The Jew Store: A Family Memoir

by Stella Suberman

Overview

SHE HAD SAID THE UNSAYABLE

In my mother's mind the word Jew used all by itself, nakedly, as it were, was not a word but a curse. She believed it was used only by people who hated Jews. If it had its three letters—its "-ish"—on the end, ah, that made the difference. If I said that someone was a Jew, my mother would ask me, "So what is he? A no-goodnik? A gangster?"

As I have understood it, my mother had come out on the porch at the very moment Miss Brookie had used the phrase "Jew store" on the telephone with Tom Dillon, before my father's meeting with Dillon. Miss Brookie used it as shorthand for the kind of business my father had in mind...but all my mother knew at that moment was that Miss Brookie had said the unsayable—had said "Jew store." — Stella Suberman, from The Jew Store

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565123304
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	09/01/2001
Pages:	318
Sales rank:	182,519
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Stella Suberman was born in Union City, Tennessee, the setting for her memoir, The Jew Store, and spent her teens in Miami Beach, Florida. After twenty years in North Carolina, she returned to Florida in 1966 as the administrative director of the Lowe Art Museum of the University of Miami. Now retired, she lives in Boca Raton.

Read an Excerpt

SHE HAD SAID THE UNSAYABLE

In my mother's mind the word Jew used all by itself, nakedly, as it were, was not a word but a curse. She believed it was used only by people who hated Jews. If it had its three letters—its "-ish"—on the end, ah, that made the difference. If I said that someone was a Jew, my mother would ask me, "So what is he? A no-goodnik? A gangster?"

As I have understood it, my mother had come out on the porch at the very moment Miss Brookie had used the phrase "Jew store" on the telephone with Tom Dillon, before my father's meeting with Dillon. Miss Brookie used it as shorthand for the kind of business my father had in mind...but all my mother knew at that moment was that Miss Brookie had said the unsayable—had said "Jew store." — Stella Suberman, from The Jew Store

Table of Contents

	Prologue	1
1	The Destination	5
2	Avram Plotchnikoff's New Name	16
3	A Nice Jewish Girl	25
4	For Better or for Worse	31
5	God's (So to Speak) Country	44
6	Miss Brookie's Cousin Tom	55
7	Xenophobia	61
8	My Father's Fancy Footwork	68
9	Bronson's Low-Priced Store	82
10	Green Eyeshades	90
11	No Picnic	100
12	Opening Day	112
13	In Christ's Name, Amen	127
14	A Gleam in My Mother's Eye	136
15	Two Social Calls	143
16	A House and Neighbors	161
17	My Mother's Dilemma	174
18	Seth's New Job	184
19	New York Aunts	197
20	The Bar Mitzvah Question	217
21	Gentiles	226
22	Joey's Homecoming	231
23	Miriam's Romance	239
24	Aunt Hannah's Wedding	247
25	Concordia's Savior	256
26	Miriam's Rescue	271
27	Push Comes to Shove	281

Editorial Reviews

In 1920, two years before the author was born, her family became the first Jews to live in the small town of Concordia, Tenn. Against the objections of his wife, Aaron Bronson, a Russian Jewish immigrant who had worked in dry goods stores in Savannah, Ga., and Nashville, started his own business by opening Bronson's Low-Priced Store in Concordia, which the locals called "the Jew store." In this richly detailed memoir, in which her father's optimism contrasts sharply with her mother's anxiety about their ability to provide their children with a Jewish education in their new surroundings, Suberman evokes early-20th-century life in the rural South and depicts her family's struggles to find a place in a town where African Americans suffered discrimination and poverty, the Ku Klux Klan was on the march and townspeople viewed Jews with suspicion. Suberman provides vivid characterizations of Concordia's residents, especially Brookie Simmons, who not only gave the Bronsons a home but fought to end child labor in the town's factory. In 1933, Aaron finally yielded to his wife's entreaties and moved with her and their three children back to New York City, even though they had come to regard Concordia as home.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After retiring in 1995 as a publicist, Suberman returned for the first time to her birthplace, a small town in northwestern Tennessee. She decided to recount, using fictionalized names and places, her Jewish family's 11 years in that small town, from 1922 to 1933. The author's father, Aaron Bronson, a Jew orphaned from birth in pre-revolutionary Russia, immigrated to New York City. Eventually, he moved his family to rural Tennessee, where he opened up Bronson's Low-Priced Store. Since the Bronsons were the first Jews in town, residents referred to their business as the "Jew Store." Writing with a personal passion (with chapters on "The Bar Mitzvah Question" and "New York Aunts"), Suberman captures the trials her family faced and positive human relationships they formed while trying to adapt to an alien, closed, Southern Christian society. -- Charles C. Hay, Eastern Kentucky University Archives, Richmond

Library Journal

YA-Russian immigrant Aaron Bronson took his wife and children from their enclave of New York Jews to a tiny Tennessee town where he set himself up as a successful storekeeper in the 1920s. The social, economic, and even spiritual experiences of the Bronson family are recounted by its youngest member, who evidently was a keen listener to family tales as well as an observer of events around her in early childhood. Nearly half of this autobiographical work predates Stella Ruth's birth and even when she appears on the stage, she is no scene-stealer. Her mother had to hide her ethnicity on her jobs in New York, and took years to assimilate to life in Tennessee. Joey and Miriam, the older children, dealt with the blunt questions asked by local children about their Jewishness with aplomb and made good friends. Mr. Bronson had to sell the insular town of Concordia on the idea that a "Jew store," a low-priced dry-goods store, was even needed and, being a "born sal-es-man," he succeeded in selling the idea and the goods as well. Suberman's fine writing and her ability to record tones and scents as well as images make this a lively and engaging story. Anti-Semitism is presented factually, as are the limitations of various townsfolk's penchant for doing good or evil. This will attract casual readers and serve as a useful auxiliary text in classrooms.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA

School Library Journal

Suberman tells her family's story with compassion and humor....authentic and postive.

Chicago Tribune

An utterly delightful book.

Chattanooga Times

The Jew Store is that rare thing an intimate story that sheds light on a piece of American History.

Jewish Book News

Like the story, which is practically a character in its own right, the people in The Jew Store linger in the mind. -- The New York Times Book Review

Marisa Kantor Stark

In this first book by a retired book reviewer for the Miami Herald, Suberman recounts the story of her family's sojourn as the only Jews in a rural Tennessee town in the 1920s. When Aaron and Reba Bronson arrived in Concordia, Tenn., (Suberman changed the town's name for the book) in 1920 to establish a dry-goods store, the hamlet had a population of 5,318 and the expectations of more to come when a new shoe factory was slated to open shortly after. Of those 5,318, almost all were God-fearing Christians of one denomination or another. The vast majority had never seen a Jew but "knew" that the Jews had horns and had killed Jesus. Yet the response of the town to the presence of the Bronsons turns out to be, for the vast majority, a bemused tolerance growing in many cases into outright love. When the Depression threatens the town, it is Aaron who proves to be the best "Christian" of them all, simply by being the most resourceful and caring of men. The Jew Store is as much a book about Jewish fear of Christian hostility as a story of overcoming anti-Semitism; Suberman is admirably frank about her mother's fears of the townspeople, which are no less destructive than the few manifestations of genuine hostility. The town is populated with the sort of colorful characters that a novelist dreams of creating, from the Northern-educated wealthy spinster agnostic who befriends the Bronsons to her overbearing, overweight, Klan-loving cousin, who is the local real estate magnate. The book is by turns charming, funny, and moving, artfully but simply written and invested with a warm glow of family love. An admirable debut by Suberman, vividly told and captivating in its humanity.

Kirkus Reviews