Twenty-Two

Summer 1893

Sarah was setting plates on the table for their weekly dinner with Leo. “Papa’s just not the same, Fanny. It’s as if that rock broke something in him.”

“That’s getting a little dramatic.”

Sarah didn’t think so. Her mother had said at breakfast, “Jacob, you leave half your food on the plate. At night you toss and turn. Maybe it’s time to have a doctor check you.”

“Don’t worry, Rifke. I’m fit as a fiddle.”

Rifke leveled her dark eyes at her husband. “A fiddle with broken strings!”

Leo consumed two bowls of chicken soup loaded with noodles and carrots. Rifke passed around the boiled chicken and potatoes, but he groaned and said he couldn’t eat another bite.

“Can I have Leo’s polke?” Sammy asked.

“Drumstick,” corrected Fanny, adamant about not speaking Yiddish.

“I don’t want a drumstick, I want a polke,” Sammy insisted.

“And a polke you will have.” Leo took a chicken leg off the platter and put it on Sammy’s plate.

“English words sound dead next to the Yiddish,” said Jacob.

“You’re right, my friend,” said Leo. “Is there an English word as good as schlimazel to describe…,” he grinned, “a schlimazel?”

Rifke sat down but ate nothing. She claimed that she had filled up by tasting the things she cooked.

Leo folded his napkin neatly next to his plate. Wetting his lips, he dished out his words like candy. “I ordered a horse and buggy to take the Goldmans and Leo Levi to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893! To see things never presented before to mortal vision!”

Fanny jumped up and hugged Leo. “Thank you, Leo! You’re wonderful!”

“Double wonderful!” Sarah exclaimed.

“We can’t let you spend all that money on us!” Rifke said.

“Rifke, you have fed me delicious dinners every Thursday, chicken soup to strudel, for two and a half years. That makes…” Leo furrowed his brow as he silently counted. “ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY. If I ate one hundred and thirty dinners in a fine Jewish restaurant it would make me a poor man, holding out a tin cup!”

Rifke shook her head and smiled wryly. “You have an answer for everything.”

“Leo, you are a real mensch,” Jacob said, “but I have no money to pay for anything at the Fair. The broken window cost…”

Leo interrupted. “You think Leo Levi takes you to the Fair and lets you stand like statues?” He put his face close to Jacob’s and whispered hoarsely, “Remember, rubber chickens!”

“I heard,” Sammy cried. “Blubber chickens!”

“And the girls have school,” Rifke added.

“We’ll learn more at the Fair. Mama, please,” Fanny begged.

“Mama, aren’t you going to come to the Fair?” Sammy asked, holding her face in his hands and turning it towards him.

Rifke picked him up. “Yes, yes, I will come.”

“We’re going to the Fair!” sang Fanny, lively for the first time in many weeks. She began to dance around the living room. Sammy pulled free from Rifke and banged on the table with a spoon. Leo and Sarah joined Fanny and cavorted like drunken dancers at a wedding. Jacob disappeared and came back with his cello.

Neighbors had never heard such loud celebrating from the Goldman house as was heard that night.