Abraham Weiner

Abraham Weiner

          Abe was my mother’s father. We grandchildren called him Dudi. He had a long, narrow face and a substantial nose. He was fairly short, but he was a strong man, and looked it, even into his old age. A tough old dude. When he was in his eighties he was still the sole charge at a newspaper-and-magazine stand at the corner of the main downtown parking lot in Wilmington, Delaware. He folded each newspaper into a cylinder and popped it tight against his knee before putting it out on the stand. He became a well-known character: The Mayor of Ninth & Shipley.

          Most of what I know about Dudi he told me in stories, or I remember from stories other people in the family told me long ago that he told them, or I remember my mother telling me. My Aunt Goldie provided her recollections in an unpublished memoire she mailed me a few years ago. Dudi liked to talk to me and tell me stories in his thick accent and smell of tobacco. He also taught me card games: casino, and go fish, and eights, and such. A wonder that I can’t even remember how to play most of them. I understand that his favourites were pinochle and klabiash, but he never taught me those successfully.

          He thought Jimmy Durante was wonderful.

          Dudi had a brother, Ellek, or Alec, about whom I know little. He died young. I think Dudi may have had other brothers or sisters, but it was with Ellek that he fled Molidechnya, the village where he was born. Molidechnya was near the city of Bialystok in the Pale, a stretch of flatlands that through history changed frequently back and forth amongst Russia and Poland and Lithuania. Today it’s in Poland, I think. Then it was a part of the Russian Empire. Dudi’s family, the Perchinskys (or Pochinskys), were Polish Jews. Avram (Dudi) grew up learning to speak Polish and Yiddish. I gather that the Jews of Molidechnya held a generally unfavourable opinion of the Russians.

          Dudi was 14 and Ellek 18 when they took off. The way I remember Dudi telling it to me — and he told it to me long ago, back when I was maybe five or six — Ellek had been drafted into the Russian army and, neither being nor speaking Russian, he decided it would be better to run than to show up for basic training. I remember Dudi telling me about running with his brother along a drainage ditch with the Tsarist soldiers standing just over their heads — maybe this was just before crossing a border. I remember Dudi telling me about making it to England and buying a phoney passport, with the last name Weiner on it, to get to America, but my mother and others have from time to time doubted some parts of this. I think Abe and Ellek did have some money to take with them, and relatives in Philadelphia.

          Anyway, the story goes that he got off the boat — maybe from London, maybe from Danzig, maybe from somewhere else — at Philadelphia, and immediately went to a warehouse by the wharf, bought some needles and buttons and suchlike — what is known here as Manchester — wholesale, and went off to the Jewish neighbourhoods to peddle them to housewives door to door. My Aunt Goldie said he looked up a relative first and went to work the next day. This was, I think, in 1889. He once gave me an 1889 US silver dollar to commemorate it. I carried it around in my pants pocket for years, but lost it one night in 1967 when I was sleeping in my clothes.

          I know I don’t have the chronology of the next 30 or 40 years straight at all. What I have is a grab-bag of disconnected stories in no particular order: He got a job as a cigar-roller in Philadelphia and joined the cigar-rollers union, which was led by the soon-to-be-famous union organiser Samuel Gompers. Dudi idolised Samuel Gompers for the rest of his life. He also worked for a while in a bakery and in a furniture store.

          He married Pauline (Peshe in the Old Country) Poznansky, who according to my mother came from a family of Jewish notables in Poznan, Poland. Aunt Goldie says she came from Bialystok. My mother told me that her mishpukha (extended family, whanau) included rabbis and lawyers and functionaries for the Catholic Polish government. There is an ancient photo of Dudi’s grandfather or uncle or some such mishpukha that the family says looks like me. I don’t think it does very much, though. It’s just the beards that are similar.

          Pauline had a skin condition that ended up causing her much pain. She died in the early 1940s. She was a strong-willed woman, from all accounts. Some stories that I vaguely remember suggest that she was occasionally ill-tempered, but I guess with a chronically-painful skin condition that’s to be expected. Looking at photographs of her (one posed alongside Dudi and the other beside my father), I get the impression from her expression that she was a woman accustomed to expressing disapproval.

          Dudi and Pauline were fervently patriotic Americans and quietly fervent socialists. They used to look in the newspaper after elections to see their two votes for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Workers Party (the only ones in the town) at the bottom of the results. I think Dudi thought it was funny that nobody knew who those two damn socialists were.

          Dudi moved his family around, changing jobs and businesses. According to Goldie they lived maybe four times in Philadelphia, three times in Wilmington, Delaware, and once each in Magnolia, New Jersey, Chester, Pennsylvania, and Lynn, Massachusetts. Maybe some other locations.

          In Magnolia, Dudi had a little general store on the Black Horse Pike, a main road running from one of the bridges over the Delaware River at Philadelphia to the beaches of the New Jersey Shore. He placed his chicken coops where speeding drivers often missed a curve in the road, so they’d have to buy the chickens they killed. Dudi himself had a carriage and a timid horse named Teddy who was easily spooked by cars. This was around the end of the first world war. Then he bought a 1918 Chevrolet that could only go uphill in reverse.

          By the late 1920s they were living in somewhat cramped quarters in Wilmington. Dudi had lost money in the furniture business in Philadelphia and had a little store again. I don’t think the Great Depression was kind to the Weiners, but they managed to get by. Dudi made his own butter for home use and used day-old milk to make cottage cheese that he sold in his little store.

          After he sold the store for next to nothing in 1936 he entrepreneured an egg route — driving to a rural egg farm and then selling the eggs door to door in town. He came to include Franklin D. Roosevelt along with Samuel Gompers in his pantheon of heroes. Then he had another little store for a while, and then a successful cousin set him up in the newsstand, where he found his calling.

          I remember once, when I was little, the car in which he was riding as a passenger on his way to work crashed into a stone wall. He got out and finished walking downtown — about five or six km — to get the newsstand open and worked through to 5:30 or six when he closed. He turned out to have a couple of broken ribs. He was 78 or 79 at the time.

          He liked going to the Orthodox Jewish shul, where all the men (women in a separate room) prayed and chanted in sing-song, Yiddish-accented Hebrew at their own pace in an unintelligible-to-me hubbub. As I remember, the place was in a basement in downtown Wilmington in a neighbourhood that was rapidly becoming dominated by African-Americans.

          He didn’t keep kosher away from the place, though: he liked pork chops and steamed clams. Especially cherrystones. I remember one glorious day when I was little that we spent digging clams on the beach at Margate, New Jersey, just south of Atlantic City. I considered digging, steaming, and eating them to be a wonderful experience; it made for a deep sensual-spiritual memory.

          He regularly played The Numbers, the illegal gangster-run lotteries popular with working people before the appearance of the legal, state-run lotteries. He also took obvious relish in telling naughty jokes and stories, which always provoked extravagant displays of embarrassment and disapproval from my mother.

          He lived to be 89, or thereabouts — he was always vague about his true birthday — and remained the most involved codger in his nursing home up to the end. He believed in work, not necessarily for everyone, but for himself. At the Kutz Home, as the place where he ended up was called, he assumed for himself a number of odd chores, which they apparently conceded to him. He was on his way to the flagpole out front to run up the flag in the morning when he had a sudden aneurism and died. And he’d smoked about 40 unfiltered cigarettes a day from about the age of ten.