by Ra'Anan Elozory

Created on: October 06, 2010   Last Updated: October 07, 2010

Hot, dry air blew Elul onto our island in view of the sun-beaten Florida coast. It was sometime in the late 1920s. There was still tension among the Mediterranean and East European immigrants, hawking their wares and pushing their services so they could feed their families. These folks were hesitant about voting.  

During that decade a Yankee had been murdered by the homegrown locals.  It wasn’t clear if he died of extreme heat burns or fright; tar and feathering can do both. Far from intimidating, these acts of terror emboldened the nascent union movement and the desire to protect abused cigar leaf rollers, amongst others.

The mainland was only a few blocks away from our Jewish Quarter on the island. It had become home to Jews from very divergent origins such as Eastern European Russians and Poles as well as Western European Germans, Hungarians and Austrians along with a surprising number of Greeks, Syrians and Turks. But with all of their numbers, even when my learned Zaidy came, they were still headless. This had seemed temporary, the more learned had always followed into further outposts of Jewish immigration, but World War I was displacing our places of wisdom and disrupting our flow of knowledge; centuries-old communities were exiled and winds of a distant, ominous and enormous danger were constantly blowing.

My Zaidy had lived in the Land of Israel before coming to America. He had seen the ancient wisdom in the ways of our sages. He had heard and seen Jews from even more distant India and Ethiopia. If such Jews were familiar with the ancient wisdom, then they were accorded with deserved respect. Our island, though, knew of no such exotic places. Cuba and Italy were equally distant. The ancient wisdom of sages, as well as the sages themselves, were quite absent from our island and even from the mainland. Their ways were rapidly being forgotten. Still, the older men longed for the comfort and security that the old ways from the old countries brought. Our old men had been mere plain folk in the old countries, but on our island their scant knowledge elevated them into sages.

The aroma of freshly wrapped cigars mixed with Italian and Espanol, strong Cuban coffee steamed into the air and dark-eyed, red-combed roosters crowed. Zaidy and two others from Kenesses Yisroel, the old men’s schul, were discussing in their common language, Yiddish, the similarities shared by our island’s open-air markets and the Eastern

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