The Changing Years, Abe Max, November 22 1968, Liverpool Jewish Gazette
(Fourth in a series of articles)
In 1914, shortly before the First World War, my family moved to that part of Brownlow Hill between the university and the Adelphi Hotel (from the records of burials in Rice Lane Cemetery the address was 110 Brownlow Hill). My secular education was continued at ‘Plezzy’ (short name for Pleasnat Street Board School) which had a predominantly Jewish intake from the immediate vicinity and the ‘emigrants’. This was the word used to describe an area stretching roughly from Duke Street to Park Lane. To it came the Jewish emigrants from Europe o ntheir way to the ‘goldener land’ – the USA – to make a transient stay.
They were put up by the Jewish occupier of one of the large houses, converted into a kind of dormitory, and provided with board and lodging. They changed their foreign money at the shops showing the sign ‘wexel bank’, whose Jewish proprietors sold an assortment of footwear, groceries, chandlery, watches, jewellery and clothing.
Memory brings to mind Hesselberg, Paterson and Caplan, in Nelson Street; Moscow, in Cumming Street; Wiseman, in Great George Street; and Kalmanovitch, in Duke Street. In Duke Street, too, was situated a steamship ticket selling agency run by a Mr Morris and in the adjacent Great George Square, Heilbron’s hotel, an establishment of some size, displaying a sign offering first-class, second-class and third-class accommodation. The last surviving type of establishment of those days, I think, was Agulnek’s in Park Lane.
Scapegoats
After the end of the First world War, in 1918, bitter fighting developed between White Russians and the Bolsheviks; there was unrest in the emergent Poland, and the broken up parts of the old Austrian empire saw much internal strife. As was usual, the Jews living in those areas became the scapegoats, and a different and grimmer sort of ‘emigrant’ appeared – fugitives from pogroms and atrocities. Some where put up at the Jewish Sheltering Home in Great Orford Street, a communal institution whose secretary was Mr Caplan, who held a similar office at the now closed Shaw Street Synagogue.
I well remember an old man arriving there whose grey beard ahd been plucked out on one side of his face, and a more tragic case of a little boy whose arm had been cut off. I can still see the look in his eyes, asking mutely, “Why, why?” Grim foreboders of what was to come some twenty years later!
The ‘Hill’ end of Great Newton Street contained two well-used communal institutions, the mikve and the poultry yard. The latter was the scene of much activity commencing slowly on a Monday and rising to a furious crescendo on Thursdays and part of Fridays. The fowl for Shabbos was (and still is) a ‘must’ in the weekend diet of our people, and indeed to some outsiders it is considered to be a religious ‘must’ together with the ‘through room’!
Hen pluckers
What a hubbub and bustle greeted the newcomer as he entered through the latched entrance at the back. A babble of conversation – for the yard was he meeting place for everyone – and here was retailed the latest scandal, news of the family, and rumour founded and unfounded. Poultry dealers, butchers’ lads and all and sundry shouted out to each other in order to be heard above the insistent background noise of the ‘hinner’. They were squawking on being taken out of the crates or from the bag in which they had been carried after being bought for the shechita at the market behind Williamson Square.
To add to the volume of noise was added the last cries as the shochet performed his rite and thrust them into a narrow wooden compartment in which the blood drained away. Incidentally, it behoved to keep a sharp eye on the bird in all this turmoil, otherwise a mistake in the compartment in one’s going out with a three-pounder after coming in with one twice that weight! Professional pluckers, clad in coarse sacking aprons, sat around and stripped the feathers with the ease of long practice for a small fee. The feathers provided them with an extra perk and the amount was augmented by the ‘amateur’ pluckers of their own bird struggling painfully to extract a small handful at a time but saving the extra copper or two.. Underfoot was a carpet of feathers and mire whose composition it was best not to enquire too deeply. And the smell, and the queue lined up to pay the fee at an opening I nthe window at the back of the house. From here Mr Lowenthal gave a metal tally showing the correct fee to be handed to the shochet with the bird. The fee varied with the type of bird. In the season the shrill notes of hens and roosters would be augmented by the deeper and quicker notes of ducks, the lone hiss of a goose and the gobble-gobble of a turkey.
Amid all the clamour and commotion could be seen, on occasion, in the yellow gaslight as the day darkened, the figure of the shochet utterly absorbed in a careful and minute examination of his knife making certain that the cutting edge and other particulars conformed exactly to the strict requirements. In those days a housewife herself opened up the bird and anxiously examined the crop, ‘puppeck’ and the innards for signs of any disease or the dreaded ‘noddle’ – a needle.
Eating days
If such a piece of metal came to light then the bird was not for her family; it was either given away or sold cheaply to a goy. When a doubt existed off it went to the rav for a ‘sheyele’ and I remember being sent on such an errand to the late Rabbi S.J.Rabinowitz at his home in Crown Street. In my hand I clutched a small paper packet containing a coin with strict instructions to place it on the table and not to hand it over direct, in deference to his position. A rav in those days received very little direct salary, if any at all, and depended on the chance payments from ‘sheyele’ fees, selling chometz on erev Pesach and other such types of income.
Those without a ‘shtele’ or permanent post travelled from town to town as a ‘maggid’, delivering a sermon called a ‘droshe’ on a Shabbos afternoon between mincha and maariv. For this they were given a small fee and ‘taken in’ by a shool elder for temporary board and lodging. This was no more than a continuance of their youthful days at a yeshiva away from home when they lived by ‘essen tag’. Translated literally it means ‘eating days’ and refers to the custom of being fed at the tables of the well-to-do of the town on agreed days. It was a custom still extant in my youth; and when studying at Liverpool Yeshiva, it was suggested that I go a Manchester establishment of a similar nature and arrangements would be made to ‘ess tag’.
Dave the barber
The Jewish shopkeepers on the Hill from Great Newton Street downwards as I remember were Cohen, tobacconist; Landy, chandler; Skulnick, ironmongery and tools; Axelrod, china and kitchenware; Levenson – later Goodman – butcher at the corner of Trowbridge Street where the Levenson girls helped in the shop; Mrs Schur, grocery; Yaffe the melamed who sold vursht; and Pochinsky’s, drapers. Mr Pochinsky, a kindly, bespectacled gentleman, aided by his daughters, rigged us out with jerseys nd shorts, cricket shirts and belts, and new outfits for yomtov. The girls were dressed in jerseys and kilts, or a gym slip when older, and for ‘best’ a ‘sailor suit’ outfit – straw hat and ribbon, sailor collar and blue trimming on the collar, and blue trimming on the bodice and skirt. Some boys were put into the masculine equivalent but we thought the white sailor type outfir ‘cissy’.
Then came a chip shop, run by the Silverberg brothers, and Dave the barder. Dave Bernstein was a short, tubby man with a greying moustache which he wore rather thick grown, not waxed and twisted to a point as others did. He had worked as a ship’s barber for many years and ahd a cosmopolitan polish much beyond any of his customers. His son – named Charlie, I think 0- helped to lather, for in those days for a shave, hot towels and massaging was the thing.
Incidently at that period the Jewish barber shop was Sam Jacobs in nearby Seymour Street. After Dave’s came Harris, the greengrocer – Charlie Rosenberg’s uncle – Katzin’s, bakers, whose white bread my mother bought when she did not herself bake. I’ve a memory of Mr Katzin carrying into the shop a long flat tin of ‘bulkes’ and dressed in his white baker’s outfit, and of Mrs Katzin, a distinguished looking lady, serving me with some delicacy or other. Then followed Alexander’s, licensed broker before Pegram’s at the corner of Russell Street and across the road to Leach, bakers, later Ginsberg’, Bennett’s, tailors’ trimmings, Nurrock, wholesale draper, and Simons, chemists later occupied by Koffman, wine and spirit merchant, who ahd formerly traded opposite at number 62, as Koffman’s Chip Shop.
The Jewish chip shops deserve a paragraph of their own, for not only did they provide palatable food but they were a sort of club and ‘coffee bar’ for the youth of those days, when we ahd money to spend in the saloon. Before that we bought the chips wrapped in newspaper and what quantities of salt from the metal canister and lashings of watery vinegar from from the rubber-spouted bottle were added to give a tang and a flavour to the hot, liberal portion obtained for a penny or two dished out with a small scoop. When funds were low we asked for a pennorth of ‘scrapes’, which were the small pieces of potato dug up from the bottom of the deep pan filled with the hot oil in which the chips were fried.
The chip shop aroma was compounded of moist, warm air, vinegar fumes, frying fish, boiled peas, a blast of heat from the hot coals under the range and the earthy smell of the washed and peeled spuds being carried in from the back in an enamel bucket to be fed into the hand-operated chipper machine and then thrown into the frier with a sizzle and a splutter.
On a plate
With increasing pocket money came the dignity of a saloon customer. There the chips came on a plate and were eaten with the aid of a much used and prong-twisted fork, seated on a bench around a table covered with shiny, creased and worn ‘American oilcloth’. At Koffman’s, in Brownlow Hill, later Yaffe’s, the saloon was a side room off the shop, but at Jacobs’s, at Chatham Street corner, we ate in a back living room, while at Restan’s, in Boundary Place, favoured customers were served upstairs.
This was a time for talk over the plates of chips and second helpings, washed down with many bottles of sarsaprilla, dandelion and burdock, and lemonade, the contents of which could be poured out by pushing down a glass ‘olley’ wedged in the top. Memory recalls many happy hours spent this way, the discussions and arguments still being carried on as we walked each other home and so to bed.