Free Jew Store by Stella Suberman Page A

Nashville.”
    Cohen began with words of wisdom. “Pomerantz is right,” he said to my father. “Only Jews know small dry goods. . . . Now big dry goods, that’s another story.” At this point in retelling the story, my father would describe Cohen’s big sigh, as if Cohen had brought to mind his competition, the posh Chappell’s Department Store.
    Cohen now locked my father in his sights. In a voice so authoritative that in the room only the sounds of respiration dared make themselves heard, he declared that he, Morris Cohen, was prepared to take care of my father’s money problems. He waved a letter about. “When the wholesalers in St. Louis read in this letter that Morris Cohen is behind you,” he said, “they’ll treat you like you was Diamond Jim Brady.” He then put the letter into my father’s hands.
    And soon afterward, it was over. The men had fulfilled their mission, my father had the promise of a store. The men filed back out past my father, congratulating him. “Like Papa was the bridegroom,” was the way my mother told it.
    But there was no bride. My mother could not bring herself to stand there and receive congratulations. She saw what had happened not as my father did, as a chance, but as a venture fraught with peril. If, as she had been hearing, there were no Jewish merchants in this “Concourse” (the Grand Concourse in the Bronx took precedence), then there would be no Jewish people either. She took to wringing her hands. “Are you sure this is what to do?” she asked my father.
    My father at this point clicked on his BORN SALESMAN sign and basked in its light. “Yes, I’m sure,” he answered my mother. Indeed he “guaranteed” it.
    The point was, of course, that if they stayed in Nashville, there would be no store for my father. “Do you think”—and here my father always gave what I took to be a flawless impersonation of Pomerantz—“Mr. Morris Cohen, ‘owner of Cohen’s Department Store in the Number One location in uptown Nashville,’ is in-ter-es-ted”—as my father famously pronounced this word—“in me getting a store in Nashville?” It was a question he himself answered with a wry “Forget it.”
    No, the Nashville men had a whole different idea, and it was for my father to open up a new market for the big St. Louis wholesalehouses. And why were the Nashville merchants so concerned about the welfare of the big St. Louis wholesale houses? Because, my father would tell us, the big St. Louis wholesale houses were where the Nashville merchants had big investments.
    And thus, soon after that day, in an old wagon bought cheap because it had been lying useless in Mr. Morris Cohen’s backyard since his image went high-toned, behind a horse named Willy bought for close to nothing from the blacksmith shop, with a bag of sponge cake and peaches from the rabbi’s wife to supplement the foodstuffs my mother had already gathered, and armed with the celebrated Cohen letter, my family set out on the three-day, two-night trip to Concordia.

CHAPTER 6

M ISS B ROOKIE’S C OUSIN T OM
    I n the bedroom at Miss Simmons’s, according to how Joey has remembered it, he woke up first, got Miriam up, and together they went into the other bedroom and shook my father—who came awake, he always said, with the store on his mind. They did not wake my mother. My father put the peaches and the cheese on the dresser where she couldn’t miss them, and they all went downstairs to the kitchen, where Miss Simmons was sitting with a cup of coffee. Lizzie Maud was there, at the coal stove, and almost immediately a plate of food appeared on the table. Joey and Miriam stared. What was that twisty stuff on the side of the eggs? My father had eaten bacon in Savannah and knew that it brought on no dread disease. “Eat, children, eat,” he said. Attempting