SHOPPING CART
SHOPPING CART
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It seemed the whole world was crowded
into my parents' tiny bakery on Christmas
Eve, 1958, customers competing for
cookies shaped like Santa Claus, pastries resembling
angels in flight and sheet cakes slathered with images of reindeer and mistletoe. As
patrons jostled for position, slowly inching toward
the counter, they ogled one fantastic concoction or
another, asking in German for a chocolate-covered
Bavarian torte or a towering Black Forest Cake.
Occasionally, the customers nearly toppled the
store's Christmas tree.
For the voluble German patrons the spectacle
must have recalled scenes back in Berlin or Munich,
a tantalizing re-creation of the Old Country wedged
into Chicago's most robust German neighborhood.
Roughly 200,000 Germans flourished in this part of
town, on Chicago's North Side, not far from Lake
Michigan, and sometimes it seemed as if every one
of them made his or her way into our bakery.
For a four-year-old boy who never had seen so
many people in one place before, this was the greatest
night of the year—of my life, in fact. Here we
were, at the nexus of the universe, which, to my good
fortune, happened to be my parents' little German
shop, on an urban strip jammed with European beer
gardens and Old World dancehalls, intimate cafes that served exotic teas and
sprawling import stores
that sold sausages of
strange shapes and scents.
Our bakery, I understood
with great pride, was a
bona fide landmark in
Little Deutschland, and
my parents played the role to the hilt.
"Wie bist du?"—how are you?—my mother
asked one customer after the next, before fetching
the cookies and cakes and breads that my father and
his brother had made just hours (and sometimes
just moments) before.
If the patrons noticed my mother's red, frostbitten
fingers under the bright fluorescent lights
that illuminated the bakery case, they didn't say.
How they would have reacted if they knew that the
woman serving the food was, not so long ago, a child
in the crosshairs of German machineguns, that the
man presiding over the cakes and breads had been
dying of typhoid in Buchenwald, I cannot know. |
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HARDCOVERISBN 978-1-58648-362-3 Pub date: 06/12/06 Price: $25.00/32.95 Canada 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 272 pages none Carton Quantity: 40 Biography, Jewish Studies, Memoir, Psychology Selling Territory: W Rights: |
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