Up From Orchard Street

1 Manya's Restaurant My father never felt sorry for himself because he had no memory of his father; in fact, he reveled in his semiorphaned state because it had brought him closer to his mother, Manya, and to the young girls and older women who doted on him. Born Abraham Jacob, he called himself Jack after he heard the name shouted on the streets of the Lower East Side. He emerged a precocious, mimetic child who talked English in long paragraphs, Yiddish in short ones, taught himself to read, sing, dance and make up enchanting stories without being urged. When he was four, to keep him company Manya sent for her seven-year-old sister, Bertha, born in Odessa after teenage Manya and her groom escaped to America. Everyone assumed that Bertha was Manya's daughter. She had neither the time nor the inclination to correct them. In the crowded noisy streets of New York's Jewish ghetto, no one put too fine a point on dates of birth, names or truth telling. Manya worked like a dervish to support the two children, starting at dawn in Greenspan's bakery, where she baked bread and scrubbed heavy pots during the day, and then racing to her night job at a gaming room on Forsyth Street, where men played dice, cards, chess and checkers and drank a burning substance concocted by the owner, aptly referred to as Tyvil, or the devil. The sign on his window read Cold Drinks, which translated into Yiddish as bronffin, prepared from rubbing alcohol, whose recipe he guarded with zeal. He possessed no license to serve alcohol but the seltzer was legitimate, splashed into glasses that could have done with more zealous washing. Manya's white hair at the age of twenty fascinated Tyvil and he hired her because she was fast on her feet and aroused desire in every man who had blood in his veins. She carried a flyswatter to keep them at bay. Tyvil's original intention was to have Manya steal bread from Greenspan's bakery to serve with his barely fermented booze--he had often spied her coming from work with a fishnet bag filled with unsalable odds and ends of rolls, pumpernickel and rye. She refused his request and almost pushed him off the sidewalk in her indignation. "What are you, some uptown Yankee, you won't be an American goniff?" Tyvil said, laughing. Her blazing tongue put Tyvil in awe of her forever. "If I steal from Greenspan, then I steal from you. You want a goniff, find one, but not me." "You're a freethinker. A woman who works Friday nights and Saturday mornings and you make a shrei about stale bread?" "Need breaks iron," she retorted. "I have two children to feed. You want to call me a freethinker because I work when others daven, call all you want." "You they should also call Tyvil. I'd die for that fire in bed." Manya swatted both of his hands with her flyswatter and ran off. He pursued her. "Wait. You have the job. You'll wash glasses, serve seltzer, maybe a little something to eat . . ." Her reputation as a cook spread without her knowledge--for the soups she brought to the bakery in a lidded tin for her midday meal, for her stews, for the scraps of dough that she turned into what the Russians called pelmeni and the Jews kreplach, dumplings stuffed with chopped meat and onions. She prepared hot borscht with beef in winter, shchi or cold borscht in summer, chicken cooked with prunes or a tsimmes with sweet potatoes, carrots and prunes. Tyvil decided to suppress his lust and opt for Manya's cooking--he was either a bigamist with two wives, or unmarried with two mistresses. He persuaded Manya to cook one dish each night; in exchange she could keep the tips and bring her son, Jack, with her. These last two concessions sealed the arrangement. Bertha, her baby sister, did not mind sleeping with their neighbor, Mrs. Molka, until Manya returned from her night job,Widmer, Eleanor is the author of 'Up From Orchard Street', published 2005 under ISBN 9780553804003 and ISBN 0553804006.