Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah (9):Defeat, Defiance, Triumph and the Undelivered Toast…by Robert M. Katzman

 

The Inevitable Postscript…five months later  

In 1963, my immigrant Grandmother, Celia Warman from Poland, gave me a $1,000 United States Savings Bond as my Bar Mitzvah gift, as she did her three grandchildren before me, to help me pay for my tuition to college in five years.  For the Jews, education is more important than gold. 

She couldn’t know, as I myself didn’t know, that I would leave home suddenly the very next year, at fourteen, and have to find a way to support myself.  But the Bond remained in a box, as time ticked by. 

By August 1965, at age fifteen, I opened a newsstand in Chicago’s Hyde Park with a friend, Rick Munden, whom I’d met three years earlier in 6^th grade at Caldwell School on the South Side of Chicago.  It was seven days a week and hard, hard work, especially in Chicago’s terrible winters.  Whatever you may imagine about the “romance’ of running a wooden newsstand when Chicago was the last city in America with four daily newspapers, well, somehow I didn’t see it that way. 

Rick decided to move on in December of 1966 and I stayed there, renaming my little corner of the world “Bob’s Newsstand”.  You may possibly be wondering, what does this have to do with Sarah? 

It’s coming.

And once again, it’s eerie, man.

In 1968, I was accepted at the University of Illinois, when tuition there was $50 a quarter.  I hear it’s somewhat higher now.  At that cost, the newsstand could pay for it, and my grandmother’s Bond slept on in the box.  I entered the school in September, 1968, and was diagnosed with cancer in December, that same year.  The surgery was done on my Christmas vacation, removing the left side of my jaw, and I went right back to school in January 1969.  

I dropped out in September 1969, deciding that I didn’t need college to figure out my future, and instead concentrated on running my still wooden newsstand.  But, on a Saturday night, November 28, 1970, the bone dry structure filled with a thousand Sunday newspapers, burst into flame and was totally consumed in hours.  It lit up the night sky and hundreds watched it burn.  I had been home sleeping for a couple of hours before the midnight shift, and when someone called me, I, too, was one of those watching my future turn to ashes.  There was no insurance for wooden newsstands, which surprised no one. 

The next day, standing in front of the remaining charred floor and a few still upright two by fours, I stood on the corner selling newspapers to shocked customers.  I was numb.  There was no heat and no roof.  My several thousand dollars worth of magazine inventory also burned up in the fire.  I felt bewildered and crushed. 

Then I remembered: The Bar Mitzvah Bond. 

By 1970, when I was twenty, it had matured and was worth the full $1,000, still a good amount of money forty years ago.  With it, I was able to buy enough lumber to rebuild the newsstand—fifty per cent larger, this time—and learned how to put on a strong shingled roof and hang two doors, taught by a friendly customer who was also an immigrant Norwegian master carpenter.  He was also a good customer at the local liquor store, so it took a while for carpentry class to resume on some days.  There was no tuition, however.  His name was Arne, and God sent him to help me.  He wouldn’t take a dime from me, either.  He told me he had helped the United States Army during World War II and they let him become a citizen in appreciation. 

The money also allowed me to rebuild my magazine inventory and after a while, everything was as before.  My grandmother was aware of the choices I made, and also of the way I was responding to what life was throwing at me.  She was wise, and said nothing, but I was conscious that I was the first grandchild to not complete college.  She however, had experienced far worse during deadly Pogroms in Europe, so perhaps she was waiting to see how things evolved.  She was 69 in 1970 and lived to be 96, dying in 1997 when I was 46. 

She got to see how a lot of things evolved, including Sarah, her last grandchild, coming into our lives less than a year before she died.  But she knew about Sarah, born in September, 1996.  Their lives overlapped, but just barely. 

So, that Bar Mitzvah Bond paid to rebuild the newsstand and less than a year later, on June 1971, I married my high school girlfriend, Barbara, a very smart and beautiful girl.  She was just eighteen and had been accepted at the University of Illinois as well, by coincidence.  The newsstand’s income paid her tuition for the next four years.  By then, the state raised it to $75 a quarter.  Jesus Christ!!

So, although the Bond didn’t pay for my education, it did pay for someone’s tuition, indirectly.  So, I felt that the Bond had fulfilled its purpose, if indirectly.  Barbara, the college graduate, and I divorced in 1977 and Joy and I joined forces after that.  Bob’s Newsstand remained in business until 1985.  Twenty years, in all. 

And the world kept spinning… 

On August 31, 2009, almost forty years after cashing in that Bar Mitzvah Bond to jump-start my life of self employment in Hyde Park, I locked the door on my Sleepyville back-issue magazine store, Magazine Memories, and was unemployed when Sarah had her own Bat Mitzvah, twelve days later.  That unemployment stretched into long months, during which I discovered there were no jobs for a 59-year-old man of my antiquated talents.  There were no jobs for millions of other people in America, of any kind of talent, either, during the soul-killing recession. 

After many dead ends, during which my friends kept me going and my family afloat, I accepted the fact that self-employment wasn’t a choice for me—it was the only thing open to me.  There was nothing else. 

With continued support from a range of friends, some even from grade school, I was able to find a smaller place, but in a better location (Skokie, Illinois).  It required hiring many men during a freezing winter to move 3,000 boxes of old magazines from six storage units to the new place.  This took weeks, and was a stop and start kind of situation, as I developed a bronchial infection and sometimes, also ran out of money.  

This wasn’t like the movies where suddenly everything was terrific and bluebirds were singing.  It was self-enslavement, twelve to sixteen hours a day, for seven solid weeks, sorting the boxes, building every single wooden rack by myself—no Arne, this time—in what turned out to be seven hundred running feet of wooden shelving six to eight feet high, using all that wood I took with me, as well as all those steel brackets and every single screw, too.  I didn’t have to buy any wood, but I did buy over a thousand screws.   Perhaps my Byelorussian grandfather, Jacob, a skilled carpenter who came to America in 1901, was watching over me.   I bet there are slivers in his wings.

But who knows?  I inherited his incredibly heavy wooden toolbox, so maybe his spirit came with it.  must bem because his son, Irving, who was my father, had no carpentry skills whatsoever.  I think about that.  Grampa died at 78 while he was sawing wood, when I was eleven in 1961.  I think about that, too, whenever I’m sawing wood.

During this period from December 2009 to February 2010, there was a day I simply ran out of money and wasn’t able to rent the large truck I needed or hire any men to load and unload it.  With the constant fear of blizzards making the move impossible, and we did get caught in one, too, I didn’t want to risk stopping while the weather was still good.  What to do? 

Sarah knew what was happening and she loaned me $100 of her Bat Mitzvah money to keep going.  I didn’t want to take it, but she is a wise child, like her grandmother Celia was, and she saw the way things were.  There wasn’t a lot of conversation about it, as I remember.  It was enough money to rent the largest truck and one man, for one day.  I did that. 

The store opened February 11^th, exactly six months after Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah.  Now I was employed again, even if I had to create the job by myself, damn it.  

Oh, and as it happens, the new back-issue magazine store, partially funded by Bar Mitzvah money, again, is named Bob’s Newsstand.  

I opened the place with no sign in front, no computer, no advertising, no fax machine and no website.  But the original and wooden newsstand I opened with Rick Munden in 1965 didn’t have any of those things either, and that seemed to work out pretty well.   Besides that, this one doesn’t need a poisonous kerosene stove to keep me warm and I don’t have to stand on the curb in the sleet and snow to wait on cars honking at me for a Chicago Daily News.  So there’s that, too.  

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but somehow, I seem to be in a time warp where things keep repeating.  How do these things happen?   Is this a second chance to get things right, this time? 

But I suppose you could reasonably ask,

“So, will the reborn Bob’s Newsstand eventually send Sarah to college?” 

Well, how the hell do I know?  I’ll be sixty-five by 2015, assuming I’m still here and rational. 

On the other hand, if Joy and I could somehow manage to pull off a $700 Bat Mitzvah, well…I suppose anything’s possible.  

Isn’t it?