Sima at the Store Window, 1967

By Barbara Krasner

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The evening was calm so far, even serene. But she knew what would come. The same thing that came last night as Newark police chased black people all through the city. She knew what it felt like to be hunted. She’d been hunted herself, all those years ago. She thought she’d put it behind her. But now here it was again. Fear. Shadows. The sound of gunshots piercing the night. Barking dogs. Shattering glass. She stood at the store window, a hand raised to push back the heavy curtain, her breath clouding the glass. More than twenty years ago, a generation really, she’d been one of those teenaged urchins on the cobblestoned streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the shmutzig kids stealing bread to keep alive one more day.

Somehow she had managed to survive, managed to come to America to meet a nice young man, a refugee like her, to raise a family in a Newark tenement. To be safe. She kept telling herself she was safe. 

But since the Newark riots started last night, she was glad Maury had predeceased her, glad her children had wanted out of the city and moved to the suburbs with their young families. Sima owned the business, the fabric store on Halsey Street between the aristocratic Hahne’s and the everyday Bambergers and Ohrbachs. Like a bolt of fabric, she’d been measured, cut, and fashioned into something else, patterned into an American wife and mother.

She would stay in the store tonight, not venture out to take the city bus home along South Orange Avenue toward West Orange. 

Garbage cans at the curb clanged. She shivered. Cats screeched and she thought she heard footsteps. Downtown Newark usually grew quiet after business hours unless the stores remained opened on selected nights. She pulled away from the window and meandered between the bins of fabric remnants sold cheap and the bolts of seersucker, pique, and linen fabric she was featuring for summer.

Fabric had a certain smell, a crisp newness. Was Newark about to renew itself? Would this be a pogrom? Would her windows shatter? Thank G-d her husband had thought to install a small room in the back with a cot and a little refrigerator. She had bread, milk, a few cans of tuna fish, a jar of pickles. What she would have had to go through to acquire these items in the ghetto back then. 

The phone rang in the darkness. Sima picked it up on the fourth ring. “Hallo?”

“Ma, I’m watching Channel 7. What’s happening in Newark. Are you all right?” her son asked.

“Yes, I’m okay.”

“I want to come and get you. Bring you to Maplewood for safety.”

She closed her eyes. What a good boy her David was. To think about his mama. Someone cared about her, not like in the ghetto, when she was left to herself. Her parents simply disappeared one day—a day otherwise like any other: gray dust, gray people, gray bread—and that was that.

“I don’t want you should get hurt,” she whispered. Who knew who was outside maybe listening?

“I’m coming now, Ma. Be ready.”

“Dovid,” using the Yiddish version of his name, “I learned a long time ago to always be ready.” She sat on a large bolt of fabric set lengthwise on the floor. A sturdy green wool. Rested the phone receiver on her shoulder. “I’m always ready.”