The Kisseloff Collection

A while back I wrote about my maternal grandfather whose 16mm porn collection was all the rage on New York City’s Radio Row in the 1930s and 1940s. I’ve been meaning to further establish my NYC credentials by writing about my other grandfather (everyone’s entitled to two), Max, who along with his family came here from a small shtetl (I doubt they had such a thing as large shtetls) in Russia in the 1920s and settled into the Lower East Side. There’s a story about it. I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s a good one nonetheless. It was told to me by one of my grandfather’s brothers, my Uncle Jack, shortly before he died.

The family lived for a couple of generations in a Yarmolimnitz, which was on the Polish border. I guess they owned a bar and were well known in town for consuming the profits. Aside from drinking large quantities of vodka and doing the kezatske at weddings, life wasn’t a lot of fun if you were a Jew in Yarmolimnitz or any other place in Russia for that matter. It was especially lousy though when the pogroms swept through the small towns and left thousands of Jews dead in their wake. During one, another of my grandfather’s brothers, my Uncle Sam, formed a kind of Jewish Defense League. He and his buddies armed themselves in the belief that they could hold off the entire Russian army if it ever entered Yarmolimnitz. During one pogrom, he was hiding in the bushes with his rifle when he saw a Russian soldier dragging a girl into a school. My Uncle Sam shot and killed the soldier and then got his ass out of there. The problem was my Uncle Sam was wearing a bright red outfit at the time. It wasn’t hard to for the soldiers to spot him and figure out he was.

So, according my Uncle Jack, the soldiers showed up at their house, lined everyone in my family up against the wall and said, “If we find any weapons in the house, you’re all dead.” They all stood there looking at each other, because they all knew very well that Uncle Sam had stockpiled all the weapons in a room at the top of the stairs.

In a repeat of the Chanukah miracle, however, they soldiers didn’t see the guns and left. After everyone breathed a sigh of relief, they knew it was time to leave Yarmolimnitz. From what I understand, no one was real sorry about it either. In my family, no one sings nostalgic songs about the homeland. What rhymes with pogrom anyway?

So they came here. But let me tell you about my Uncle Sam. When I was a kid, his favorite thing was to shake your hand in such a way that he squeezed and rubbed your bones rubbed together until you screamed. Actually, that wasn’t his favorite thing. He was doing his favorite thing one day around his 65th birthday when his wife got a visit from some woman.

“You Mrs. Kisseloff?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, your husband’s over at my place. You better go get him.”

“Just send him home.”

“I can’t. He’s dead.”

It seems Sam died doing his favorite thing with this woman.

According to family legend, Sam was arrested on his first day in this country when he joined a crap game on the dock at Ellis Island. When the cop asked him where he lived, he said, “I have no idea. I haven’t been there yet.”

He later, rumor has it, was a chauffeur for the mob. A few months before he died, he was mugged by two guys in an elevator and beat the daylights out of both of them. At his funeral, the rabbi, who had no idea who he was, eulogized him as a charitable man and as a family man. At that point, a cousin of mine gave my father an elbow in the ribs and said, “You better check the coffin to see if he’s talking about the right guy.”

Most of my grandfather’s family went into the garment industry or retail. Sam and Jack were pressers. Then there was Carl, who was known as der blinder, because he had thick eyeglasses. He was married to Gertie, who was so fastidious that if you were sitting on her couch and you leaned forward for a piece candy on the coffee table, she would reach out and fluff up the cushion before you sat back down.

My grandfather was also something of a tough guy but no one talked about it much. He was in the Russian cavalry during World War I until he took a bullet in the butt. I have a lot of old family photos from those days. Here’s one of him without his horse Triggerovsky:

For a time in the 1950s, my grandfather and father went into business together with a one-hour martinizing dry cleaning that lost money from the day it opened. The store was in Brighton Beach under the El, but the best thing about it was it’s name: The Alan and Jeff, named for my brother and me. Imagine that. I may not ever write a great book or do a great deed, but I can go to my grave with the knowledge that at one time in New York a laundry was named for me.

At the same time, my grandfather had a dry goods store on Orchard Street. Everybody on Orchard Street then had a dry goods store, and the competition for every customer was so fierce that they hardly ever closed. From what I understand my grandfather went to work one day in 1927, and didn’t go home until 1963.

And then only because he had had a heart attack and would die the next day. When I was researching my book on New York, I visited the fellow behind the barrels at Guss Pickles. When I introduced myself, he asked me, “You related to Kisseloff?”

I said I was. He then told me he was the one who walked my grandfather home that day, and that my grandmother refused to open the door because she was sure it was a robber. That’s how rarely my grandfather was home.

He did have time to join and head his landsleit (countrymen) group, the Yarmolimnitz Society though. Here’s a great photo courtesy of my cousin Maxine from one of their annual gatherings on the Lower East Side. He’s at the table at the top in the center, behind my grandmother, the matronly looking woman in the black dress (click on the photo to supersize it). At the same table on the right, the fellow with the black hair is my Uncle Jack. The person with the long beard in the front table on the left is really my Aunt Pearl, who grew whiskers to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a Chasidic rabbi.

As I said, I have a lot of family photos that go back nearly a century, but this is a more recent one that is the point of this story. It’s a shot of the store from the 1950s that someone just happened to find in an old book of New York photos (again, it’s clickable). Check out the sign in the center.

When You Must Remember This was finished, I thought it would be fun to take a picture in front of the old store for my author’s photo. The publisher didn’t go for it, but I’ve always liked it. Here it is:

I loved that store. It was narrow with shelves on both sides piled with sheets and pillow cases. I still remember the old wooden floor that creaked and the tall rolltop desk in the back (tall to a six-year-old, that is). The best thing though was the toilet. It was an old pull chain job, and as soon as we’d get there for a visit, my brother and I would head to the bathroom and just pull the chain over and over. You could always tell when we were on the Lower East Side because the levels in the city’s reservoirs would drop a few feet. The store closed when he died in 1963. I still go back to visit. Here’s Sue and me in front of the store a few years ago. The place now sells handbags and suitcases. The pull chain toilet is gone.