(Author: Clark Zlotchew, Vol. 79, #1, Winter 2024)
My mother’s father, Nathan Granoff, was a glazer in Jersey City, New Jersey, and had been one in the land of his birth: the Ukraine. In his youth this region was part of the Czar’s Russian Empire. But he never felt the land of his birth was home. After a thousand years of Jews living in Ukraine, they were never considered Ukrainian; they were a separate people, a persecuted minority. The United States became Grandpa’s only real home.
My grandfather worked with glass to make windows, mirrors, glass tops for desks, anything that involved glass. I remember seeing him at his Jersey City shop, big hands covered with black cuts and nicks from working with glass and mercury from making mirrors, cheerily greeting me with a big smile under his blond moustache. “Hallo, Clocky!” he would call out, his foreign accent handling of the affectionate nickname for Clark.
My grandparents Nathan (seated) and Esther Granoff, with my uncles David (left) and Harry and Mother Francine.
I remember him, seated in his worn, dull green armchair, by his reading lamp, smoking a cigar as he read, enveloped in a gray cloud of smoke. When the cigar became too short, he would stuff it into his pipe to finish his smoke. When I was a child, he would often put his cigar aside, place me on his knee, and bounce me up and down, bawling out a rhythmic tune, singing, “Hey, tuli, tuli, tuli, hey, tuli…”
When I was a few years older, he would tell me of his adventures traveling long distances in his trade. He had worked as an apprentice from a very early age and had his own business from age fourteen or fifteen. The travel, by horse drawn cart, often on bumpy dirt roads in the vast countryside, was necessary because at the time there were very few glazers in the Empire. It also meant he constantly had work to do, which was a good thing. Those roads turned to thick mud in rainy weather or during the thaw and were snow covered in winter. That kind of travel carrying sheets of glass struck me as taking a great deal of courage and determination. When I mentioned the possibility of the glass breaking on those trips, he said, “Sometimes they did. Hey, Clocky, a man does what he has to do. But I was careful to try to avoid big bumps and holes.”
Once he told me he had traveled far to the western edges of the Empire where the people spoke a language he didn’t understand but learned a few words and expressions in it and to count to twenty. He called these people Moldavani, which in my adulthood I realized were the people of the country now called Moldavia or Moldova. The Moldavians are really a branch of the Romanian people and as such speak a Romance language. Grandpa told me that when he came to the United States he heard Italian immigrants speaking and it struck him that Italian seemed to him like Romanian. He was right; they both derive from Latin.
On another occasion he told me he once had to travel far to the east, to a city he called what sounded to me like Tavriz. The trip took several days and he had to cross what he called Kavkaz or Kafkaz. When I grew up and had (still have) a great interest in geography and languages, I realized that Kafkaz was the Caucasus Mountains, and the city was what on English maps is written as Tabriz. It was hard to believe he journeyed all the way to the present capital of the Azerbaijan province of Iran! The independent nation called Azerbaijan is north of the Iranian province of the same name. Reading history, I found that in Grandpa’s era that part of present day Iran (then called Persia) was in the Russian sphere of influence, under Russian jurisdiction. So, yes, I realized, he really was referring to Tabriz in the Azeri region of today’s Iran.
He told me he more than once visited a region he called Krym, which I later realized was Russian for the Crimea. He explained that the inhabitants of Crimea at that time were Muslims and that he found none of the anti-Jewish feeling he experienced in the Ukrainian and Russian regions. These were the Crimean Tartars who spoke a Turkic language. There were also Jews, called Krymchaks (Crimeans), who spoke a dialect of the same Crimean-Tatar language. I would have to suppose the Crimeans of his day were not very strict Muslims since Grandpa said they drank wine, as contrasted to the vodka favored by Ukrainians and Russians. Islam, of course, forbids the drinking of any alcohol. There was a large grape growing and wine producing industry in the Crimea. There still is, as I found when on a tour of Ukraine, which, in 2010, included the Crimea.. My wife and I saw large vineyards in the countryside and stores selling the local wines in Sevastopol and Yalta.
One incident Grandpa described stands out in my mind. He was engaged in conversation with a local Tatar when he heard a loud screeching sound in the distance. In the distance there was a man driving his horse-drawn cart towards them. The closer the cart came, the louder the terrible noise. Grandpa commented to the local man, “That fellow should really oil his wheels.”
The Crimean slowly shook his head and calmly declared, “No, no. An honest man doesn’t care if you hear him approaching. Only a thief oils the wheels. And he would arrive in the middle of the night, so no one notices his presence.”
I loved the stories my grandfather told me of his experiences in the “Old Country” when I was a child. There are many more he related to me. His wife, my grandmother Esther, told me stories as well, many of which involved Grandpa as a man of courage. He was too modest to tell those stories; she did it for him. My grandparents were unforgettable people.
Nathan and Esther Granoff (at the head of the table, furthest from camera) with their children and their children’s spouses
Dr Clarke Zlotchew, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs over several decades, is Distinguished Teaching Professor at State University of New York. He is the author of seventeen books, including anthologies of short fiction, translations from the Spanish of short stories and poetry by Nobel Laureates and literary criticism of Spanish and Latin American authors. His essays and short stories have appeared in both his Spanish and English versions in the U.S. and Latin America (http://www.clarkzlotchew.com).
