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V 1 * >**• ‘leuwa
A Yom Tov reminiscence.
new sui
it fo
poq
For The No* Year
m m SANS
nrifi
by Richard Yafte
A new suit for Roah Hashana
depended on a number of things:
If Pop’s blind horse (he had a
weak spot fqr . unfortunate
animate) hadn’t had to go to the
vet’s that summer, if his peddl
ing business among the Penn
sylvania Dutch farmers had
been fairly good, if Mom hadn’t
lost any boarders over the hot
months, and if she hadn’t given
away what little there was of the
spare cash to her various
leather strap from the but
tonhole in your lapel. It was a
favorite gimmick to sell boy’s
suits — and the gimmick work
ed. In shul on Rosh Hashana,the
ticking of the Ingeraolte was so
loud you could barely hear the
hazzan.
Suits then for boys bad "knee
pants,” knickerbockers maybe is
New York, but knee pants in
Lancaster. Long pants for kids
were not yet in, parents believ
ing that their off-spring
UijV
imsrwiliasls
fit?
~ £ ft £
EAST
The suit was always at least one size too big:
“You'll grow into it. n I never did. It either gave
out before the next suit was due, or off it went
in the semi-annual package to... Pop’s folks or
. . . my mother's relatives (in Lithuania).
charities, including her Ladies
Auxiliary of something or other.
For Mom, that old Jewish saying
that “charity overcomes death”
was a truism not to be argued. If
we would say to Mom, “Look, we
can’t afford it,” she would
answer that “that’s takka the
time to give. That’s really doing
a mitxvah.”
The new suit for me was Pop’s
chore. He was the maven, being
something of a “clothier”
himself because he carried a
“line” of men’s pants — the line
consisting of basic black in a
single style, for that’s all the
Pennsylvania Dutch farmers
wore for dress. But never mind,
Pop would examine the seams,
feel the doth, say yes or no, the
verdict being non-appealable as
if hknded down by Louis
Brandeis himself.
As for me, all I cared about
was whether an Ingersoll watch
went with the. suit. An Ingersoll
watch, for the benefit of those
who never had one and thua
avoided a premature but perma
nent stoop from carrying it, or
even a hernia, was a big, fat
nickel timepiece that sold for a
dollar and whose determined
tick never let you forget that
time was indeed fleeting. You
carried it in your breast pocket
suspended from a chain or
shouldn’t grow up too fast, and
maybe they were right
I probably had suite of soft
materials now and again, but I
don’t remember them, only the
scratchy, tweedy kind built to
last for active kida, especially at
the knees which went fast from
shooting marbles.
The suit was always at least
one size too big: “You’ll grow
into it.” I never did. It either
gave out before the next suit was
due, or off it went in the semi
annual package to the “old
home” in Shavel Uyest, Kovno
Guberna, for Pop’s folks, and to
Popalan in the same Lithuanian
county or province to my
mother’s relatives.
We didn’t have a full-time rab
bi in our shul in Lancaster but
our hazzan, Reb Moshe Mussnit-
sky, who later changed it to
“Muss” when he accepted a call
from a Brooklyn congregation,
and our melamed-shochet-sham-
mos Reb Chatzke! Mishler,
filled the bill nicely. I sang in the
hazzan’s choir as leading
soprano until that which
happens to boys happened to me
and I wasn’t a soprano any more
and became a pretty bad com
bination of tenor-baritone-
basso-squeak.
Reb Mussnitaky had a fine
repertoire of High Holy Day
V.
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ni i's*
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arias, so good in fact, that people
like Puceini, Leoncavallo and
Verdi brazenly stole his tunes
which I later heard at the Metro
politan, sung without apology
to the real composer.
With the new suit came a
snap-brim fedora hat which the
British call a “trilby.” Only the
hazzan and Shammos and choir
wore yarmulkas — the square
land, not the little round ones or
the knitted dollar size “kiput”
that have become the syle now.
That is, except on Yom Kfppur
when it became a bit too much to
wear a hat from sunup until sun
down, and all the men wore yar
mulkas.
The Neileh service on Yom
Kippur, which closes the solemn
day and you have already been
inscribed in the Book of Life, you
hope, and pray that you be kept
there, tested the memory of both
the congregation and, certainly,
of the choir boys, because by the
time we got half way through
this service, the shul was darit,
and no “Shabbos goy” — or more
accurately, “Yom Kippur goy” —
to turn on the lights.
The women would begin to
disappear some time during the
Neileh service, to go home and
set the table, and come back in
time to hear the shofar and join
in the wish, loudly and clearly,
“La Shana Haba Yerushalayim"
— Next Year la Jerusalem — *§»*«*
if not the Jerusalem of sub
stance, for it then seemed so far,
far away,then the Jerusalem of
the spirit when it would no
longer be, as Sholem Aleichem
put it, so hard to be a Jew. 1
Jewish Digest
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