wish to travel the same road that my parents, my brother, Joey, then seven, and my sister, Miriam, five, had traveled by horse-drawn wagon in 1920—two years before I was born. Although County Road 431 was then a clay road meandering along, it made its way, as now, west through Weakley County and into the county I have named Banion, of which Concordia is the county seat.

  Until this trip I had not been back. A Buddhist text tells us that the elephant is “the wisest of all the animals, the only one who remembers his former lives, and he remains motionless for long periods of time, meditating thereon.” This may be fine for the elephant, but Concordia is one of those towns that has been steadily losing population, and I am a woman of more than a certain age. By 1995 I was feeling an urgency to forgo meditating and take a look at the site of my childhood before it or I disappeared. A grandchild told me I was having a “roots emergency,” and I guess I was.

  I decided on a one-day visit—enough, I thought, to cover a town only six blocks one way and five the other. And I planned not to visit people, only places.

  County Road 431 was never very lively. You see the cotton fields, but you need patience to get to the signs—the BANION COUNTY one and then the one that says CONCORDIA TOWN LIMITS. After a church and a graveyard turn up, you are almost immediately on First Street.

  First Street seemed little changed from what I remembered. Though no longer cobblestoned, it is still only three blocks in length, stores on both sides. I went quickly to our old store, which had been in the center block—the Number One location in that day’s merchantspeak.

  You used to be able to spot our store by the gold letters on the plate-glass windows: BRONSON’S LOW-PRICED STORE. My father had splurged on those letters. For customer morale, he said, so customers would not feel that “low-priced” meant cheap.

  Our store is now Swain’s Electronics, one of the few stores on the street that still sells things. Most of the properties that are occupied offer services. Some persevere from my day. The First National Bank, for example, seems as in charge as ever, its brass plaque gleaming perhaps for the ages. At the end of the street the train depot is still operating, if minimally. And across the railroad tracks the church steeple rises into the air, though the church may no longer be New Bethel Baptist.

  Bronson’s Low-Priced Store was Concordia’s “Jew store.” There had been none until my family got there, and in those days it was the custom for every small Southern town to have one. A Jew store—and that is what people called it—was a modest establishment selling soft goods—clothing and domestics (bedding, towels, yard goods)—to the poorer people of the town—the farmers, the sharecroppers, the blacks, the factory workers. We were the only Jews among Concordia’s inhabitants, of which, when my family arrived in 1920, there were 5,318, counting whites and Negroes.

  For us Concordia actually began at the house of Miss Brookie Simmons. As I pulled my rental car up to it and sat looking, it seemed much as it had when I had last seen it and, I have no doubt, much as it had been when Aaron and Reba Bronson and family had pulled up to it themselves on their arrival in Concordia.

  Though I was not there on that first day, it doesn’t really matter. The story of it, and the events leading up to and following it, have been so often recalled and relived in my family, they have long seemed as much my experiences as the things I remember as having happened to me. My mother and father are with us no longer for the nostalgia sessions that so engrossed us, but Miriam and Joey are still around. Miriam and Joey live up North; I, in the South, though among a mixed population of Southerners and Northerners. Although Miriam has been living up North for many years, her Southern accent is as strong as ever, if not stronger. Joey (“Joe” now to most people but “Joey” as ever to Miriam and me) lost his a long time ago. Mine is still there, more there at certain times than at others: When Southerners are present, my speech is dense with y’alls and mercys and much less so when they’re not.

  Joey and Miriam and I get together as often as possible, and when we do, out come the stories, along with the snapshots and the newspaper clippings and the old store newspaper ads.

  Like Banion County and Concordia, most names are not real ones; but what happened and why are pretty much the truth, or, as my father would say, “close enough so nobody argues about it.”

  CHAPTER 1

  THE DESTINATION

  My mother always said she’d felt something of a let-down when she first saw the sign reading CONCORDIA TOWN LIMITS. They had been riding for three days along rutted dirt roads north and west of Nashville. Somehow she had come to believe that when they got to the town that my father had chosen for their new home—their destination, he said—there would be something remarkable about it, something that would set it apart from the other small Tennessee communities through which they had been traveling. But here they were, at the “outskwirts,” as my father called it all his life, and what she saw were only more cotton fields, yet another wooden church with a cross on top, one more cemetery. So what should she have expected? she asked herself. An elevated train? Fancy gates?

  My mother wasn’t exactly overjoyed at being there. Truly, ever since they had left New York City, her mood had been like a thing on her chest, as she used to say. Two years and three months before, the family had ridden the train south to Nashville, where at least there lived other Jewish families, where there was a shul, or synagogue, and the prospect of a glass of tea in the afternoons with the rabbi’s wife. Now they were about to enter a small town in Banion County, west Tennessee, fifty miles southwest of Paducah, Kentucky, wherever that was. They were going to try to open a stor
e in a place where they would be the only Jews in town.

  These feelings of my mother’s were very unlike those of my father. Indeed, in disposition the two of them were very different. She was the one who looked back, fretted, viewed with alarm, often brooded. He lived for the future, crossed bridges when he came to them and not before, hoped always for the best.

  In looks, except that they were both small in stature, they were opposites as well. My father’s appearance was bright and light, his straight hair “blondish,” his eyes famously blue, his smile quickly there. My mother was dark haired and dark eyed, and her smile came less readily.

  As they rode toward town, true to form, my father was ebullient, my mother apprehensive. Oy, what were they doing here, she was asking herself, herself and her husband and her two children, here among these, as my father called them, “country Tennesseans”? From what she had seen of them along the road, she had already declared them a curious people. Were they not strange, these women who charged out of their houses (in bonnets stiff like iron) to sweep with brooms their dirt yards? Whoever heard?

  And oy, the church spires. As she looked now toward the town, she counted six. Or maybe seven. In such a small town, so many churches? From what she had heard, in the South prayers went to God and to—um—Jesus, so why not just one big praying place, come one, come all? The deep gloom all at once upon her, she did what she always did when this happened—put her head in her hands and moved it back and forth, as if tolling it. “Like a bell my head was in those days” was the way she used to describe it.

  As the oft-repeated tale went, when, on July 16, 1920, the Bronsons reached the edge of town, there was in the sky a heavy black cloud outlined in cold blue. Within a few minutes the rain began falling. My father pulled the wagon into the graveyard, and my mother joined Joey and Miriam under the tarpaulin, which already sheltered the family’s few possessions. My father stayed out in the now-hammering rain and stared at the tomb-stones. On one a poem started, “So sinks the sun after a gentle day,” and he thought it was nice that somebody’s day had been gentle, his own not having been gentle by anybody’s call.

  My father had wanted to go by train; Concordia was a county seat, and therefore the train stopped there. But trains meant fares and freight charges, and with the debt to my grandfather for their trip to Nashville still outstanding, my mother—for whom a debt was, as she put it, “like a growth”—argued otherwise. No, she said, they should think of “a penny saved, a penny to pay back with” and should therefore go by wagon. As if it were a matter of choosing the El over the streetcar to get to 125th Street, my father said.