Third Entry

I haven't posted here for awhile - sorry about the delay. This is all I have transcribed so far. I hope to get more transcribed soon.
A note about these postings - sometimes my grandmother used yiddish words and I tried my best to spell them phonetically. If anyone can help me out on the words and proper spelling, that would be appreciated. A series of question marks means I'm not sure what was said. K.

Further down on the East side, down Ludlow, Essex, that area of streets were more the Polish and Western Jews, the Lithuanians, what we used to call the “lithvox.” We used to call them the herrings cause they ate a lot of herrings, just as they called the Romanians the “pressas” or the “chassas” because Romanians were know to be great eaters, which we were.
So the area was sort of like divided into little enclaves, and yet everybody was together in a way. Because they had synagogues, but even they were divided a little bit into areas where people went to. Oh I remember we went to one on Eldridge Street, magnificent. The pews were beautiful, beautiful wood, dark polished wood and the pews were all red velvet. Of course, the men sat downstairs and the women sat upstairs, that's the Jewish religion.
And I'm gonna tell a tale out of school now. We all went to synagogue. My mother was very religious, God knows, I'll talk about her more later. My Father knew everything, he knew every prayer by heart, read the Hebrew, knew the book backwards and forwards, but he wasn't quite as fussy as my Mother was about the religious things, the things you should or shouldn't do. For example, how could he stay in “schule” all day on Rosh Hashanah or Yum Kippur, and not have a cigarette? Excuse to take me out for a walk, 'cause dear sweet little Blossom shouldn't spend the whole day in that atmosphere, it was so close, you know. Take me out for a breath of fresh air, ha ha. We'd take a walk under the bridge there, on Eldridge Street where the bridge came over, and behind the things were no body could see us, and Papa would smoke a cigarette. He knew I would never tell and of course I never did. So I got my fresh air and Papa had a cigarette, then we went back in again.
That was an interesting phase of life on the East Side. There were a lot of interesting phases of life on the East Sides. We lived in tenements. Apartments house they called them later on. Tenement houses. They were walk up, flats. In the early days, they didn't have hot water, the toilets were out in the yard, sometimes in the hall. We didn't have Frigidaires, naturally, we had the old ice boxes in those days, which Louise knows about where you had the wooden ice box and you had a brick of ice in the top and in the bottom is where you kept the food and underneath it all you put a pan to catch the water as the ice melted. And if you didn't remember to empty that pan, you had lots of problems, you had a flood. But that was part of our life. I remember wood stoves, I remember that old ice box, in the winter we didn't even use that. In the winter we had a box built on the outside of the window sill in which we put the butter and the cream and stuff like that because it was nice and cold and it froze. And the milk in those days was not homogenized so the cream would rise to the top and pop out of the top of the bottles, pure cream!
Those are things indigenous to the way we lived, everybody lived the same way. Little later on they had toilets in the apartments, and then eventually hot water and stuff like that. But I lived through them all. I remember one apartment we lived in where there was a bath tub in the kitchen, an old fashioned tub covered with a large wooden board. My mother put a fancy cover on it and we used that as a table, as a study table, as a whatever, and when anybody had to take a bath, everybody scooted out, you took the board off, Mama filled the tub with water and you took your bath, and then you covered it up again.
I don't know, we lived through it, it didn't bother us. We were real clean, my Mother was.. nobody could be cleaner then my Mother was, God was she a pain in the neck, she was so clean. And it was hard to keep clean in those days, it wasn't easy because you didn't have what you have today. We didn't have the cleansers, we didn't have the lovely Formicas, the dishes or anything. It was tough on these women, they worked real hard. Did their own sewing, their own mending, their own everything, They worked so hard. Sewed all the children's clothing. It was fun, but it was a hard life. And we were not rich, but we didn't consider ourselves poor.
Well, maybe we were poor, maybe we weren't poor. We always had enough to eat. We may not have had steak every day, that's for sure, we wouldn't want it anyhow. And they way they cooked, especially the way my Mother cooked, I know, it didn't matter what she made, it always tasted great. The simplest foods she would use. Nobody every threw anything out, you had potatoes left over, you made potato latkes. You had something else left over you made something else out of it. So, as I say, we never really knew we were poor, though I'm sure by other standards, we were.
But we were largely happy. I know one thing, in our household, Papa came home at 6:00 for supper. Every one of us had to be washed, hands washed, face washed, at the table, clean and ready, not a minute after six. Six, on the button, on the dot, and we were there. And we all ate together.
Mama made full meals, I was just thinking the other day about the kind of meals she used to make. An appetizer, a soup, a main course, a salad, mostly for dessert, fruits and nuts, there always was a bowl of fruits and nuts on the table. We always had salad with every meal. Not too many sweets, not too many desserts, but for special occasions, especially holidays, we had all the fancy things Mama used to make so beautifully. The strudel, the Saturday morning crescent coffee cake that my Mother made, God if I could only taste it today. Full meals. But we weren't fat, none of us were fat really, except my brother Meyer, but he was just naturally a fat guy. So, as I said, we ate well.
Some people were more enterprising. We had a friend, my father's friend. A friend or a relative, I don't know what he was. ???? He couldn't do anything, again he was just a learned man but not skilled in any trade. He started by buying handkerchiefs, you could buy handkerchiefs I think, like say, two for a penny. Stand on the street corner and sell the handkerchiefs, linen, beautiful pure linen handkerchiefs sell them for a penny a piece. No he had two cents, so he bought four handkerchiefs, then he had four cents so he bought eight handkerchiefs. And that's the way he did it and he worked until he worked himself up and he got into the linen business. Then he started to go from door to door selling damask, gorgeous. We had... all the table clothes and napkins we had in our house, don't forget, were linen, pure linen that Mama used to wash and starch and iron, beautiful. No wash and wear stuff that you threw in the machine and threw in the dryer! Everything had to be starched and pressed and the table was always set like that, beautifully set.
So we sat around the table, we ate our wonderful meals, we talked politics, whatever. The only time we didn't talk controversial subjects was when we ate fish on the count of there was bones in the fish, we shouldn't choke to death. Papa said, “no talking during fish!” And we were happy.
We lived most of my life that I can remember we lived in the same area around Forsyth and Broom Street. We moved frequently because in those days, if you were willing to sign a two year lease on a flat, you got one months free rent. So you signed the lease for two years, you got your free months rent, at the end of two years you moved to another house. Across the street, around the corner, but at another house, another flat and again you got your free month. Well, that was important to us that free months rent. So we moved around. I know we lived at 109 Forsyth Street, we lived in 113 Forsyth Street, we lived across the street at 110 Forsyth Street, we lived on 242 Broom, where else do I remember. That's the way we jumped around. A couple of times we tried moving out of the neighborhood. My father was like me, I'm like my father. I spent my whole life in the same area, I was perfectly happy with the East Side, I loved it. My mother always wanted to get away. I think she would have liked to live in the country, I really do. Of course, she said, you know, you did what your husband wanted, you did what you had to do, and you did it. So we moved... once we moved to the Bronx. For two years we lived in the Bronx, I cannot remember the street. But I do remember there were house on one side, the other side was practically all empty.