A Powerful Lesson from Pa

by Sam Fishman 

 

When Pa was about sixteen, his family fled the Russian pogroms and settled in Brooklyn. As a boy in the shtetl, he studied all day memorizing the Torah and the Talmud. Here in America, Pa had to earn a few dollars working in a sweatshop.                 

 

Ma’s family had come to Brooklyn from Romania. When she met Pa, she was seventeen and working as a seamstress. Ma was a beauty. Pa loved her, and she loved the gentle scholar. They were married in 1912. I was born in 1913.

 

Together Ma and Pa worked and scrimped, and saved enough money to buy a knitting machine and start up a business making sweaters. For a few years they were moderately prosperous, lived a bit easier, and along the way had another child, my sister Shirley. Intent on expansion, Pa went into debt and didn’t put aside any reserve funds. Of course the Depression wiped us out. Pa’s spirit broke. I still remember the terrible crying jags. Ma was a constant source of comfort, hope, and love unlimited. Her repeated “It will be all right” kept us intact and gradually healed Pa.

 

Eventually Pa managed to borrow two hundred dollars to buy a little candy store.  For the rest of their working years, Ma and Pa spent eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year (excluding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) in candy stores, sustained only by their hopes for their children’s future. From behind his soda fountain, Pa explored the universe. “Ah,” he would say, “God created such wonders—the skies, the mountains, the oceans. Such beauty, if only people wouldn’t spoil it.” And yet to him a human being was the most marvelous creation of all. “I’ll never understand how even God could make us.”
 
One morning Pa was at the soda fountain as usual, waiting for the rare customer. I was off in a corner reading a magazine. About ten o’clock a short, thin, middle-aged man came in out of the scorching sun and walked very slowly to the soda fountain. He was neatly dressed in a well-worn blue suit and tie. He asked Pa if he might have a drink of water, apologizing because he didn’t have the two cents to pay for a glass of seltzer. “Here, take the seltzer,” said Pa. “You’ll owe me two cents.”

 

Sipping slowly, the man began to tell Pa in a low, halting voice how he had walked here all the way from the Bronx, hoping to find work in a tailor shop down the street. It was a temporary job, but it paid a full ten dollars a week. He’d read the advertisement in the evening edition of the paper and had left his home long before dawn. Our store was in a section of Brooklyn close to Coney Island—miles and miles from the Bronx. By the time he got to the tailor shop, the job had been taken. Now he had to walk all the way home to tell his family.

 

“When will I ever get a job?” he sobbed. “I’ll never forget Pa’s face as he cried silently with his fellow man. He went to the register, took out two dollars and change—the whole morning’s receipts—and gave it all away. Afterward, he never said a word about it, never spoke of it at all. It was done. It was gone. To Pa, nothing rare or unusual. It was just Pa.... Now long gone, but still with me today, in all I do.

 

This story first appeared in Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins' book Jewish Stories From Heaven And Earth: Inspiring Tales to Nourish the Heart and Soul (Jewish Lights Publishing).