The Changing Years, Abe Max, Liverpool Jewish Gazette, September 20, 1968
(Third in a series of articles)
The family moved to Cecil Street, now wiped away and which ran parallel to Prescot Street and bisected Montague and Fortescue Streets. It was to the ‘goyisher’ end where the street ran into Mount Vernon Street. However, from my mother’s point of view it was a very good move, for the house had hot water on tap – an unusual luxury in those days.
In the two-up-and-two-down houses of the neighbourhood the sole means of cooking was on the kitchen grate fed by coal. The grates were flanked either side by a steel panel and our right hand one concealed a hot water tank from which ran a brass tap. So the bricked-in washing copper in the back scullery could be filled with this very welcome hot water on Monday, which washing day – a godsend when everything was done by hand. Laundries were an undreamt-of luxury and the washtub, dolly-pin and rubbing board were a common sight everywhere.
When funds allowed, a maid was hired to help out, and later on we secured the services of Mary as our permanent weekly help. The helps of those days knew all about a Yiddish house and needed no guidance in separating ‘milchig’ from ‘fleishig’ and how long to kosher meat and indeed often reminded the ‘Mississ’ about those things.
Front parlour
Housework was never ending and farmed out among the family, my Friday chore being the ‘shyer’ the steel fender and the fire irons, then to polish the Shabbos ‘lichter’ used for benshing licht and to ‘Brasso’ the brass plate which covered the rounded front door step. There were no steps up to the front door so we did not have a cellar kitchen with stone steps leading down to the area called by everyone the ‘airey’. The front parlour window stone was painted red or yellow to keep bright and of course the lace curtains were kept white and stiffly starched. Morris, the curtain man in London Road, was the place to buy curtains and they were sold by dutch auction.
The front parlour grate was used rarely and the fashion was to cover it with a ‘guard’ made from coloured paper cut out into an intricate pattern and purchased from an itinerant woman hawker who used to go from street to street shouting a cry which sounded to my ears like “apery papee!” Times were hard but all was cast aside on Friday nights when the light of the candles and the gas-light shone on the framed family photographs and the mizrach. This was hung on the wall facing east and every Jewish bride made one from gaily-coloured wools sown on to a pierced canvas background showing the seven-branched candelabrum, the outline of imagined buildings in Jerusalem and other embellishments.
There was usually an ‘enlargement’ or two on the wall, the trade in which was mainly in the hands of our people and the basis of many a good credit round in the Soho Street and Great Homer Street areas. Time no doubt colours the picture, but how white was the tablecloth, how sweet the yellow egg from the hen boiled in the soup and how ziss the portion of ‘polker’. Was the challah more tasty, the chopped herring more succulent and the lockshen with more of a ‘tamm’ than today, or is that imagination?
Vine Street School was now too far away and I became a pupil of ‘Brunny Wezzy’, a Scouser name for Brunswick Wesleyan Church School. But not for long. My father learnt to his horror that Wezzy was connected with a kleister – a church! And that was the end of that!
An interview with Mr Sol Levy was very quickly arranged and another pupil enrolled in the Jewish School, Hope Place. Well do I remember my first day there. When I entered by the Hope Place door what appeared to me to be an apparition from the nether regions rose from the stone steps leading to the basement. It was, in fact, the caretaker, Mr Gottshalk, coming up after a stint at the boilers below, his naturally swarthy-complexioned face made darker by an admixture of coal dust and perspiration. Topped by an unruly mop of bushy black hair, eyes glinting through thick pebble glasses, his appearance started me and has left a remembrance until this day.
Bertha Best
Those were the days of street gang warfare and Jewish lads in particular had to cast a wary eye around. I was quickly warned to keep a sharp lookout for the ‘shgotzim’ from nearby Caledonian School and to take the Hardman Street route to the boys’ entrance in Pilgrim Street. My classroom was the end one with desks on raised tiers and the teacher was Bertha Best – dear Miss Best whose kindly manner I remember to this day. A list of other staff will no doubt cause many readers to cast back a glance to their own schooldays. The Misses Kresner, Epstone, Serabski, Goodman, Gordon, Inestone and Messers. Sol Levy, Sam Levy and Pizer Abrahams.
Cocoa and buns
School dinners were served in the basement and I am told the Jewish School was the pioneer in this now common service. The treat, however, was on Fridays when no meals were cooked. Armed with a pink-coloured ticket we trooped to the Zionist Hall in Bedford Street and exchanged it for a tin mug of rather milky cocoa and two buns. We sat at long trestle tables and the service was run by ‘The Ladies’ who, I think, were the wives and daughters of the members attending the Hope Place Synagogue. My stay at Hope Place was brief, for my father, ever on the lookout for a good Jewish education for me and being somewhat contemptuous of the ‘Princes Road’ accent with which we were taught Hebrew, sent me to Dr Fox’s Hebrew Higher Grade School, then in West Derby Street.
The upper part of Brownlow Hill was within my boundary and memory recalls many business establishments and local characters living there. There was a village like flavour about some of the added names given to men living in the area: for example ‘der shuster’, ‘der Schneider’, ‘der melamed’, ‘der holtzhacker’, ‘der hinner’, ‘der paylisher’ and so on.
Above Elizabeth Street, were to be found Latin, the tailor; Carasov, sweets and tobacco; Aranovitich (later Alpers), meat and vursht; Caplan, grocer; a non-Jewish barber named Chapman, remembered by me because he gave a free pencil with a haircut; Bishop, butchers and Caplan, the newsagent and tobacconists, who sold Yiddish papers. Many readers will remember dear kind Rosie Caplan, who helped her father in the shop, and the proprietor himself, a silver-haired, shortish man who peered at you over his spectacles never set firmly on his short stubby nose.
On the other side, above Bedford Street, came Rosenberg, tobacconist, a shop I remember from my first recollections of the district; ‘Shymer’ Samuels, who sold a polyglot variety of eatables from meat to vegetables etc.; then Carmel’s, the wine shop. The owner was a man well versed in the Talmud and a pillar of the local synagogue. Then there was to be found Jacob’s chip shop, though I seem to recall an earlier occupier named Black. The chip shops of the community were well patronised by our youth and well deserve a chapter oh their own.
Nellie’s fish
At the corner of Chatham Street was a public house outside which was set in the roadway a public weighing machine used by the horse drawn lorry drivers of those days. They received a ticket giving the full weight and the ‘tare’ (the unladen weight), thus showing by subtraction the full weight of the load. Then a shop used by Dr. Strock, followed by Black’s, the printers and Mrs Levine, the butcher. Up the hill to Paddington found Lot the chandler (a non-Jew), Zack the grocer, a man with a full-grown beard and prominent in the affairs of the nearby Nusach Ari Shool, Cohen’s the drapers, Isons, Shieldhouse (footwear), Burman’s in the same trade, the London Hat and Cap Co.; Levine the grocer and Mr Beck, higher up, who carried on the trade of hand-made cigarette maker and cigar retailer.
Bamber Street, with a predominately Jewish population ran into Paddington and almost opposite was Nellie’s the fish shop. There must be many of my women readers, who were first introduced by their mothers into the niceties of buying fish for shabbos and yomtov at Nellie’s. She knew to a nicety the popular requirements of the Jewish fresh fish trade. The emphasis is on the word ‘fresh’ and Nellie had nothing to learn about lesht, ockenes, fluke, hecht, bream, hake and other fish for frying, chopping and stuffing. What a turmoil there was round the open pavement display erev Yontov, and a fingering of the body for firmness and a flicking back of the gils to see that underneath was blood red and fresh. Here old friends met each other, exchanged gossip and were made au fait with that kind of news peculiar to the feminine mind.
Millionaires
The masculine sounding-board of the neighbourhood was Crown Street Shul, the Nusach Ari. At one end sat the ‘ayven’ or stove, round which sat on forms the mainly workingmen congregants between mincha nd maariv discussing matters spiritual and temporal. Other people’s money is always a matter of interest to ‘us’ and there was no exception here. Many an assessment was made from Rothschild down to the local ‘millionaires’. As the riches grew in amount the epithet in Yiddish shortened in length. “Er ist reich – gvir – ongeshtopt!” And the stuffed to bursting of the latter exclamation did not refer to a kishke.
Apropos of this delicacy of yesteryear my grandmother in Russian Poland was a woman rare in those days when girls received no formal cheder education. She knew how to daven and keep up with the service in shool. She led a chorus of women in the curtained-off section who said prayers with her. One yomtov, overcome with tiredness and the stuffy heat of upstairs, she dozed off and apparently dreamt about what to make the next meal at home. The chazzan was in the last tages of a long drawn out “ay yiy yiy” when she awoke with a start and murmured sleepily: “Yeh kishke, nisht kishke”. The women around her immediately took up the refrain and in their plaintive sing song manner burst out with “Yeh kishke, nisht kishke!”. to the stupefaction of the chazzan and his listeners.
Topol
The Nusach Ari Synagogue – now at long last closed – fulfilled the purpose of the shtibbel abroad and there was a constant saying of Kedusha, psalms, mishnayoth and, for the more erudite, a ‘blatt Gemorrah’. Memory brings to mind their own Rav, Rabbi Suckmansky, who dressed as nearly as possible in chassidic clothing and led many a song and dance on Simchas Torah. Their religion was a cheerful one and a yahrzeit meant kichel, herring and, of course, a bottle of ‘bronfen’ after the morning service.
Life was not easy and ‘parnossa’ a problem but the men of those days kept cheerful, regarded their maker with philosophy of Topol and helped each other. Their womenfolk were not a whit behind and maybe there was not the super-hygienic homes of today, but there was ‘freintshaft’ and helpfulness, not a separation behind walls and hedges.
Life was lived on the street and there was always a barrow woman with fruit, a travelling milkman, or another hawker round whom to gather buy and ding (bargain). There were people going round in pairs – never singly – to collect a nedova for someone in financial straights and all gave, it being de rigeur not to ask for whom. There was always a new baby being born in the neighbourhood, and that meant help to be given with food and looking after the other kinder. And who remembers the mother lying in state with her well-filled feather pillows covered with pillowslips sewn with many frills and tucks, the bed valances touching the floor and on the four walls a printed prayer pinned up to avert the evil eye? It was an occasion for cherry brandy, black grapes and a welcome only holiday for the mother! A Kimpet!