Dube’s

My sister Tamar wrote that in the Hamlet of Amenia where we spent our summers there is a new florist in the store where Dube’s used to be. A wormhole of memory opens.  The Dubes were an older couple when I knew them, around our grandmother’s age.  They had a narrow, dark, dusty dry goods store in an old brick building on the main street of Amenia, on 343, the road leading to Sharon, CT. In my memory the store is packed, floor to ceiling, and Mr. Dube could find anything in the apparent chaos.  We bought sneakers there, and blue jeans. Perhaps it was the crowded, claustrophobic feeling of the store that makes it stand out so sharply in my memory. It’s lovely to think of that space reborn as a light and cheerful florist’s.  

The Dubes were part of the merchant Jewish community in Amenia, along with the Rothsteins and the Rubins who had the town’s two drug stores, and the two Jewish families who ran the Depot Market. Alfred Dube was born at the end of the nineteenth century in Illinois, but his wife was Russian.  I remember them as part of the generation shaped by the holocaust.  Mrs. Dube was, in my memory, a kind of ghostly presence, spending her time in the back of the store, where I imagined they lived.  I have a memory of her bringing him his lunch, or perhaps clearing it away.  I remember his lined face, but not hers.  And now, I can find them on Wikipedia, and a lengthy obituary of their daughter who moved to Utica, near where we live now, and ran a pharmacy there with her husband.  She had probably moved away before I knew them.

Dube’s, the drug stores where we went for ice cream and comic books, the market where Dad bought steaks when company was coming, the tiny library, the long closed movie theater, these were our summer world in town.  If it was not a completely safe world, we believed it was.  A sprained ankle or a bee sting were the biggest threats.  Mark Silk and I, aged perhaps ten and eleven, led our band of four younger siblings down the half mile dirt road through the woods, past our gate, to the road which was NY 44 until the lone traffic light at the center of town and then became 343 as it continued down to Dube’s towards Sharon. Amenia Drugs was our primary destination, on the far side of 44 before the traffic light in the early days, and then in a larger, newer space on our side of 44.

Amenia, for all that it had a visible Jewish community and a little brick synagogue (remarkable among those small towns), was clearly a Christian community.  There were churches all over, outnumbered only by taverns.  That’s what Dad said, but we never counted.  As I came to understand what it meant to be Jewish in a Christian majority country, I thought about the Jewish families who had made Amenia home.  I read, only recently, that one of the draws for those families was that the Amenia High School accepted Jewish kids, which the high school in Sharon did not.  Unthinkable now, unimaginable for my grandchildren.  But I remember the closed country clubs (though not in tiny Amenia, of course) and the Jewish quotas at elite colleges and universities, still in force when my big sister, Shayne, was applying to schools.

I thought that all these Jews had the same history as my parents, children of emigres from Eastern Europe who settled first on the Lower East Side and then migrated north through Westchester and up both sides of the Hudson.  But of course, the stories are more complicated.  I was stunned to learn from a death record that Mr. Dube was born in Illinois.  I had always assumed that the name was Dubinsky or something like that, but it might have been the French Dube and perhaps the family came down to Illinois through Canada.  How did we know they were Jewish?  We just did. I realize that I still carry that habit, figuring out who the Jews are in a new community.  So many of us are secular Jews now, but in my generation at least we probably carry similar memories of holidays, songs, foods, the accents of the old country. 

I don’t anticipate pogroms under Trump, even with his very fine people on both sides.  I don’t think we go back to quotas and exclusions.  And of course, Jews are hardly the only people nervous about our country under Trump.  The years when Dube’s was where we bought our sneakers and jeans were hardly idyllic for Jews, but the lived memory of the holocaust felt like a sort of shield.  We had seen the worst of what could happen when antisemitism was allowed to flourish and the whole world had pulled back in horror.  But the survivors are mostly gone now.  My grandchildren will never see the faint purple tattoo when a sleeve is rolled up.  And now there is Gaza, and many legitimate reasons to be anti-Israel, with antisemitism happy to hitch a ride.

I think about Dube’s, about summer life where we could walk to get most of the things we wanted, where Amazon didn’t deliver the capers we couldn’t find at Price Chopper.  The deliveries then were milk from the milkman who carried dairy products, eggs and bread, and the wonderful selection of fruits and vegetables that our beloved Phil Cianciolo brought. I doubt that children’s biggest worries are still sprained ankles and bee stings.  I’m glad to know that Dube’s is remade into a cheerful florist’s. But not every change is progress.