The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1)

by Joan Lipinsky Cochran

  Yeah. I feel the tiniest bit sorry for him. But mostly I hope he enjoys his sour apples.

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  9

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  It’s Friday morning and I’ve come to the conclusion that if I read another recipe for matzo ball soup, I’ll be sick. I’ve been through more than fifty cookbooks and internet searches and come up with nothing. You can prepare matzo balls with chicken fat or vegetable oil. Leave them in the refrigerator for twenty minutes or overnight. Add leeks or flanken to flavor the broth. It’s old news to me. You’d think that after centuries of making the golf ball-sized dumplings, somebody would come up with a new spin.

  Tradition.

  I don’t think my editor’s going to accept that excuse. My article’s due in a week and I spent so much time with my sons during their visit that I’m behind on my work. Gabe drove up from Miami Monday morning, picking Josh up from the Ft. Lauderdale airport. It was the first time I saw either of them since Daniel’s and my split. I’d hoped they could stay through Saturday and Sunday, but both had plans—a fraternity party for Josh and a paper for Gabe.

  They asked about the breakup as soon as they entered the house, hugging me and asking if I was okay. Daniel and I have raised great boys. Both offered to run errands and do repairs around the house. Over lunch Monday, Josh admitted he was horrified by his father’s affair. When he asked if I’d take Daniel back, I shrugged and told him it was too early to tell. Why cause the boys more worry?

  We spent a few days relaxing around the house, hanging out at the mall and eating at their favorite burger restaurant. The boys slept late every morning, leaving me time to bake them chocolate chip cookies to take back to school.

  Though upset with their father, they agreed to join him for breakfast Wednesday. When they got home. Josh told me his father made a point of telling them Dawn no longer worked for him. I should have been relieved, but didn’t feel much of anything. Dawn’s disappearance from Daniel’s life does nothing to ease the sting of his betrayal. Naturally, I didn’t go into that with Josh or Gabe.

  I threw together a barbecue Wednesday night and Tootsie surprised me by agreeing to come—something he rarely does. Josh drove down to Miami to get him and it was nice being with family. But the table felt incomplete, a chessboard missing its king, without Daniel and his silly jokes.

  “So how’re you boys taking the split?” Tootsie asked once we were seated at the picnic table on the back patio. Josh, who’s become quite a cook since leaving for college, brought the London broil he’d grilled to the table.

  Gabe exchanged a glance with his brother. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Your mom tell you what happened?”

  “About Dad cheating?”

  “What else? Maybe you boys can talk some sense into her.”

  “Dad, will you drop it?” I was tossing the salad and sent a few lettuce leaves flying onto the table.

  Tootsie ignored me. “What your father did was stupid. But your mother’s stubborn. She won’t listen to me when I tell her to get over it. Maybe she’ll listen to you.”

  Josh winced. “That’s kind of up to Mom and Dad, isn’t it?”

  I wanted to hug him. He sounded so mature.

  “It affects you too.”

  Josh shrugged and slid several slices of steak, pink in the center and cut perfectly across the grain, onto Tootsie’s plate. “We’re fine.” He set his jaw in a line that was so similar to my father’s expression of anger that I wanted to laugh. Tootsie let the subject go.

  At any rate, this morning I call a dozen synagogues looking for Rosh Hashanah recipes that date back to Florida’s pioneer days. They have plenty of cookbooks in their libraries and sisterhood stores. But nothing historic. Or what I’d call historic.

  One of the younger librarians I phone ticks me off.

  “You called the right place,” she says after I explain I’m seeking holiday recipes by early settlers. “Temple Shalom has the best Jewish cookery collection in town and I’m sure we have recipes from early settlers. Let me put you on hold while I look.”

  I wait, envisioning her thumbing through a series of ragged tomes, their bindings barely intact, as she searches for a yellowed scrapbook of treasured recipes.

  When she returns to the phone, her voice is bright with excitement. “I think I have what you’re looking for. It’s a sisterhood cookbook dating back to the midcentury. Here. It says nineteen sixty. You should find some historic recipes in this.”

  I don’t tell her that’s the year I was born. Or slam the phone into the receiver. Instead, with my usual ladylike restraint, I say thanks, I’ll get back to you. Then I glance in the mirror on the wall in the dining room, now my office, to reassure myself I’m not an early Jewish settler.

  Well, maybe I am.

  So I’ve driven back to the cultural center, this time to search the library’s cookbooks and, to be honest, look further into my father’s past. I was too shocked to go to the library after my visit to the museum a week earlier. But the main library has an impressive collection of books and documents on Florida. I figure if I can’t find the recipes I need here, I might as well accept that any records of what my foremothers cooked were swept away in a hurricane.

  The garage’s stairwell is free of sleeping men today, although a dozen characters in shabby clothing slouch at the black metal tables and chairs on the plaza. Most are middle-aged or younger and show signs of sleeping rough. When a gray-bearded man approaches me for a handout, I give him a five. Living outdoors has to be tough on older people and I briefly catch his gaze before he mumbles his thanks.

  It’s late August and the air’s sticky with humidity, but at nine in the morning the sun is too low on the horizon to cast its heat on the open plaza. It’ll be unbearable in a few hours when Miami’s furnace sun scorches its red and yellow tiles. I assume most of the people in the plaza will escape the heat under highway overpasses, where I’ve seen cardboard shelters.

  The hushed sanctuary of the air conditioned library is a welcome relief from the humidity and I take my time mounting the gracefully-banistered wood and metal stairs to the second floor. Upstairs, the room that houses the Florida collection is cool and faintly lit by overhead chandeliers. I pass five long tables on which small lamps throw soft yellow light, and wonder if the men sitting there, some reading and some snoozing, come to this room to escape the heat. Rows of metal shelving stocked with books extend almost fifty feet from the wooden tables to the room’s windows.

  I haven’t been here in years so I start by approaching the librarians at the wood-paneled enclosure in the middle of the room. A tall man in khakis and a dress shirt looks up as I draw near. He’s almost completely gray and has a full, neatly-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and moustache. Thick glasses distort his eyes into large orbs. I assume he’s a retiree, a senior citizen who volunteers at the library. But the sound of his “can I help you” stops me. He speaks with the deep timbre of a much younger man and I stare at him a second, experiencing an odd sensation. It’s as though a masked man has removed his disguise—his beard and thick glasses—to reveal the same face, but much younger.

  It doesn’t take him long to catch on to what I need. He pulls a set of keys from the drawer and leads me to an enclosed room where the library keeps its rare book collection. I’ve always wanted to enter the library’s Fort Knox, to see books that are so valuable, so precious, they’re worth locking away. When the door to the small room clicks behind us, the bearded librarian pulls out three scrapbooks and a leather-bound tome. He lays them on an antique wooden table and announces he’ll check back in half an hour. Then he pulls the door shut.

  Although the books that fill the walls are sequestered behind glass, the room emits a musty scent and I imagine each of the well-worn volumes releasing an aroma as distinct as that of an aged wine in a well-stocked cellar. I feel remarkably at peace in this inner sanctum with i
ts carved wooden table and shelves of rare books and wander for a few minutes, glancing into the cases. None of the titles are familiar but there’s a sense of sacredness to the room. Perhaps it’s because these books are a testimony to the past, to the permanence of the written word and the value humans place on the preservation of knowledge. I settle into a chair, don a pair of white cheesecloth gloves from the box on the table, and begin my search.

  This time I’m lucky. The recipes I find for baked, boiled, and stewed fish are unlike anything I’ve seen before. The most appealing come from a small brown scrapbook with recipes written in a delicate, spidery penmanship. I squint to read the small, faded words. I’ll need to do a bit more research to identify some of the ingredients, but it’ll be worth the effort for something so rare. I’m surprised by the number of recipes that involve fish, then recall that’s what was available in South Florida in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the region was being settled.

  I’ve just finished jotting down the third recipe, this one for a kosher fish stew, when the librarian returns. I can tell from his placid smile that he knows I’ve found what I’m seeking. I gather up my notes and precede him out the door.

  I’m about to ask the librarian if he has any books or ideas about researching criminal activities in Miami during the 1940s when I notice a stack of small boxes on a shelving cart outside the librarian’s station. They’re containers of microfilm. I haven’t seen those since I began searching the internet years ago. The uppermost box is labeled Miami News, 1950.

  I turn to the librarian. “You can read the paper that far back?”

  He reassures me I can. “But there’s no good way to search it,” he adds, “so you need some idea about when the story you want appeared.”

  I think back to the conversation I had with my father about Fat Louie and to the Kefauver articles I found in the museum. I know it’s a long shot and that it’ll mean hunching over the microfilm machine for hours, but curiosity gets the better of me. I ask for the Miami News from 1948 to 1949. If my uncle testified at the hearings in 1951 and World War II ended in 1945, those would be likely years to find articles on him and, maybe, my dad. I make a trip to the ladies room, then settle in front of a microfilm machine with ten boxes of film.

  My stomach is grumbling and my eyes ache but, two hours in, I’m no better off than when I started. It’s taking longer than it should to scroll through the blurred images of articles published more than a half century earlier; I can’t resist reading the occasional story. Nineteen forty-eight, it seems, was particularly eventful. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated and Israel declared its independence from Great Britain.

  I move on, finding an interesting piece about movie studios blacklisting Dorothy Parker for her left-leaning politics, then realize I’m nearing the end of my final microfilm roll. I’m disappointed at finding nothing, but relieved to be ending my search. Then a familiar name flashes across the screen. I back up the roll until I find it again. Abe Kravitz. I smile. Abe was one of my father’s best friends, but I haven’t heard his name in decades. He was a skinny guy, always in motion, with too much energy to stay seated for long. He and his wife, Betsy, were regulars at our home. The two never had children but were among the close family friends who attended my sister’s and my birthday parties. I knew Abe did business with my dad, but never knew what it was. At some point, I realize as I fiddle with the microfilm machine, he stopped coming to the house. I can’t remember why.

  The article is three paragraphs long but it takes a few minutes to enlarge the type and focus well enough to read. The article reports that Abe was convicted for selling stolen goods to restaurants and bars on Miami Beach. He was sentenced to five years. I do the math. He was out of prison by the time I was born. I glance around, wishing there was someone I could tell. Abe a thief? It sounds crazy. But so did my father’s story about Fat Louie. I press a button to copy the article and stuff it in my purse to show my father. If I confront him with it, he may be willing to tell me about his past. I return the microfilm to the book cart.

  On my way out of the library, I swing by the free computers and log in to my email account. Nothing important. I decide to do a search on Abe Kravitz. The odds are good he’s long gone and the best I can hope for is an obit. After a bit of surfing, I learn Betsy passed away two years earlier. But Abe is still around. In fact, he lives in Harbour Villas in Boca Raton, fifteen minutes from my house. A short click to anywho.com and I’ve got his phone number. It’s only three, so I decide to call from the car and ask to stop by. Maybe he’ll tell me something about my father’s past.

  Abe sounds delighted to hear from me and says come over. I don’t mention how I came across his name. Or bother him with my father’s cockamamie gangster tale. I don’t need another alter cocker angry with me.

  An hour later, I’m idling in line behind the Harbor Villas guardhouse, a rickety white shack inside of which sits an elderly man in a burgundy toupee. When it’s my turn to enter, he scrutinizes me, letting his gaze run up and down my face and peering into the car before he asks for identification. I suppress a laugh as he squints at the front, then back, of my driver’s license. Satisfied I’m not a middle-aged suburban terrorist hell-bent on taking out elderly Jews, he returns it to me. The arm of the gate rises and I enter a maze of low-slung, two-story buildings painted the same mind-numbing white as the guardhouse.

  Harbour Villas is a concrete Mecca where retired northerners move to spend their golden years in the land of sunshine, palm trees, and early bird specials. I’d never been inside but heard its residents love it. Always something to do. Singing, dancing, bingo, canasta, mahjong. And bus service to the mall, the grocery store, and the doctor’s office. Including Daniel’s oncology practice.

  It takes fifteen minutes to find Abe’s apartment and park my car. Each building is an identical two-story cement structure with glass-jalousied windows and doors that open to a narrow walkway. When I make it up the exterior steps to his apartment, it’s almost six. Although the apartments open to an outdoor corridor, the walkway smells of cat urine. I hear the faded roar of a television behind Abe’s door and hope I’m not interrupting dinner.

  I knock and wait a minute. When Abe opens the door, he holds a cane in his left hand but greets me with a powerful handshake. “What’s it been? Twenty, thirty years?” he says, appraising my appearance like a butcher examining a side of beef. I half expect him to guess my weight.

  “At least thirty,” I answer as he steps back to let me in. “You’re looking well. It’s nice to see you in good health.”

  The apartment’s larger than I expect. The kitchen is no more than a single wall of appliances and cabinets with a dinette, but the living area is as big as my family room. A white leather couch occupies one wall. To its left sits a matching recliner and end table. Opposite the chair is a large-screen television, tuned to a football game with the sound off. The only object that distinguishes the apartment as Abe’s is an eight-by-ten studio shot of Abe and Betsy in their fifties on the end table. Otherwise the apartment feels as cold and impersonal as a budget motel lobby.

  Abe hasn’t changed much, though I suppose he always looked old to me. His hair is completely silver, but he still has a full mane that he’s brushed back and left long at his nape. He flashes a familiar crooked grin when he sees me studying the photo. “Love of my life,” he says, easing himself into the recliner. “Passed away two years ago next month.”

  I settle into the couch, offer my condolences.

  We make small talk. “How’s your dad? Any kids? What’re you up to these days?” I tell him I’ve got two sons in college and that I write for a newspaper.

  “I heard your Uncle Moe died young, what was he, thirty-five? A damn shame. You see your cousin much?” He watches me closely as he asks these questions and I assume he’s being tactful.

  My uncle had a heart attack when I was eight and his son, Zvi, twe
lve. At that point, I wasn’t old enough to grieve for him. Which isn’t to say I didn’t love him—but I was too young to understand what death meant. He did magic tricks for Esther and me, pulling quarters from behind our ears and teaching us card tricks we’d show off to our friends. I felt sorrow for Zvi, who was much nicer to me than Esther was. He worshipped his father and spent the week after Uncle Moe’s death holed up in his bedroom

  My father was so devastated he closed his business for two weeks and disappeared into his study. Esther and I were frightened by the sobs and moans coming from behind his locked door but our mother assured us he was fine, that it was his way of grieving.

  “I hardly ever see him,” I tell Abe. “We used to do all the holidays together but that stopped after Uncle Moe died.”

  “Well, how about that?” He sounds almost satisfied by my answer. Then he adds, “I’m sorry to hear it. It must have been hard for your cousin and aunt to see the happiness your family shared.

  “What about your husband?” Abe says, changing the subject. “Did you keep your original model?”

  I laugh and tell him I’m married to a doctor named Daniel Ruchinsky. At that, his eyes light up. “The Dr. Ruchinsky?” he asks, leaning forward. “The oncologist on Eighteenth Street.”

  I nod and decide against mentioning our separation. “You know him?”

  “Who doesn’t?” He laughs. “At my age, everything’s a scare. You feel a bump on your leg. It’s cancer. Your appetite is gone. It’s cancer. The one time I had cancer, your husband saved my life.”

  I often went to Daniel’s office to help with hiring and paperwork, but didn’t get to know his patients. “I’m glad to hear that,” I say, though Daniel is the last person I want to discuss.

  “It was last August. My internist noticed my white blood count was low and sent me to your husband. One, two, three, he’s got me in the hospital, on chemotherapy, and after a few months, I’m back to myself. Without Dr. Ruchinsky’s help, who knows?” He leans back in his seat and waves a hand in the air as though to indicate his apartment or his life or maybe the football game. “Bought me a few more years.”