Sweet Like Sugar by Wayne Hoffman Page B

called Glenbrook Books and Judaica. I thought: This is clever? Why not People of the Book? From Right to Left: Jewish Books from Aleph to Tav?
    â€œYou didn’t want to follow in your father’s footsteps?” I asked.
    â€œWhen I was young, yes. But after high school, when I thought I would start work in the bakery, my parents sent me to study in a yeshiva in Brooklyn. And there I studied instead to become a rabbi.”
    He never had a congregation, he explained. He taught at a boys’ school in Brooklyn while he continued his own studies. And then he met Sophie. They were soon married. She left the home where she’d lived with the soldier’s family—her adopted American family—and moved into the rabbi’s basement apartment in Brooklyn, and they continued to work at their respective jobs: He taught at the yeshiva while she worked as a nurse at the girls’ school across the street.
    One of the soldier’s brothers was transferred to Washington for work in the early sixties, and it was he who suggested that there was a business opportunity there for the rabbi and Sophie. The Jewish community in the Maryland suburbs was booming, he said, but there were few businesses to serve them. A quick look in the Yellow Pages found no Jewish bookstores at all between Washington and Baltimore.
    â€œIt was a big move,” the rabbi said, “and a big risk. Not just professionally—there is a risk in any business—but personally. We didn’t know anything about living in the suburbs. I didn’t know how to drive a car or mow a lawn. I had never lived so far from my family. And for Sophie, she had already lost one family and was quite frightened to lose another.”
    But they moved, and they learned about cars and grass and fireplaces, and how to run a business.
    â€œYou know, Benji, marriage is sacred. But this does not mean that every marriage is perfect. This was a difficult test for us. When we finally made this decision, to leave our families behind and start a new life here, we only had each other to depend on. But we did it together. And this is how I knew, looking back, that Sophie was the woman I was meant to marry.”
    I held up a finger to get him to pause while I got the black-and-white photograph from the mantel and laid it on the kitchen table.
    â€œYes, we had just moved here,” he said, running a finger around the edge of the picture. “Look at our faces. Big, hopeful smiles. But inside we were scared. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
    The suburban Jewish community grew, he explained, especially in the late sixties, when Jews fled Washington after the riots. The business thrived, expanded, diversified beyond books to include jewelry, posters, yarmulkes, and ritual objects from wineglasses to prayer shawls.
    As the rabbi spoke about his wife, sweet memories framed in melancholy, his spirit lifted slightly. He spoke in paragraphs, gesturing with one hand while the other held the sandwich he kept forgetting to eat.
    â€œEvery day, Sophie was with me,” he said. “We ran the store together. She would work in the mornings, and then come home in the afternoon to cook dinner and take care of the house. I couldn’t make it through one day without her.”
    â€œYou were the only ones in the store?” I asked.
    â€œFor the first several years, yes,” he said. “We couldn’t afford any help. But we were fine on our own. Just the two of us.”
    â€œAnd you and Sophie never had kids?” I asked.
    He paused, and his expression fell. “No.”
    â€œHow come?” I asked.
    Wrong question. As soon as I saw his face, I knew I shouldn’t have asked.
    He stopped and put his salami sandwich back on the plate.
    â€œWe could not,” he said, his eyes growing suddenly heavy again.
    He pushed his plate away from him and stood up from the table.
    â€œThey did horrible things to her,” he