Almonds and Raisins

by Maisie Mosco

  Sigmund had no clients, or hope of collecting outstanding debts from men who could not afford to feed their children. His own family were existing on potato soup, except for once a week when Yankel Cohen, who owed him for a suit, would turn up apologetically with a couple of eggs laid by the scrawny hen the Cohens kept in their back yard, and that evening the potatoes would be grated and mixed with eggs and flour to provide a meal of “latkes.”

  One morning, Rachel found Sigmund standing in the middle of the kitchen surveying his books, with an agonized look on his face.

  “Oh no!” she cried as he marched resolutely to a shelf. “I won’t let you!”

  But Sigmund reached down a volume despite her protests and opened the dresser drawer to find some paper in which to wrap it.

  Rachel picked up the book. “The King of Shnorrers? How can you sell it when your father gave it to you?”

  “My father would understand why I’m selling this book first.”

  “I would like to understand also. Tell me.”

  “You’ve forgotten Yiddish? You don’t know anymore that shnorrer means beggar?” He took the book from her and began to wrap it, lovingly. “What Zangwill has written here is engraved upon my mind and my heart, I’ve read it so many times. So why do I need to see the words printed on the page? From books you can’t make kefulte fish, my dear Rachel and they won’t pay the rent when the man calls to collect it this afternoon. You’d prefer me to ask for a handout from the Benevolent Fund?”

  Rachel paled and shook her head.

  “When things get better we’ll buy back the book. I’ll take it to Carl’s shop and maybe he’ll manage not to sell it. And meanwhile I won’t have to be a shnorrer.”

  After Sigmund had gone to the bookshop, Rachel slid the other volumes along the shelf to fill the space The King of Shnorrers had occupied; she did not want him to be reminded of its absence. But as time went by and more spaces appeared on the shelves, she was unable to disguise them and could not bear to see the distress in her husband’s eyes whenever he entered the room.

  The Sandbergs had nothing to sell except the furniture Salaman had given them and Abraham would not part with it.

  “We’ll manage,” he said to Sarah. “We’ve had hard times before.”

  “This hard never,” she replied, putting bread and herring on the supper table. “When did we not have even a quarter of chicken between us for Shabbos?” She sliced the bread, for which there was no butter. “And why you won’t part with a sofa you’ve never once sat upon I don’t understand!”

  “Shall I ask Mr. Radinsky if I can work for him in the evenings like David used to?” Nathan suggested, but his mother did not reply. A spare time job would be a means of escaping from the house, as well as a help to his family. “Why won’t you let me, Mother?”

  “It was bad enough your brother had to do it.”

  “Just keep your mind on your schoolwork Nat,” David said sharply. “That’s all we ask.”

  “David’s right,” Esther echoed.

  “I don’t get much chance not to, do I?” Nathan retorted with uncharacteristic petulance. His mother and David made sure of that. Sometimes he felt as if the whole family cared about nothing except him coming top of the class and passing the scholarship. Lou was to take the exams, too, but his family weren’t at him all the time, they let him go out to play marbles in the street sometimes after school. You’d think it was a sin for me to spend a single minute thinking about anything but school! he thought resentfully. It’s a good job I enjoy reading, but they’d make me read even if I didn’t.

  “Any more grumbles out of you, Nat and you’ll hear from me about it,” David frowned as his little brother cast a sullen glance at him. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  Sarah went into the scullery and returned with a piece of cheese, which she put on Nathan’s plate.

  “Why’re you giving this to me, Mother? When nobody else is having any?”

  “Mrs. Moritz sent it for you. They sold some books again today.”

  Nathan’s face flushed. “You said that last week when I was the only one who had a fish ball for supper.”

  “It’s the truth,” Esther said. “Carl told me.”

  “But it makes me feel terrible! And I won’t eat it unless everyone else has a bit, too.” Nathan divided the cheese into six pieces and felt as if he was carving up a treasured volume from his godfather’s library. “I might be the youngest, but I’m no different from anyone else in the family.”

  “Of course you are,” Sammy smiled. “You’re the one who’s going to be somebody.”

  Nathan saw his mother glance at David, then Sammy looked uncomfortable, as if he had said something he ought not to have said, and a sudden silence descended. “What’s the matter?” he asked scanning the strained faces which had not looked that way a moment ago. “What did Sammy mean?”

  “We’ll tell you one day,” his mother said as she dished up the frugal meal.

  Nathan sat with the cubes of cheese cupped in his hand, looking from one face to another, but nobody met his gaze.

  “So give everyone a bit of cheese if you’re going to, Nat,” Abraham said restoring the atmosphere to normal.

  “"He’d take the food from the child’s mouth!” Sarah exclaimed.

  Abraham chewed the flavoursome morsel his son had just handed him. “He isn’t selfish and that I like to see. It’s also important he should stay that way.”

  Sarah sighed as she cut into her herring. Tonight she had fried them. Last night she’d served them soused. And the night before that they’d had borscht as watery as Malka Berkowitz’s had sometimes been. Would the way her family was living now ever be any different? Sammy had been laid off from the factory and Abraham and David were bringing home only a nominal sum, paid to ensure their allegiance to Salaman until business revived. Esther’s commission at the gown shop had recently dwindled to nothing; even the ladies who lived in fine houses and wore smart clothes had begun to feel the pinch.

  She watched Nathan anxiously as he ate his herring, afraid he would become ill unless she could provide him with a more varied diet. The scholarship exam he was to take would set him on the path she had decided was to be his, but where would the money come from to keep him there? The sixpences and shillings and half-crowns which must be hoarded week in, week out, as a squirrel accumulates its store of nuts for the time of need. She couldn’t remember when she’d last been able to save a farthing and the lapse in building up her doctor-son’s education fund was an added anxiety; she already visualized him with a stethoscope around his neck, a dark and handsome young man whose name everyone would mention with bated breath. But meanwhile, how to nourish him was the pressing problem.

  Wispy-haired Mrs. Kaplan provided the answer when Sarah met her on Bury New Road clutching a bloodstained parcel to her flaccid bosom.

  “Someone’s left you a fortune you’re able to afford meat?” Sarah inquired.

  “I’ve got a lodger now,” Mrs. Kaplan informed her.

  Sarah knew several women who had taken lodgers recently, men and boys who drifted from town to town in search of work. These transients always had benefit cash with which to pay the landlady and this enabled her to supplement her family larder. The Sandbergs no longer had room for a lodger, but nor did Mrs. Kaplan.

  “You’ve got six children at home. What’ve you done? Rolled him in a perineh in the back yard?”

  Mrs. Kaplan bristled, which she was always quick to do. She had on the same darned shawl she had worn years ago, when she bargained with Mr. Radinsky over the bruised apple, and it looked as if it had not seen soap and water from that day to this. The neighbours thought her dirty, loud-mouthed and arrogant and Sarah agreed with them.

  “If a person doesn’t have room they can still find it!” she snapped. “You’ve forgotten the old days, when everyone lived with landsleit, how people always found a way?”

  Sarah eyed the blowzy woman thoughtfully and with new re
spect. She had never before encountered anyone who was more resourceful than herself.

  A few days later, David arrived home from work and found a strange young man seated by the fire. Sarah had decided to present her family with a fait accompli.

  “His name’s Ben Klein,” she said with a smile. “He’s come here from Leeds to find work, so he’ll live with us while he’s looking.”

  Ben gave David a lopsided grin. His face was long and sallow, but his eyes were intelligent, with a humorous glint which warmed his somewhat saturnine countenance.

  The Sandberg brothers liked him on sight. Had they not, they would have objected to having him share their bedroom. That night Nathan moved into the big bed with David and Sammy, vacating his own for the lodger.

  Ben fitted into the family as if he had always been there. This was partly because he had no home of his own and found the Sandbergs’ a comforting place to be. His parents had died in an influenza epidemic soon after he left school and he had been fending for himself ever since. He was David’s age, but looked older. In repose, his face was the kind which had never looked young.

  “I’ve lost count of how many houses I’ve lived in,” he said at supper. “Leeds, Bradford, Newcastle, back to Leeds again when I was demobbed and now Manchester!” He was enjoying Sarah’s potato latkes, having paid her a week’s money in advance which allowed her to buy some eggs. “But food like this, Mrs. Sandberg, I’ve never tasted.”

  “With my mother flattery will get you nowhere,” Esther told him from across the table and he shot his crooked smile at her. When he smiles he’s not so ugly, she thought with casual interest, though her mind was on Carl whom she was meeting after the meal. She returned Ben’s smile.

  Sarah noticed the exchange as she slipped another latke onto Ben’s plate to welcome him at his first meal with them. But it did not assume significance in her mind until the following week, when Ben came home and said he had found a job.

  “You waved a magic wand, maybe?” she exclaimed in astonishment. The rest of the family were amazed, too. There were no jobs to be had.

  Ben stood warming his behind at the hearth, smiling to himself about how it had happened. He found it hard to believe, also. “I was hanging around Flat Iron Market this morning,” he volunteered. “Spying out the land.”

  Abraham chuckled. “You’re thinking of buying it?”

  “Well not tomorrow,” Ben countered with a laugh.

  There was something about the way he said it which made David prickle with interest. Ben was like himself. Ambitious.

  Sarah had recognised this, too. “The day after, perhaps?” she asked, smiling.

  “A shop’s what I’d really like, but I wouldn’t mind a market stall to begin with,” Ben said confidently.

  Esther brought him down to earth. “Tell us about the job already.”

  “Well I saw this old Goy puffing and panting, trying to unload some crates of pots and pans off his cart. So I started to help him. At first he wouldn’t let me, he thought I’d want paying for it.”

  “You wouldn’t have?” Esther asked.

  “Listen, money I need, but I’m not that kind of shnorrer!” Ben said hotly.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “If a person does a deal with me, it’s different.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, too.”

  “When I said I was just trying to help him, he let me do it,” Ben continued. “Then he asked me to lay the stuff out on his stall. ‘You can’t expect all that for nothing,’ I told him. ‘What makes you think I do?’ he said. He told me to get on with it and watch the stall while he went, excuse me, to the lavatory. When he got back I’d served some customers. The prices were marked on the stock, so I knew what to charge. He sat and watched me serve a woman who only wanted a cup and saucer, but I sold her a plate that matched them. ‘You’ve got a real Jewish head on you,’ he said when I handed him the money. ‘You can’t expect me to have a Christian one, can you?’ I told him. Then he offered me the job.”

  “Mazeltov!” Sarah chuckled. “So let’s have supper, there’s another working man in the house to feed!”

  When Esther returned from her outing with Carl that night, her mother was waiting up for her.

  “You’ve been somewhere nice, Esther?”

  “For a walk in Heaton Park. What else can we afford?”

  “With Carl nothing and never,” Sarah said bluntly. “What will he ever be, that sweetheart of yours? Bad times or good?” It hurt her to speak this way about the son of her friends, but she had to think of her own daughter and the truth was the truth.

  “Maybe he’ll be manager of the bookshop one day,” Esther said loyally, knowing this was unlikely.

  “Like a horse would fly if God had given it wings.” Carl had been born without drive and Esther knew it as well as she did. Where was her sense?

  “I love him, Mother.”

  “And from love comes children. Who will support Carl Moritz’s children while his wife is pregnant with the next one and can’t go out to work?”

  “Stop it!” Esther cried.

  “You’re the one who should stop it. You must’ve been touched with lunacy that day on the tram to close your eyes to what you’re heading for.”

  Esther stared at her with hatred.

  “So you hate me for telling you the truth,” Sarah shrugged. “I still have to tell it to you, I’m your mother.”

  “I couldn’t live without him,” Esther said flatly.

  Sarah laughed. “You think there’s only one man in the world for you? When another is right here in the house?”

  Esther looked surprised.

  “And a boy in a million Ben Klein is.” She paid him the highest of compliments. “Another David.”

  “Where’ve you got this daft idea from?” Esther asked derisively. “We’re always lashing out at each other. I don’t think he even likes me.”

  “No?” Sarah smiled. “He had a little chat with me about you tonight.” She did not tell her daughter it had been at her instigation, so she could sound out his feelings.

  “Hm,” Esther murmured. Then she told her mother to forget it and went upstairs to bed.

  The following week, when Carl was stocktaking at the shop and Esther had nothing to do, Ben invited her to go dancing. Sarah did not so much as blink an eyelid when she heard her accept.

  Chapter 7

  David’s determination to raise himself from the ghetto had not faltered, but by 1922 he was no further forward and there was no sign of another boom which would make it possible for him to demand a worthwhile wage from Salaman in return for managing the factory.

  Many of the workers were still laid off, or on short time, and he could not shake off the feeling of stagnation which had been with him since he returned from the army. The lines they had manufactured before the war were still being made in the same old way, shapeless gabardines to be thrown on carelessly to keep out the rain.

  But that’s what they’re for, he cogitated watching the blessed torrent which had just begun to pour from the skies. The sun had been shining when he came to work, as it had all day long for the past week, and the familiar anxiety about a dry season had pervaded the workroom. David had come downstairs to escape from it and was standing in the doorway, getting a breath of air during the brief morning tea break.

  Bessie brushed past him carrying a shopping bag. “My dad fancies cucumbers with sour cream for his dinner today. All week when it wasn’t raining he didn’t fancy it!” she grumbled tying a scarf over her head. “I’ll get drowned, going to the shop. I left my umbrella at my Auntie Rivka’s.”

  “Where’s your raincoat?” David asked her. She was wearing a beautifully cut beige coat, which Sigmund Moritz had tailored to her ample proportions.

  “I wouldn’t be seen dead in one!” she snorted as she set off down the puddled street.

  When David went back upstairs he did not eat the bagel he usually had in the break, but stood by the workroom
window thinking of what Bessie had said. He’d heard Miriam disparage raincoats, too and had never seen her wear one. Most women would rather get wet than wear one and who could blame them? He eyed a bale of fawn gabardine. It was not unlike covert cloth in appearance, of which Bessie’s coat was made. David’s mind began to buzz. The factory could not reproduce the fine lines of a Sigmund Moritz garment, but surely Eli could cut something similar?

  “You’re not eating today, David?” Millie said to him. “You forgot to bring something? So share mine.”

  He looked up and saw her offering him a black bread wedge. “I’m not hungry, thanks Millie,” he smiled and went to get a pencil and some paper, gripped by an unprecedented excitement. Half-an-hour later, he had completed the first of the many fashion sketches he was to make in his manufacturing career.

  “You’ve become an artist?” Eli put on his glasses and studied the clumsy drawing which David showed him. “So what is it? It looks like a lady with no legs or face.”

  “It’s a coat.”

  “Very nice,” Eli lied and handed the sketch back to him.

  “I want you to make a pattern for it.”

  Eli snatched the sketch and looked at it more carefully. “I should make a pattern for this?”

  “Why not?”

  The cutter rubbed his stubbled chin nervously. “But what will Mr. Salaman say?”

  “Let me worry about that,” David smiled.

  When the pattern was made, David changed one or two details and instructed Eli to get on with the next stage.

  “I should cut it from cloth?” He was still worrying about Salaman’s reaction to wasting time and paper on the pattern, if he found out.

  “That’s what you usually cut coats from, isn’t it?”

  Eli surveyed the pattern. “But this is a real coat for a lady, David. Who makes real coats to wear in the rain?”

  “We’re going to,” David told him.

  “Mr. Salaman knows?”