Bake Shoppe

It was quite an interesting collection of the population I encountered, working at the bake shoppe. Far from the renaissance-style boulangerie which its name with the early modern English spelling suggested, it was a kosher bakery, owned and managed by Mr. Mertz. For minimum wage, I slung colorfully jimmied cookies and onion rolls into boxes, waiting on those who came into the store with cravings or just to buy a challah for the Sabbath.

Raised in a secular Jewish home, I wasn't used to being around the conservative and Orthodox. I knew that the women never wore pants, but I didn't know that they always wore wigs in public, that only their husbands should ever see their real hair. When children came into the store and I gave them a cookie, they always prayed in Hebrew before it touched their lips. And the men. Big in stature or not, they all loomed large before me, clad in black suits, white shirts, and long black overcoats. Their faces were covered in long, untrimmed beards which crawled up their faces into sideburns and head hair which was invariably hidden under a black hat. And under the hat was a yarmulke. What an effort, I thought, just to be Jewish. For me it had always been easy.

One of my co-workers - a woman with one very crossed eye - had a husband who came to pick her up every day. He always brought along a big camera, and one day he asked if I would let him shoot some pictures of me. Of course I would, I told him, partly flattered and partly uncomfortable with the idea of a strange man wanting to take (and presumably keep) pictures of me. What resulted from those photo sessions were pictures I hated: me behind the counter with my mouth twisted into grimaces that I had thought would look like smiles. I have no idea why all the pictures came out that way – I hadn’t contorted my face on purpose, and I was horrified and embarrassed that pictures of me like that existed.

I made friends with Sarah, a pinkish-haired old lady who swept the floor compulsively. One day I noticed a tattoo on her forearm and asked her about it. She began to cry immediately, trembling and clutching my young arm as she told me in her heavy Polish accent about the concentration camp. Naïve when it came to the horrors of the Holocaust, I listened with the awe her story inspired, though helpless and at a loss for words. Sarah helped me to understand that though we may be as far away from each other as old and young, or from where we come geographically and experientially, we are all still packed in here together pretty tightly, and sometimes we just need to reach out and clutch the arm that happens to be the closest.

It was my first job, and I learned how to work hard and serve the customer. But most importantly, I took home with me snippets of life, the bits and pieces and peeks into what goes on beyond my comfortable little zone. It was the most I ever earned for a mere minimum wage.