Yonah Schimmel Knishery on the Lower East Side, New York
Technically, I grew up in a mixed faith family but really it was a no faith family. My father is a non-practicing Jew and my mother – who was born in Sweden and raised, nominally, as a Lutheran – was similarly nonobservant. So while my brother and I grew up without a deep understanding of the rituals of religious life, we always felt a strong connection to Jewish culture, especially food. Some of my fondest memories are eating and shopping with my father on the Lower East Side at Jewish specialty stores like Russ & Daughters, Katz’s Delicatessen, Ratner’s, Yonah Schimmel Knish, Kossar’s Bagels & Bialys, Guss’ Pickles, among others. Now eighty-four, my father loves to take his grandchildren to Economy Candy, where he tells them to buy whatever they want and as much as they want.
I wove this history into my novel, My Last Innocent Year, making the father of the main character, Isabel, the proprietor of Rosen’s Appetizing, a slightly down-at-the-heels appetizing shop on the Lower East Side. What better way to make Isabel feel like an outsider at Wilder, her posh New England college, than to have her grow up in an appetizing store? At school, Isabel rarely explains her father’s work; when pressed, she will elaborate, placing appetizing stores in the context of Jewish dietary laws, explanations that often leave her feeling less understood than before. To make sure I captured Isabel’s experience accurately, I read Mark Russ Federman’s memoir Russ & Daughters about his life growing up in the famous appetizing store. Reading his story helped me understand how different Isabel’s life would be from the people she goes to school with, people who have grown up with summer homes, family vacations, and boundless wealth.
In my novel, set in the late 1990s, Isabel is writing a thesis on The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s classic novel about old New York, no shopkeepers – or Jews – in sight. At one point, a professor asks why she is writing about Wharton. Why not Bernard Malamud, he asks her, or other writers who might speak more to her experience?
While my brother and I grew up without a deep understanding of the rituals of religious life, we always felt a strong connection to Jewish culture, especially food.
The novel her professor was referring to – and I know because I wrote the scene – was The Assistant, Malamud’s novel about Morris Bober and his struggling grocery store set in the 1950s. While there are overlaps between Isabel’s father, Abe, and Malamud’s fictional shopkeeper, Isabel may not have found much to relate to in Malamud’s bleak depiction of immigrant life plagued by violence, antisemitism, and crushing poverty. Because despite their similarities, Abe and Morris are products of very different times. Morris is a first-generation immigrant who came from Russia as a teenager and speaks with an accent, while Abe is an American for whom the question of assimilation is closer to being answered. Also, while Rosen’s Appetizing is set on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood Isabel describes as rapidly gentrifying, Bober’s grocery store is located in a neighborhood in decline.
Isabel and Malamud’s protagonist’s daughter, Helen, both have lives similarly shaped by historical forces. While coeducation and the availability of student loans make it possible for Isabel to attend a school like Wilder (which I modeled on my alma mater Dartmouth), Helen is unable to afford more than a semester at NYU. But even with a college education, Helen’s future is still limited by gendered expectations. Because of the strides made by second wave feminism, Isabel can imagine a future for herself as a writer while Helen’s best chance for upward mobility is to marry well. Also, while Abe is able to protect his daughter from the financial realities of their life, which turns out to have consequences later in the novel, Helen is acutely aware of her family’s financial precarity and gives most of her own paycheck to help support her parents. Isabel sometimes laments how much her father has invested in her, but his sacrifice – and the sacrifices made by those who came before him – has made her life possible. In that way, it is a classic immigrant story.
My own family history mirrors, in part, the fictional ones described in My Last Innocent Year. My great-grandfather, Joseph, opened a candy store in Brooklyn in the 1930s, which remained in our family until the 1980s, moving eventually to a prime location under the elevated train on New Utrecht Avenue. I remember visiting the store a few times as a child, but as someone three generations removed from the immigrant experience, that was the extent of my connection to the store. My father worked for his grandfather as a teenager, but both he and his sister went to college and had careers that took them far away from the store. The store eventually passed on to my great-uncles, Joseph’s sons, who had no children.
Like Morris Bober, the lives of my great-uncles were circumscribed by lack of education and opportunity, but because the store was successful – due to a combination of luck and expertise– it became an engine of economic growth and assimilation for my family, much as Rosen’s Appetizing is for Isabel and her family, as Morris Bober hoped his grocery store would be for his. Federman’s story is unusual in that Russ & Daughters endures as a thriving business that continues to support – and employ – members of the original family. In this way, his story upends the traditional immigrant story, at least as it has played out for generations of Jews in New York City.
The store and the work it required is considered by Isabel’s father as a means to an end, the end being a better – read, more assimilated – life. But in the end, it is often larger, historical circumstances that most shape our lives. As that same professor tells Isabel, “We think our stories are personal, but we’re all products of our time.”
Daisy Alpert Florin attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019 – 20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Florin lives in Connecticut with her family. My Last Innocent Year is her first novel.