Ziporah’s eyes went wide with fright. Hannah fought for her breath and gradually regained control. She gripped her apron and pressed it hard into her face. Ziporah drew a chair near her mother’s and extended her thin arms. Hannah rocked in her daughter’s embrace and cried until she was spent.
“I’m sorry to be so weak Ziporah.” She drew back and sniffed, pulling out the handkerchief. “I feel like this cold is going to finish me.”
“Mama. You are still not well from the flu. You go lie down. I will finish with the laundry when it thaws and hang it here near the stove. Let me look after you.”
Hannah sighed heavily. “All right. I will rest a bit. You are a good girl, Ziporah. You should not have a life so hard.”
“Mama. It will be better soon. In summer it is always better.”
“Ha! Summer in Winnipeg. Then the air will be thick with mosquitoes and we’ll have mud up to our noses and people all around us will be dropping dead from typhoid, scarlet fever, consumption, and who knows what else. I can’t wait,” Mama snorted. Her hand flew out to swipe at her disgust.
Ziporah heard the door close, then the groan of the cot, and sighed with relief. A few minutes off of her feet would help Mama to rebound. It almost always did. She worried a lot about her mother. There was too much on her shoulders, it was plain to see. Ever since the news from London of the deaths of Aunt Esther and Uncle Leib, Mama seemed different. Something seemed to have broken in her. Ziporah longed for the mother she had when they were still in the old country, when Ziporah was a little girl. She was different then. She was strong and determined then. She had hope.
Ziporah sat down to think. What could she do? She was almost twelve. She would soon be a woman by Jewish law, Zaida had said. Slowly it came to her that her talks with her grandfather were more than nice stories about the responsibilities of Jewish men and Jewish women. She thought of Malka in England, just a year older than she was and working as a grown woman works. Ziporah knew she was ready, also, to have more responsibility in the family.
She glanced about the kitchen looking hard to find what her mother would instantly see to do. She straightened up a towel and gave the floor a quick sweep. As she lit the lamp on the table, an idea began to take shape in her mind. It came simply and unexpectedly like an answer to a prayer. It was the seed of a monumental plan, the kind of idea that Papa would think of. She became so excited thinking about it that she laughed with happiness and hopped up and down. She would have to speak to her father about it first.
Moving efficiently about, she set the table for the family. She sliced the bread and was careful to count that there were just enough slices, with thicker pieces for Papa and Zaida. Her mind was on fire with her plan. Finally she heard the familiar clank of the door latch on the stable and looked out to see Papa was unhitching Queenie. She wrapped herself in Mama’s heavy shawl and ran out to have a private word with him.
“We finished a little bit early today. It is easier to come when there is still light,” he said smiling in reaction to her obvious delight in seeing him. “How is Mama feeling today? Is she better with the coughing?”
“The coughing is a little better, Papa,” she answered. “I made the special tea with the Seneca root, and she thinks it helped her. She is lying down for a few minutes.”
Zev turned to Ziporah with worry in his eyes. “Lying down? Is she all right?”
Ziporah hesitated. “I think so. She is sad, but I think she’ll feel better with a little rest.”
He rubbed down the mare and worked silently in his thoughts while Ziporah scrambled into the wagon to find out what treasures her father had brought home from his peddling rounds.
“Papa, before we go in, there is something I would like to talk with you about.”
“Nu? So, then tell me.” He saw the determination in her face and tried to guess if what he was going to hear was going to be good or bad. One could never tell with this child.
“You see, Papa, I worry that there is too much for Mama to cope with.”
Zev listened carefully to Ziporah, who lit up with an animated rush of words as she summarized her plan articulately and with maturity well beyond her years. He thought about how quickly his children were growing up and shook his head. By the time she finally got to the end of telling the details, her arms were flailing with the kind of exuberance that can only come from one too young to have ever faced failure. Zev nodded and smiled and reached over to rub her head with pride and affection. Wasn’t it yesterday that she held his hands and took her first steps?
“Not only a beauty, but a head for business, my daughter has,” he reached his strong arms around her and hugged her hard. “I like your thinking, Ziporah. We’ll discuss it at the table.” he said as they closed the stable.
Ziporah raced up the path to greet her grandparents, and together they all went into the house.
They said their prayers and Mama ladled supper into their bowls at the crowded family table. With the few minutes of privacy before the arrival of the boarders, the family discussed their business of the day. Zaida had a new student coming to study with him at the synagogue. Baba said she might be getting an increase in wages at the sewing factory. And Mama worried about her orphaned niece, toiling away, ‘doing God knows what’, on the other side of the ocean. The jar of coins to pay for her voyage to Canada was still pitifully short of what was needed. At the rate they were able to save it would be at least two years before they would have the money for Malka’s voyage.
At this, Zev nodded to Ziporah. “Perhaps there is a better way to save the money more quickly. Ziporah has an idea.”
“We can open a restaurant!” she squealed.
“Oy!” came in unison from Baba and Mama.
Ziporah carefully explained that the burden of the boarders was obviously too much and that they could make just as much or even more by running a café in the house.
“I could do the cooking, Mama. You know I can do it. You said yourself that I can cook well,” Ziporah said proudly. Mama sat quietly and considered how this would work and what impact it might have on the family. She saw nothing but problems.
“First, you are a child,” she said. “This is too much work for a child, even with me working along with you. Then we must look at this house. Where would they sit? On the floor?”
Mama was very practical and would have to know all of the logistics before she would be able to give her approval. Zev had already been thinking about this and offered a solution that involved two long benches that he could make. The table would be fashioned from a pair of boards that could be arranged over the storage barrels. He swiftly calculated that they would be able to sit ten people at a time at this makeshift table. At the end of the evening they would take the table apart and take the benches outside. This way the front room would be available for Isaac, Aaron and Mendel to sleep in as they had before the family had started taking in boarders. Ziporah would have a cot in the kitchen.
“It will be so cozy and warm for me by the stove, Mama!” she pleaded. Zev and Hannah would finally reclaim their bedroom, which had been given over to storage as well as two bunk beds for all four children since they opened the boarding house. Everyone looked at Hannah and waited. They watched while she took a deep breath, and then finally spoke.
“Maybe,” she shrugged. “We would need a new stove.”
Zev stroked his wife’s arm and looked into her eyes.
“I want my house back.” she reached for his hand. “I want a life with my family back. Maybe we should think about this, Zev. Maybe while we are young enough and strong enough, we can do this. Maybe. But we would need a bigger stove.”
Zev looked as Ziporah and winked.
Baba’s eyes were twinkling with anticipation. If things went well with the restaurant she would be able to leave her job in the coat factory to come and help. The constant crowding and living with strangers had been extremely difficult for all of them. The very thought, to have the little house back just
for the family – it would be a joy of joys.
Ziporah let out a cry for happiness. “So we are going to open our restaurant?”
“We will see, Ziporah,” Zev said, stroking his beard. “You must have patience. A decision like this takes lots of thinking and planning. Tomorrow, I will go to see Hiram and Mordecai Weidman. If we open a restaurant, they would be our supplier for the food we would need to buy. No one knows more about the wholesale grocery business in Winnipeg than the Weidman brothers. They would have some good advice, and they will allow us to buy on credit. We don’t have the money to just go into business like this.”
At this, there was the sound of heavy steps and men’s voices at the kitchen door. Mama quickly shooed her family off the little kitchen table so she could feed the lodgers.
In the coming days, the idea quickly grew into determination to open the Zigman Café in the Patrick Street home. Mr. Lee, who owned the Chinese Laundry on the corner, was the first to suggest he would put up a sign in his shop, if Hannah would be so kind as to advertise his business in her restaurant. The planning dominated all of the family conversations, and there was much excitement as they worked out every little detail.
Free of the obligation to boarders, the family would finally be able to reclaim a proper celebration of Shabbat. The Sabbath was extremely important to Zaida Baruch, and the family heartily agreed anything to do with the café business would come after their obligations to God.
As she planned menus and worked out costs, Hannah gradually became consumed by the new project, and her mood started to brighten with the possibilities that would be presented.
She would get her privacy back. She would have a chance to be happy again. And her poor orphaned niece would soon have a loving family in Winnipeg to come home to earlier than scheduled.
The stumbling block was the stove. It was just too small to handle the large cooking pots that would be needed. Mama fretted. Papa brought out the jar with the emergency savings. They talked. They pulled out sheets of paper with columns of numbers on them. They talked louder. The jar went back. The café dream almost came to an end. Isaac was the one to find the creative solution. It would not be convenient, but they could arrange to use the stove at the Levine home next door. He had asked Mrs. Levine and she had told him, that if she could share a little in the food from the café she wouldn’t mind sharing her stove.
With vigor and determination the family formed a united front to face the many obstacles that lay ahead.
And then, out of the blue, came the potential for a fantastic windfall. Zev found it at the shvitz.
Chapter Fifteen
The Shvitz
April 27, 1899
It was almost May, but the evening air still snapped with the bite of winter. Zev drew his shoulders up to brace against a sharp north wind and stepped smartly along in anticipation of the pleasures ahead. He allowed himself only one luxury, and it was never questioned or disapproved of by his wife. Once a week he would wrap a towel around a small jar of herring and a large loaf of bread and make the twenty-minute walk from his house on Patrick Street north across the tracks to King and Dufferin.
At the edge of the farmers’ market stood an odd-shaped brick building with a big sign in English proclaiming it to be Solly Silverstein’s Bath House. No one who went there called it that. They called it the shvitz. Mondays and Wednesdays were for ladies only. The rest of the time it was clearly a men’s club, a social center for the immigrant community that populated the densely crowded slums of Winnipeg’s foreign quarter.
With no indoor plumbing and little more than a washstand in most of the homes in the area, public bathing houses were generally good businesses and the best of them was Solly’s. Fashioned in the traditional banya style of Russia, Solly’s Shvitz was a familiar and much loved piece of the old life.
On entering Solly’s, visitors were immersed in thick, humid air, out of which bubbled a rich blend of languages—Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish among them—with Yiddish emerging loudest of all to dominate the shouting of greetings and telling of jokes.
Zev’s recent visits to the shvitz had taken on a new enjoyment with his increasing status as a businessman. Word had quickly spread about the new Zigman Café and Zev took pride in the recognition of his family’s success. In truth, the money earned was not a lot better than what they had made from the boarding house business, but they were learning quickly, and the future looked promising. Zev continued his peddling business and had calculated that in four more months he would have enough money saved to buy the new cook stove Hannah had picked out. She already had the delivery date circled on the calendar.
Even with his growing reputation, Zev was a long way from being seen as one of Solly’s star customers. In fact, with his shy nature and small, wiry frame, he remained largely invisible against the boisterous personalities that set the tone at the shvitz. He much admired the confidence and witty lines of the master storytellers: men like Max “Scrap Iron” Spiegelman and Mike “Bunzy” Benzelock, who competed to be the center of attention and provided spirited entertainment for the willing audience. Zev, with his reserved nature, wasn’t the kind of man who would be given a clever nickname. His gift was for numbers and computations, not for entertaining. He secretly wished that he could have just a little of that charm that seemed to come so easily to some. His own clever retorts to the banter and chiding remained unspoken, coming to mind only on his walk home as he recalled the teasing one-liners of the evening. He wondered what it felt like to be that popular. Take Solly, for example. He had to do nothing more than say hello to bring a smile and a feeling of special importance to everyone around him. Now that was true power.
The shvitz was not a place to rush. Often a visit to Solly’s would last several hours, depending on whether it involved a poker game. Typically, the patrons would alternate between the steam room and the side room. The side room was equipped with tables and chairs where the men, draped in towels, would take a break and talk and eat or smoke and play cards before returning to the steam for their second and sometimes third sweats. It was here in the smoky card room that they shared stories and news about the community.
It was understood that in the steam, talking was kept at a minimum so people could hear themselves think. Here, the bathers would savor the sensation of the vapor billowing off hot rocks, purging their bodies of pent up poisons and tensions as they sweated in temperatures that climbed past one hundred fifteen degrees.
Solly’s place had class and low prices. The class came from the presence of a parchik. He was a big Russian named Grigori, a burly giant of a man whose job was to soap down the patrons with a leafy broom.
Zev filled a bucket with cold water and carried it up to the upper bench, the clouds hissing around him as he sat in his favorite spot in the corner.
“You want playtza?” The parchik held up a fresh oak leaf broom and motioned to Zev.
“Not today, thanks, Grigori,” said Zev, mindful of every extra expense.
“I’ll take his turn.” A heavy man unfamiliar to Zev waved his hand from the lower bench. He groaned his way into a standing position and then carefully settled onto Grigori’s wooden massage table as a walrus might take comfort on a warm rock. The parchik raised the bundle of soapy wet leaves and spun the wide short broom against the man’s back. He then began rhythmically slapping it down on his naked hide, flinging the soap as he worked. Solly’s recent hiring of Grigori had been met with great approval from his wealthier clients who could afford the special service of the professional rubdown. To the others, the fresh smell of the oak leaves, shipped in all the way from Chicago, was alone, an unpaid extra benefit.
The shvitz renewed them, cleansed them and gave them strength to cope with their daily struggles. Among the Jews, the word mechiah was often used to describe the pleasure of the experience. No English word could come close to that description. That sense, that wonderful sensation of ultimate comfort, hummed through the place and gave them all the
belief that, one way or another, they would make it in the new world. There were no limits on what they could accomplish here. In Winnipeg, Solly’s Shvitz was to the Jews what the Manitoba Club was to the wealthy English. It was a home away from home, a place to trade stories with friends, to laugh in the unguarded company of men and to make the odd deal.
Such was the case for Zev on that fateful evening in April 1899. Lightheaded and in need of relief from the steam, he double wrapped his towel around his skinny body and emerged in the card room. Solly was just back from a visit to New York and was in fine form as he delivered the punch line of a story to a group of regulars lounging between sweats. As the laughter reached its peak, Solly spotted Zev and turned to say hello.
“Hey, Zev!” His voice boomed out over the crowd. “You couldn’t arrange for the warm weather a little earlier for me to enjoy on my return to Winnipeg? Irving, get my friend Zev a shot of the special vodka, will you?” Solly called out to the man behind the counter, who was dispensing sandwiches.
“Good to see you back, Solly.” Zev shook his hand, swelling with pleasure to be singled out so publicly. “The shvitz is not the same without you. What’s new in New York?”
Solly glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “You won’t believe my luck. My brother, Max, has found for me a pot of gold.”
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