Nate's Fish and Poultry Shop

By G. David Schwartz

I do not particularly like eating chicken. This is a curious position for a Jewish person to be in. Chicken is virtually the staple of Shabbat dinners on Friday evenings. Chicken is the fundamental Jewish response to illness. But I do not enjoy eating chicken.

Maybe my life would have been entirely different if the man I most respected in life had not owned a chicken store. My grandfather, Nathan Oscherwitz, was the son of a dairy farmer and milk deliverer. His father was struck in the head with a pistol during a robbery attempt and died some days later. My grandfather subsequently found himself investing everything he had into a haberdashery. In later years, he liked to say of this experience, "I lost the shirt off my back."

When I was born, my grandfather owned the poultry shop. My earliest memories find me in that most unsanitary place, where live chickens were butchered according to the specification of customers. I can see images of my young self sticking my fingers into wire cages that held between ten and thirty squawking chickens. I can hear my grandfather's hurried warning not to stick my fingers in the cages as he turned from one customer to another. "Okay, what do you want?" he would inquire with a businesslike impatience.

I remember naming chickens, although I cannot recall any of the names I gave the domestic fowl. Unbeknownst to me at the time, each of the fowl was dead within hours or days at most. Nor did the twinkling look of bemusement ever leave my grandfather's eyes as his gaze darted impatiently from customers to tenderly observe me.

Spoiled, I was. I had the run of the store. I was in charge of naming chickens and sticking my fingers into cages where, yes, they were pecked. But in retrospect, it is not clear who ran the store.

Clearly, my grandfather was the owner. But when I reach into that bemused perspective that my grandfather willed to me even while he was alive, it is apparent that the chickens ran the shop. They cackled when anyone approached, and everyone present knew that the cackling was a demand to be left alone, or taken. Once in awhile one of the men would reach for a chicken and, in response to the cackling which was delivered, either leave that particular chicken alone, or speak with it as it was taken behind the counter, behind the great wall, to be slaughtered. My grandfather, the men who worked with him, myself, and the customers: we were all at the bidding of the chickens. And I suspect that my grandfather and the men he worked with knew it.

There was a symbiosis between myself and the chickens, between the chickens and the shop, and between the men who worked with my grandfather and the job which had to be done. They were great black men, as any man is great to a child who stood only four foot tall. They had great, guttural laughter and I, the prince of chicken naming, was also the crown prince of generating laughter.

The issue can be raised: were these men genuinely happy? Was it just my impression or were they engaging in a denial of their true feelings, a show which would have been their perceived qualifications for keeping their job? It is a matter of honoring my grandfather to at least think that I experienced his intimacy with these men, their freedom to be genuinely at ease in the shop. But does remembering in this manner simply mask the truth?

My grandfather would have restrained no one. The proof? Smiling black men — Jake, Bert, Mo — would take time from their activities to stand next to me, put massive arms around my shoulders, and ask in a teasingly astute manner: "How do you know that one's name is Henry?"

I was never "Dave." I was always "Nate's grandson." For someone who had always been told "David! Get away from there!" or "Don't do that, David!" the change was refreshing.

Later, a friend from South Carolina would tell me that at the very same time in her life, black men would not dare address a white person by their first name.

What a rush! In the world controlled and directed by the life, naming, and death of chickens, my grandfather was "Nate," and I was "Nate's grandson."

How different are our experiences.