Also by ILENE BECKERMAN
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
What We Do for Love
Mother of the Bride:
The Dream, the Reality, the Search for a Perfect Dress
Makeovers at the Beauty Counter of Happiness
THE
SMARTEST
WOMAN
I KNOW
by ILENE BECKERMAN
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Contents
Introduction
First, a Little Background
The Story Begins
The Store
Upstairs
Grandchildren
An Education
Love
Another Beginning
Relatives
Holidays
A Way of Life Ends. A New One Begins.
Endings
Epilogue
Preview of What My Mother Gave Me
The Smartest Woman I Know
This book is dedicated to Ettie
by her seventy-five-year-old granddaughter
WHOEVER SAID there’s nobody as smart as an old woman must have known my grandmother, Ettie. If she had been born in the late twentieth century instead of the late nineteenth century, she probably would have been the superstar of advice bloggers.
The older I get, the more often I think about Ettie and the more her words come back to me. Sometimes you don’t know how much you love somebody until that somebody’s gone.
FIRST, A LITTLE BACKGROUND
IF THE GOLDBERGS HADN’T left Grodno in Russia in the late nineteenth century . . .
If they hadn’t ended up in New Orleans and started a business tanning hides for drum heads . . .
If Lillie Young, my grandmother Ettie, then a young girl, hadn’t left the Big Apple in 1901 and traveled to the Big Easy to visit her relatives . . .
If she hadn’t met her distant cousin Harry Goldberg in New Orleans on October 1, 1901 . . .
If Harry Goldberg hadn’t married her on October 26, 1901, twenty-six days after they met . . .
If Harry’s father hadn’t had such a fierce temper, Harry might not have taken his bride and headed for New York . . .
If Harry and his bride hadn’t settled on the Lower East Side, both working seventeen hours a day in a candy store and saving every penny . . .
From left: Harry Goldberg, Ettie, and the New Orleans relatives
If they hadn’t saved enough pennies to buy a building to open their own candy store . . .
If it weren’t 1929 and the Depression hadn’t come at the same time that Harry was about to close on the building . . .
If the bank that Harry had asked for a loan hadn’t reneged because of the Depression . . .
If when Harry, hat in hand, went to his rich relative, Mr. Gertz, to borrow money and Mr. Gertz hadn’t said, “You should have come yesterday . . .”
If when Harry, again with hat in hand, hadn’t gone to the Empire Trust Company on Madison Avenue and 56th Street near the building Harry wanted to buy . . .
If Mr. Smith, the loan officer, hadn’t believed in Harry and agreed to lend him the money he needed . . .
Then there never would have been a candy store called Goldberg’s in the farmland of upper Manhattan . . .
And the store wouldn’t have changed its name to Madison Stationers when the farmland turned into the ritzy neighborhood of the Upper East Side.
THE STORY BEGINS
UNLIKE THE PIONEERS WHO went west, Ettie (no one remembers why Lillie acquired that nickname) and Mr. Goldberg (no one remembers when Harry decided that he should only be referred to as Mr. Goldberg) were pioneers who went north.
They left the safety and familiarity of the Lower East Side, where a sour pickle, a bialy, or a two-cents plain were only a block away, and moved to Madison Avenue between 64th and 65th streets. After years of living on Madison Avenue, they became gentrified on the outside but never in their hearts. Instead of a jelly donut from a pushcart on Second Avenue, Mr. Goldberg would buy a Linzer tart from Duvanoy’s, the French bakery on Madison and 65th Street.
Instead of hanging the wash on a clothesline from the kitchen window, Ettie sent the wash to the Chinese laundry on Lexington Avenue. But every bone in their body was Jewish, and despite living in this wonderful land of opportunity, they were always on guard. The next Hitler or Stalin could be waiting around the corner on 64th Street.
THIS STORY IS MOSTLY about Ettie, all 4′10″ of her. She was one of the smartest women I ever knew, even though she never made it past the third grade.
Also in the story are:
Mr. Goldberg, who at four o’clock every afternoon, left the store and went upstairs where he and Ettie lived, to take a nap in his blue easy chair.
And God, to whom Ettie spoke several times a day . . .
You got a minute, God? I’m not really complaining but it says in the Talmud that a man has 613 mitzvahs to do but a woman only has 3. So how come I am busy from the minute I wake up in the morning until I go to bed at night, and Mr. Goldberg, who has 613 mitzvahs to do, has enough time to go upstairs at four o’clock every afternoon and take a nap?
Two other characters in the story are:
Tootsie, my sister, older than me and much prettier, who I occasionally hated . . .
and Gingy, me.
My sister and I went to live with Ettie and Mr. Goldberg in 1947, when I was twelve years old and my sister was seventeen. The reason we went to live with them is a story for another day.
A few years earlier in Atlantic City
The first year we lived there, Ettie cried a lot. Sometimes because she was peeling an onion. Sometimes because President Roosevelt had died. Sometimes because of things I was too young to understand at the time.
I remember Tootsie going out on a first date with a boy from Westchester that year. She thought he had money. He thought she had money. Both were wrong.
I remember hiding a paperback copy of Forever Amber, the hottest, bawdiest book of the time in an Adventures of Superman comic book.
“‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t expect to find you a virgin.’”
Forever Amber? In my house? The Talmud’s not good enough for her?
Tootsie lived with Ettie and Mr. Goldberg for one year, until she got married at eighteen. I lived with Ettie and Mr. Goldberg for six years, until I went to college.
Some of the things I remember about those six years might not really have happened. I might have mixed up my memories with my sister’s memories or with movies I saw. Sort of like the Kurosawa movie Rashomon. In that movie, many witnesses to the same event describe in detail what they saw. Each recollection is different.
If there was only one way of looking at something, God wouldn’t have given you two eyes.
To me, everything I’m going to tell you really happened. Like the time I was fifteen and bought a black dress for a New Year’s Eve party and Ettie said to me, “You’re wearing black? You’re going to a funeral?”
Maybe what happened in those small moments shaped my life more than I realized. Maybe we are the memories we hold on to. Things that happened a long time ago seem to have happened yesterday. Even now, sixty years later, when I wear a black dress, I remember Ettie’s words.
DURING THE YEARS I lived with Ettie and Mr. Goldberg, the world changed a lot. World War II had ended, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, Israel became a state, long-playing vinyl phonograph records and the Diners Club credit card were introduced, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a “witch hunt,” the Rosenbergs were executed, 50 percent of Americans owned television sets, and the Korean War ended.
But during that time, life didn’t chang
e very much for Ettie. After raising three children while working in the store seven days a week, she found herself, at the age of sixty-five, raising two grandchildren while working in the store seven days a week.
Just about all day, everyday, Ettie would either be standing by the cash register, waiting on a customer, or sitting on a folding chair in the back of Goldberg’s candy and stationery store holding court and schmoozing with the customers.
THE STORE
ANYBODY WHO WAS ANYBODY in the neighborhood—the machers, the mavens, the meshuggeners—came in to Goldberg’s. Most of them weren’t Jewish.
Loyal customers like Mr. Arnold, who never went out without his boater straw hat, spats, walking cane, and the young man by his side he called darling.
Mr. Goldberg didn’t wait on them. Ettie went out of her way to be nice to them.
You understand about boyfriends of boys, God? I don’t. But if I had to choose between a somebody who fights with somebody and a somebody who wants to make believe that a boy is his girlfriend, it should be my business? If it were up to me, everybody should mind their own business.
Mrs. Vanderhaven was also a regular customer. Her elbow-length gloves always matched the silk flowers on the wide-brimmed picture hats she always wore.
Ettie said she kept the tags on her dresses tucked in the sleeves so she could return them to Russeks of Fifth Avenue after she’d worn them a few times.
Every Friday, Mrs. Vanderhaven would buy two Will & Baumer ten-inch ivory candles for her dining room table. The first of every month, she’d come in and spend an hour standing at the magazine rack looking through Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
“Madam,” I once heard Mr. Goldberg say, “this is a store. We sell things. If you’re not buying, it would be my honor to escort you to the public library on 58th Street.”
Mrs. Vanderhaven
SARA DELANO ROOSEVELT, FDR’S mother, lived in a brownstone at 47 East 65th Street, around the corner from the store. Every once in a while 5′10″ Sara, who ruled over her son Franklin and her daughter-in-law Eleanor, would come into the store and visit with 4′10″ Ettie.
What did they have in common? They were both mothers of sons, so they both worried.
Sara worried about her son Franklin’s future because of his polio. Ettie worried about her son Larry’s future because of the draft.
“Don’t worry,” Ettie told Mrs. Roosevelt, “your son’s got a good head on his shoulders. I bet someday he’ll be president.”
Ettie told that to every customer who had a son. “That’s how you make a customer,” she told me.
If a customer had a daughter, Ettie would say, “Don’t worry. Your daughter’s got a good head on her shoulders. I bet someday she grows up to marry the president.”
NOT EVERYBODY WHO CAME into the store was a “somebody.”
Mrs. O’Reilly was an Irish governess who worked for a fancy lady on Park Avenue. Every other sentence out of her mouth was “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
Mrs. O’Reilly had come from Dublin when her hair was red and she still had freckles. Even after her hair turned gray and her freckles turned to liver spots, she spoke with a brogue.
She had three grown sons. One was a priest, one was a policeman, and one she never talked about.
What did Ettie and Mrs. O’Reilly have in common? They both worried.
Mrs. O’Reilly would come in with a cheery “And how are ya today, Mrs. Goldberg? Did ya have your good-morning tea?”
After Tootsie and me, what Ettie loved most was hot tea and lemon. It had to be Lipton tea. In a glass. She’d put a sugar cube in her mouth and sip the steaming tea through the sugar cube.
“Yes,” Ettie would answer Mrs. O’Reilly. “Two glasses. Thank you for asking. But I know how much you like your Irish coffee.”
Mrs. O’Reilly would say, “Indeed, I do. Indeed I do. But I have it at night after I take off my shoes and my girdle.”
“Kineahora, Mrs. O’Reilly. You should only live and make a habit of it. You drink coffee. I drink tea. But otherwise we have so much in common.”
“Because we both have three children?”
“No, I mean the Irish and Jews have so much in common.”
“That’s what’s called malarkey, Mrs. Goldberg.”
“You ever hear of corned beef? So, the Irish eat theirs with cabbage, we eat ours with a pickle.”
“Mrs. Goldberg, are ya sure you never kissed the Blarney stone?”
“Kissed the Blarney stone? I never even kissed Mr. Goldberg.”
ONE DAY MARLENE DIETRICH, wrapped in furs, came into the store. Immediately Mr. Goldberg hurried over to wait on her.
“Madam,” he said, “I recognize who you are and I must tell you I have seen every one of your movies and enjoyed every one. You have brought great pleasure into my life. Now, how may I be of service to you?”
Dietrich smiled and asked for a pack of du Maurier cigarettes.
“Madam, is there anything else I may do for you?” Mr. Goldberg said.
“No, thank you very much,” Dietrich answered, “you are so kind.” She paid for the cigarettes and left the store.
Mr. Goldberg turned to Ettie and said, “You know who that was?”
“Of course,” Ettie answered.
“What a thrill,” Mr. Goldberg said. “To think that I just waited on Katharine Hepburn.”
God, should I tell him?
Ettie knew about movie stars even though she rarely went to the movies. “Who needs the movies,” she’d say. I should pay money to go to the movie to see craziness? I can just stay home and see craziness. A movie about what’s happening downstairs and upstairs and out my window, no one would believe. Nobody could make a movie so good as what I see with my own eyes. I have enough worries without going to the movies. If I want a headache, God, I can just stay home.”
NOT ONLY WASN’T ETTIE a movie fan, she also wasn’t a sports fan. Every afternoon, the same men would come into the store, buy the evening newspaper, and the first thing they’d do is turn to the sports page.
“Sports?” she’d say. “Another waste of time!
“North Korea is making war on South Korea and all these dummkopfs want to know is who won a ball game? A man jumps up and tries to get the ball in a basket. He takes a stick and hits the ball so it should go in a hole in the ground. He takes a fatter stick and tries to hit the ball far away. He grabs a ball and runs with it and other men try to push him down.
On Delancey Street
“A woman would never be so meshugge. She sees a basket, she fills it with fruit. She sees a hole she fills it up. She sees a stick, she puts it someplace out of the way so nobody should trip or get poked in the eye. Somebody tries to push her down, she calls a policeman.”
If Ettie had no one to talk to, she muttered to herself. “So much money for a man with a ball? Nobody even knows the value of money anymore,” she’d mutter. “Nobody picks up a penny on the street. If Mr. Goldberg and me hadn’t saved every penny, we’d still be living on Delancey Street. A penny earned is a penny you should save. A dollar is even better.”
UPSTAIRS
WHEN THEY WEREN’T IN the store, Ettie and Mr. Goldberg went to their apartment above the store, where they ate, spoke Yiddish to each other (when they spoke to each other), and slept until the next day’s work.
Upstairs, Ettie had her radio.
“Thanks, God, for the radio,” she would say. “I listen every day. I don’t have to buy a ticket. I don’t have to go someplace else. I don’t have to stop what I’m doing to look. I don’t even have to sit down. I can be standing by the stove, wearing my housedress, taking the fat off the chicken soup, and the President of the United States can be talking to me.” Unlike other grandmothers in those days, Ettie actually spent as little time in the kitchen as possible. The store was what nurtured her.
When Ettie and Mr. Goldberg came from Europe, many Jews went to bed hungry. So for Ettie, the purpose of cooking was to keep the stomach filled. Qu
antity was more important than quality.
One day a customer asked Ettie what she was making for dinner. “Food,” she answered without hesitation.
“Eat,” she would say to me. “You shouldn’t go hungry. Nobody should go hungry.”
ETTIE COOKED BECAUSE she didn’t believe in eating out. “A restaurant?” she’d say. “Why eat out when you have a kitchen?”
One day a customer told Ettie about a new restaurant that opened in the neighborhood. “That’s wonderful,” Ettie said. “I have to try it.” After the customer left, I heard her muttering.
“I need to go to a fancy-schmancy place, God? How do I know what khazeray they’re putting into anything? How do I know they wash their hands? In my house, you could eat off the bathroom floor. In some restaurants, you don’t even want to go to the bathroom in their bathroom.”
Ettie believed that food could solve all problems. “Feed your stomach, and the rest will take care of itself,” she advised. “It’s amazing what a few little prunes can do.”
Her advice about mental problems? “What you put in your stomach will make you feel better than what a man with a beard and an accent tells you about your mother.”
For depression, she suggested pot roast with potatoes and carrots. For anxiety, kreplach and chicken soup. Up one day, moody the next? Try blintzes with a little sugar or a little sour cream, depending.
What she couldn’t understand was Chinese food. “Shrimp? Do the Chinese eat gefilte fish?”
Next to Tootsie and me and after hot tea and lemon, the thing Ettie loved most in the world was her own gefilte fish.
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