Goldie

by G. Murphy Donovan (January 2014)

Marc Chagall

The store carried a small eclectic inventory: mostly milk, bread, eggs, canned goods, soft drinks, newspapers, and tobacco. Packaged goods were complimented by a small delicatessen where Goldie made sandwiches, not just any sandwich, but heroes.

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Of course sandwiches, even the good ones, were not invented in the Bronx or anywhere else in America. Bread infused with other comestibles surely accompanied the cultivation of wheat, the advent of bakeries and aprons. The latter may have been, after the fig leaf, the second creation of Cro-Magnon dress makers.

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Any baker, before the age of knickers, barbers and bikini waxes, standing in front of a waist-high oven was in danger of spontaneous combustion. Leather skirts were surely the original fire prophylactics for the hirsute tribes of Europe.

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Credit was not the only thing that made Goldie unique.

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Comity is the only mandatory condiment for an ethnic or religious stew.

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She better than any Bureau of Labor Statistics, understood poverty in the micro-culture that was Van Nest. If you had an account with Goldie, you were poor. Alas, poverty, then as now, was never an absolute and even less of an occupation.

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If the boys protested that they had asked for a half hero, Goldie would loudly proclaim:

Goldie had a rare talent for saving your face without diminishing your worth.

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Mrs. West was a contemporary of a more famous fictional Jewish matron, Molly Goldberg. The radio and television show of the same name celebrated another raucous family in the Bronx where all obstacles might be overcome by patience, humor, kindness, and a nosh. Molly Goldberg was the quintessential Jewish mother with a heart as big as Bronx Park. With The Goldbergs, chicken soup and brisket became therapy.

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Epilogue

Molly Goldberg (Gertrude Berg) died wealthy, surrounded by a loving family in 1966. Goldie West died peacefully in a South Beach studio apartment ten years later. She never got, nor ever again needed, a fur coat.

Anne Frank, age 15, was murdered by Nazis at Bergen Belsen in 1945. She became the example of which she wrote.

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