Kolansky’s

In Memory of Howard Adler

Mr. Kolansky had been in a Concentration Camp, but that meant little to the three boys who tormented him. Concentration, a word used often by the nuns who taught the boys Catechism in school, meant thinking very deeply and laboriously, something they did not like to do. They weren’t sure how to reconcile the words, concentration and camp. They knew, however, by the looks on the adults’ faces, and the pitch of their voices, when they mentioned Mr. Kolansky having been in a Concentration Camp, that whatever it might be was very serious, part of the war and the Depression – things still hovering in the ether of East Liberty as palpably as the intoxicating smell of baking bread rising from the ovens of National Biscuit Company on Penn Avenue, just across from the Little League Field and the Dairy Queen.

Kolansky’s was a two story listing insulbrick store at the corner of Howe and Social Streets. Its inventory was sparse, as old as Mr. Kolansky, covered with dust, dwindling, never replenished, it seemed, except for milk, bread, butter, and penny candy. It was as if, when the very last item was sold off – a jar of relish, a box of jujubes, a tin of thumb tacks – he’d switch off the dim bulbs dangling from long wires noosed to the rafters and walk out of the caving, lopsided shack and never return. He lived, supposedly, with his wife in the apartment above his store. No one had really ever seen her, though some claimed to have glimpsed her peering down, from a filmed oval window, into the alley behind the store.

Edward, one of the three boys, lived just a block from Kolansky’s. Edward’s grandmother, with whom he lived, along with his grandfather – his parents were dead – sent him often to the Jew Store to buy a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, and a stick of butter. Like Concentration Camp, Edward wasn’t so sure what Jew, in this context, meant, but he knew it was not good, a derogation. He was a fifth grader at a Catholic school. He had been taught by the nuns – they had beaten it into him – to worship Jesus, a Jew. How could Jew be bad if Jesus, the Son of God, the Light of the World, was a Jew? But his grandmother was not the only one who called Kolansky’s The Jew Store. It was just what people called it – matter-of-factly, seemingly without rancor, without thinking, a mere designation.

Edward’s family was Italian. His grandfather –...