The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1) by Joan Cochran (popular books of all time .txt) 📗

I’m not satisfied with his explanation but let it drop. My Uncle Moe died years ago, and neither my father nor I are talking to his son, Zvi, who would’ve been too young to know what was going on at the time. I tried to explain to my dad how shocked I was to read about Uncle Moe’s appearance before a committee investigating organized crime—especially after learning of his own ties to the Jewish mob. The old man kept mute. I’m pretty sure he knows more than he’s telling me. Lying in bed at night these days, unable to sleep, I sometimes feel as though I’m spinning off into a strange world. First, Daniel betrays me, then I learn my father and uncle may be gangsters. No one seems to be who I thought they were.

Tonight we’re having the stuffed cabbage my father bought at Epicure, a gourmet grocery across the causeway from the Schmuel Bernstein. Back in the fifties, when Miami Beach was a refuge for retired Jews, everyone went there for their borscht, chopped liver, and matzo balls. Straight from the shtetl, the Old World, my father claims. The Epicure still caters to the old Jews. But they also stock gourmet cheeses and mineral water for the skinny models and what my father calls feygeles—slang for gay men.

Stuffed cabbage is a big deal for Tootsie. He asks me to make it at least once a month since my mom passed away. This week, when I again remind my father I don’t make Mom’s recipe, he acts like I’m holding out. “A balebosta like you. A big shot food writer. You’re running her noodle pudding and chicken soup recipes in the newspaper. And you can’t come up with her stuffed cabbage?”

Maybe he hears me shrug over the phone or tires of riding my rear. “Okay,” he concedes, “Sadie Goldfarb’s daughter, Mavis, brought us to The Epicure Wednesday and I filled the freezer with cabbage rolls. I can spare a few for my favorite daughter.”

That’s what he calls me when he wants a favor. It’s also what he calls my sister, Esther, on the rare occasions she phones or visits.

When I got off the elevator on my dad’s floor, I was accosted by the rancid odor of several generations of boiled beef and cabbage. But once I step inside his apartment, I’m greeted with the pungent aroma of simmering tomatoes and vinegar. Tootsie turns down the heat on the stove and gives me a kiss, then follows me into the living room where I plop on the couch.

He plants himself in front of me and shifts from foot to foot, rocking like a dinghy on rough seas. “You notice anything different?”

I glance around the small room. The swivel chairs are covered with faded blue sheets. Back issues of the Forward, a Jewish newspaper, are strewn across the cocktail table and couch. The bulletin board next to the kitchen, normally plastered with colorful ads for early bird specials, is covered with black-and-white photos. I can’t make out the images from where I’m sitting.

“I don’t see anything,” I say, looking straight at my father. I reach for the newspaper lying on the couch beside me. “Should I?”

He walks over to the bulletin board and taps its edge. “You know who this is?”

I get up, grunting, making a big show of the effort it takes, and walk to the board. My stomach contracts. An attractive thirtyish woman stands on a boat dock in one photo, leans against a market stall of straw hats in another, waves from the passenger seat of a 1950s convertible in a third.

And she’s not my mother.

Her skin’s fairly light but her features—the fullness of her lips, the curl of her hair—suggest African blood. A snapshot in the middle of the display shows my father with his arm around the woman in a banquette. I recognize the restaurant in which they’re sitting as a once-famous Bahamian nightclub. When my father brought us to Nassau the summer after I finished sixth grade, we had dinner there and I admired the giant jeweled elephant statues that stared at us from shelves around the club. My father—who always used the term schvartze, a derogatory Yiddish word for blacks, when he talked about the truck drivers he employed—made a big show of his friendship with the owner, having me shake hands with the darkest man I’d ever seen. I felt intimidated by the man, whose deep laugh and large frame filled the nightclub, and was surprised by the gentleness and warmth of his handshake.

When I turn to my father, I catch a nasty glimmer in his eyes, a hint of wiseass in the curl of his lip. I wonder if he put the pictures out to brag of his prowess or get my goat. It’s a game he plays, daring me to react. I want to snarl, but resist the urge. I look back at the photos and ball my fists, pumping them open and closed. This time he’s gone too far. I walk to the bathroom and slam the door. When I’m through splashing water to relieve the heat flushing my cheeks, I look in the mirror.

And there she is, again. My mother. It’s uncanny how much I look like she did at the same age.

As a teenager, all I felt for my mother was contempt. I’m not proud of it, but when you’re young, the world is black and white and you’re unwilling to dwell in the subtle grays and off-whites that make life bearable. If your husband cheats, you leave him. I never thought about the fact that my mother was married at twenty-one and a mother of two by twenty-four. And a woman who spent her life keeping house, raising children and playing tennis is ill prepared to face the working world. I often heard my mother and her friends speak in the hushed tones