God Bless America

Until I was fourteen, the store had an antiquated soda fountain which was fronted by a long pink and white marble counter. By 1961, the fountain was often out of order for one reason or another. We had a half a dozen ice cream bins just below the fountain. If you had to describe the store with one word, that word would have been ‘old’. If you had to use two words, you could have added ‘dirty’ as the overall description. There were six antiquated metal revolving seats which were always being abused by kids who insisted on rocking back and forth while they merrily spun themselves around and around. One of these seats was constantly coming up out of the partly rotten wooden floor to which it was nailed. The linoleum which covered the wood seemed to always be worn out down the center aisle. The store was long, narrow and not quite adequately lit. On the back wall there was an aging Breyer’s Ice Cream clock above the entrance to the rear storage area. Looking up, you would see a drab yellow nicotine-stained high tin ceiling and the rest of the store was always in varying states of disrepair.

My mother was continually asking my father when he was going to either clean it up or leave it to work in what she called the ‘real world.’ She had worked for years at the Quality Toy Company in Manhattan as a bookkeeper and I suspect that this was the only reason our family survived financially. The profit margin in the candy store business was really slim and with a 500 or 600 dollar gross each week, it had to support both us and my grandfather. Finally, he decided to get rid of the fountain and redo the entire place. He signed a contract with Hallmark cards to sell only their products in the greeting card area. We gutted the entire store, added several rows of card display and storage racks down the center of the store and built all the other display areas out of formica covered wood. We got rid of the two display windows that had to be passed by in order to enter the store, thereby pushing the selling area right out to the sidewalk where a new front was installed. He added a humidor for tobacco storage. In just three weeks, we had a brand new, clean card shop. The soda fountain was eliminated and since greeting cards were marked up 100%, the profit margin became more comfortable. We were the only Hallmark retailer within ten blocks and soon the whole neighborhood was buying its cards at our store.

For almost ten years, I spent every Saturday night and Sunday morning working in the store. Each Saturday night, I would put together the Sunday papers, which came in sections that had to be collated before they were sold. I used to help out practically every day and was glad to do it. Sunday mornings were the most interesting. Every hour, as each church mass was finished, the people would all show up at the store for their newspapers. It was amazing to me that so many of these people, who believed they had just spent an hour with God, would immediately arrive at our store looking for the National Enquirer. Usually, the lead story had a headline that read something like, “Baby Born With Two Heads and No Brain” or “Mother Drops Kids in Vat of Acid” or “Is Ed Sullivan Sleeping Around?”.

While I had some obvious anti-Christian feelings, I would like to believe that they were rooted in the post-world war II paranoia which affected Jews throughout the world. My parents and grandparents were acutely aware that the Roman Catholic Church had, for almost two thousand years, held all Jews accountable for the death of Christ. This was a ridiculous notion, if there ever was one. That was like holding all Roman Catholics responsible for the medieval crusades, or for helping the Nazis to escape after the World War II holocaust.

We did not have a very large family by the end of World War II. Our ancestry was geographically located on both sides of the Rumanian-Polish border. Out of more than 400 pre-war members of the family tree, only a handful survived the holocaust. I think two or three escaped to Israel, two made it to Argentina, and my grandparents had immigrated to the United States in the early 1930s. Most of those who died in the holocaust were victims of the atrocities committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. So, while we were safe in America, the war became a personal tragedy for our family.