This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Often it happens that Rock Islanders tell their own stories best. Here is one from Dr. Alex Stone, a retired veterinarian who has been writing stories and tales of the local Jewish community for the past seven years.
Once upon a time when boys wore knickers until they were fourteen, and I walked a mile up and back to Longfellow Junior High, and movies were black and white and just learning to talk, my mother and father lived with my sister and me on Twelfth Street and Fourteenth Avenue—the very edge of “Jewtown” in the west end of Rock Island, where the Mississippi flows east to west.
The center of the Jewish community was B'nai Jacob, the Ninth Street Shul: a two-story medieval, Polish, timbered synagogue with a roof sloped to shed the snows of western Illinois. B'nai Jacob was our prayer house, our schoolhouse, our communal dining room, our public broadcasting system.
Ninth Street was the retail center of Jewtown. Shapiro's Department Store, shoes for the family; Rosen's, clothing for men and women; Klein's Corner Grocery, smaller than a Mom and Pop store; Irving's, fruit and vegetables; Sadie's Kosher Kitchen, a restaurant of fourteen oak chairs, oilcloth covered tables, and in the back room a pool table for the 'loafers'—my mother's definition—and other oak tables for the Saturday and Sunday night five and ten cent poker players. "Hoodlums," my mother called them.
Every afternoon Sadie's daughter, Flora, sat at the restaurant window that faced the alley, did her homework under her mother's constant eye.
"Poor bastard girl," is what my mother called Flora. "She will never marry a nice Jewish boy, not in Rock Island."
And Flora never did. She went to the University of Chicago, met and married Harry Berger, heir to the South Bend Steel Company fortune. They had eight children, and to the best of my knowledge, lived happily ever after.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
