With me, it was the far less exalted potato knish.
The sign over the cooler in Wegman’s refrigerated food section read: The original Coney Island Square Knish. Microwaveable. Delicious! Potato, Mushroom, or Red Cabbage. Low in saturated fat. Cholesterol free. Source of dietary fiber.
I bought one, took it home and popped it in the microwave, and hoped for the best.
Do you recall the taste of a Knish? Perhaps you're not really sure what a Knish is? Some foods are known in one part of the country but not in others. My friend in Minnesota had to tell me what lefsa was. I filled her in on the egg cream, kielbasa, and, of course, the Knish.
To begin with...it's pronounced ka-Nish. Stress is on the second syllable.
Knish: According to my dictionary, the Origin is Yiddish, from Russian knish, denoting a kind of bun or dumpling.
I didn't need the dictionary to tell me all that.
When I was a boy there were guys who would come around on the streets of Brooklyn selling knishes from a pushcart, the same way they still sell hot dogs today. The "Knish Man", however, is no more. These days fancy stores like Wegman's stuff them full of mushrooms and cheese and red cabbage, but back then a Knish was the simplest of simple foods: mashed potatoes wrapped in fried dough. Maybe they don't sound like much, but they were truly delicious. The Knish Man would slice the Knish open sideways and spread thick spicy brown mustard on each side, then hand it to you wrapped in wax paper. There was a small door on the side of the puschcart and inside there was a fire that kept the knishes warm. I don't remember how much they cost. Seven Cents? Ten? Certainly no more than Twelve.
We loved them, my sister and I. These days high-minded know-it-alls admonish us to avoid potato-y, starchy, high carb foods and feast ourselves on broccoli and lettuce instead, but back then no one gave a damn what they or anyone else ate. Whether we are better or worse off nowadays I leave for others to decide. I only say that on the streets of Brooklyn in the days of my boyhood the Knish Man was a welcome sight.
But if I follow him down those streets after all these years on the dimming horizon of memory, I find that there is a whole world standing behind that pushcart peddler, a world sad and tragic beyond words. These were real men who dispensed this exotic treats. Men who sometimes had numbers tattooed in blue ink along the sides of their arms, men who had lost their families and loved ones and every single possession that could be called their own, who had escaped from hell and survived to sell potato dumplings to kids in Brooklyn for twelve cents a shot.
In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, Williamsburg, Brooklyn became home for thousands of Hasidic Jews. By the time I was growing up in the early nineteen-sixties, our neighbors included hundreds of refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe. In the summer they would sit out on beach chairs in front of their apartment buildings as the world moved past them. They would watch us wild American city kids playing stickball or punchball in the street, and when you passed by them they never smiled, nor do I recall ever hearing the sound of laughter coming from where they sat. They just sat there and sat there, day after day, with the cloud of death hanging over their heads. Perhaps they were still trying to work out how they had been ripped from their homeland and exiled to this strange and alien place.
Sam and his brother Phil, who ran the little superette up the block, both had numbers stamped on their arms at Auschwitz. Sam, the swarthy, perennial bachelor, flirted with all the women in the neighborhood, but I remember being told that Phil had been forced to watch his wife and children murdered in front of his eyes. Whether or not this was strictly true or just a story people told, I had no way of knowing. Certainly it could have been true, especially from the way Phil seemed to always be staring off into the distance with his face empty of all expression. And if it wasn’t true for Phil, it was true for so many others. The brothers were an indelible part of the neighborhood. My Italian Catholic mother and all of my aunts shopped there several times a week. And for years after the brothers were long gone and the store had changed hands numerous times, had gone from superette to bodega, there were people in the neighborhood who would still insist they were going to Sam's when it was another place entirely.
It may seem strange to go from the humble Knish to a subject as vast and fraught with peril as the Holocaust. But growing up in Brooklyn, we knew about these things. The war had been over less than twenty years at this time. It was still fresh in our parents’ memories. And there were our neighbors, living evidence of the great atrocity. We had heard the stories. I seem to have known from an early age that Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were gassed and cremated at places with names like Buchenwald and Auschwitz. We even heard stories of body parts used to make soap and lampshades. And I can remember watching the trial of Adolph Eichmann on television when I was eight or nine. I don’t know how much I understood of it at the time, probably not much, and yet I remember watching it on my aunt’s TV in the apartment next to ours. Eichmann was a top Nazi (I knew that much) and he had organized the deportation of five million Jews and others to the ghettoes and concentration camps. He was one of those responsible for their sufferings and their deaths (I knew that too). After the war he had escaped to South America, but the Israeli police were on this trail for years, and they finally captured the bastard in Argentina, and brought him back to Jerusalem for trial. One of the iconic images of that time was of Eichmann sitting in a glass booth (for his own protection) listening to an interpreter through headphones as the evidence mounted up against him. There was even a play written about it later, The Man in the Glass Booth.
The trial is famous today for Eichmann's notorious "I was only following orders" defense, which of course began the legend of good Germans always marching along doing just as they are told. But orders or no orders, Adolph Eichmann was found to be as guilty as his better-known namesake, and he finished his days dangling from the business end of a long, sturdy rope. Good riddance.
I don’t know if I ever made any connection at the time, but my father’s family was German: beer, sauerbraten, pigs-knuckle German. Of course, once he married my mother, that kind of food was pretty much banned from the house forever. Today I am eternally grateful today that I grew up on lasagna and sausage-and-peppers and not hasenpfeffer and bratwurst. But my father still drank foaming mugs of beer as he played pinochle with his brothers every Friday night. Did they feel any guilt or embarrassment over what Germany had put the world through in the Twentieth Century? I don’t think so. The family had been in America since way back in the eighteen-seventies. There was no connection with the other side. And my grandfather’s parents had come from France, so there was a little French in the mix. I am sure they never felt any connection at all with the Germany that had given rise to Hitler and the Nazis. For myself, we were closer to my mother’s side of the family, so growing up I always felt more Italian than German. And I might mention that both of my mother’s brothers married Jewish women. So, in terms of extended family, we were a pretty varied group. Nor was that so unique those days in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
And there is this: one cold winter day I stopped at the knish cart on my way home from school for my regular treat with extra mustard down the middle. Perhaps the knishes weren’t hot enough because Knish Man leaned over and opened the side door of the cart and began stoking the fire with a metal rod. As he did so huge licks of flame came shooting out, nearly catching the edges of his dirty apron. I must have jumped back and shouted an inane warning to ‘watch out!’ or something of the sort, because down through all the years I still recall the man’s casual shrug as he continued to stoke the fire, indifferent to the flames.
“So?” I recall him saying, not necessarily to me, “If I burn, I burn. What of it?”
Looking back, the man was probably in no real danger, but I remember to this day that I was profoundly shocked and disturbed, not so much by his words as by the absolute flatness and despair (though I probably didn’t know that word back then) in his voice. That anyone could be so uncaring of their own life was too much for my child mind to wrap itself around. That night I told my father what happened.
“Sometimes people can become very unhappy,” he told me, “and then they don’t care much anymore.” I vowed that no matter what happened to me in life, I would never allow myself to slide down into such indifference and sadness. Of course, it helped that I was growing up in the United States of America, and not Eastern Europe in the murderous time of Adolph Hitler.
And now the years have passed and the Knish Man is long gone from the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Just another memory in the vast storehouse of memories that make up our lives.
Postscript: I tried the Wegman’s knish. It wasn’t bad. But of course some things never taste as good as they do when you’re a kid on the streets of Brooklyn.
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