by Frederick R. Liss

On January 31, 1986, Frederick Liss of Digital Equipment Corporation in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, posted a short memoir to net.religion.jewish. He was responding to a thread about Jewish community, but what he wrote stands apart from any argument: a childhood recalled with specificity and warmth, a world of shoychetim and siddur-davening spice merchants that once covered miles of the Bronx. The Grand Concourse neighborhood he describes dispersed in the late 1950s and 1960s. This account, posted to a computer network by a DEC engineer twenty years later, is among the most vivid early records of it.

I have some fond memories of growing up in The Bronx, New York City, during the early 1950s. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Grand Concourse during that period, it was one of those neighborhoods where for miles around everyone was Jewish. This is no exaggeration. I was about eight or nine years old before I discovered that there was such a thing as a non-Jew. But that is another story. Every five or so blocks there was a shul. Some were small, some were very large, and all were full when Shabbos came. It was not uncommon to see a group of Lubovitchers, with their long coats and broad-brimmed hats, on their way to shul. If someone had gray hair, by definition they also spoke with an accent. It's unfortunate that neighborhoods like that have dispersed.

I remember my grandmother taking me with her to Bathgate Avenue to go shopping. Even on a weekday the narrow street was crowded with shoppers. Both sides of the street were lined with red brick tenements and there were small shops on the ground floor of each one.

Our Shabbos meal was always centered around chicken and chicken soup. Because of the importance my grandmother placed on this meal, the chicken had to be a fresh one. When is the last time you had chicken soup with the egg yolks taken right from the chicken?

I remember Tony's Chicken Market. I think the building originally was a garage. My grandmother would take me by the hand up to a pile of chicken coops. She would point out a chicken to Tony. He'd grab it by the neck and bring it to the shoychet for ritual slaughtering. I remember him wearing a long black coat and sitting on a milk box. He would say a bracha and then perform the cut. He also would put the chicken into a barrel until it stopped moving.

If someone wanted a non-kosher chicken, Tony would take it to a block and chop the head off with a single blow. To this day I can close my eyes and see the chicken heads lying in the sawdust on the floor. Come to think of it, in those days just about every store had sawdust on the floor.

When the chicken was done, my grandmother would take it to the back of the store where she would pull out all the feathers. Then she would remove the stubble over an open fire while she exchanged greetings with the rest of the women standing there.

I always looked forward to the treats my grandmother got me. Next door was a store that sold dried fruits and nuts. Just inside were peanut roasters. The smell and taste of fresh roasted peanuts is indescribable.

Sometimes she would take me across the street to the spice shop. The owner was an older and very thin man. He would be standing in the corner of the store rocking back and forth with a yarlmuka on his head and a sider in his hand. When we entered the store he put down his prayer book and stood before us with clasped hands. For only a few pennies my grandmother would get me enough rock candy to last me for a few days.

I also remember Rudy's fruit and vegetable store. My grandmother told me that Rudy had to be watched very closely. He once put a small rock in with a bag of potatoes and she never trusted him again after that.

A little further down the street was the kosher butcher. There were no neon lights in the window. Instead, big silver decals with Hebrew letters spelled out kosher bosher. It seems that everything in the store was white and shiny. As a little boy I was fascinated by the rail on the ceiling that extended from the street to the refrigerator. When there was a delivery I used to watch them put the carcasses on pulleys and roll them into the refrigerator. Once the butcher let me pull the rope to operate the switch so the meat would be directed behind the counter.

This story, however personal to me, is not unique. We share a common heritage, and I am sure each one of you has your own little story to tell.

Colophon

Written by Frederick R. Liss, Digital Equipment Corporation, 333 South St., Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Posted to net.religion.jewish, January 31, 1986. Liss was a DEC engineer who contributed several posts to the net.religion.jewish community in late 1985 and early 1986, including an account of watching a television documentary about Soviet Jews. The Grand Concourse neighborhood he describes — centered on the wide boulevard running through the South Bronx — was one of the most densely Jewish urban neighborhoods in American history, reaching its peak Jewish population in the late 1940s and early 1950s before beginning to disperse with suburban migration and urban change. The Bathgate Avenue market he describes was one of the last great outdoor Jewish food markets of the American Northeast.

Shoychet (also shochet): the ritual slaughterer, trained and certified in the laws of shechita (kosher slaughter), who performs the prescribed cut with a specially prepared knife after reciting the appropriate blessing. A figure central to urban Jewish commercial life until the mid-twentieth century, when centralized kosher slaughterhouses replaced the neighborhood market shoychet.

Preserved from the UTZOO Usenet Archive (news038f1.tgz, batch b58) for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

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