by Steve Lipman (Forest Hills, NY)
Sometime in May, 1903, Zorach and Goldie Finkelstein, residents of Sapotskin, a heavily Jewish village in the northeast corner of Poland (now in northwest Belarus) climbed on a horse-drawn wagon, carrying their meager possessions in a few simple canvas and cardboard suitcases, and headed to the German port city of Bremen. There they boarded the SS Pennsylvania, a 13,333-gross ton passenger vessel.
Part of a wave of Jewish immigration from the Russia Empire’s one-time Pale of Settlement, the young couple left their homeland and their families, undoubtedly making the voyage to the United States in steerage, along with men and women and children from many ethnic groups.
Goldie was probably pregnant with the couple’s first child, a son, who would be named Max when he was born in Buffalo the following February.
In addition to the suitcases, which were packed with the expected clothes, and a rushnyk, a red-and-white linen table divider she had sewn five years earlier, Goldie, then in her early twenties, packed some of her most precious belongings in a parenee (the word, which was passed down in family lore, is of uncertain origin; in Polish the objects were known as a pierzyny), a large white comforter stuffed with goose feathers, which stayed in the Finkelsteins’ family for several decades.
Inside the paranee was a pair of candlesticks.
If the Finkelsteins, Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews who had been married five years earlier, followed the traditional practice of shtetlach in that part of the Jewish world, they most likely had received the candlesticks as a wedding gift five years before from their friends in Sapotskin.
The Finkelsteins’ style of candlesticks was typical of those owned by Orthodox Jews in their era and that part of Eastern Europe. Manufactured by the prestigious, Warsaw-based Jozef Fraget metal smith firm (founded in 1824), of hollow, galvanic sliver-plated brass (Jews were forbidden from owning silver in many parts of the empire), each stood 14 inches tall, with a detachable candle-cap that fit into a circular depression atop the candlesticks to catch paraffin droppings, and three artistic legs on the 5-inch-diameter base to give the candlesticks balance.
The candlesticks’ serial number – because of their value and popularity, the series of products was numbered – was 3340. Inside a small oval on the base of Goldie’s candlesticks: the words “FRAGET N PLAQUE,” which mean that the silver core was electroplated with a layer of pure silver.
Candlesticks like that were as common in many Jewish homes of that generation, especially those with immigrant roots, as the ubiquitous Singer sewing machine. And, in some Orthodox homes in the Greater New York area, artwork by the prolific, and eccentric, Morris Katz.
Goldie had no idea she fit a particular demographic; she simply kept the candlesticks to fulfill a Jewish woman’s mitzvah. One that her mother, and grandmother, and countless generations of women in her family had done before her with their own candlesticks.
As she had in Sapotskin, Goldie used the candlesticks to usher in the Sabbath and important Jewish holidays in the modest home that she and her husband bought on the Jewish East Side of Buffalo (relatives had already settled there), and later, after Zorach (who took on the name Samuel in the United States) died, in the second-floor apartment of my parents’ two-story home in the city’s increasingly Jewish North Park neighborhood. Like other Jewish women, Goldie would cover her eyes with her hands as she recited the Hebrew blessing over the candles.
Sometimes her grandchildren – including me – would watch her make the brocha.
Goldie, a widow then for 20 years, died in 1968.
By rights, her candlesticks should have passed to my Aunt Hennie, the Finkelsteins’ oldest daughter, then a married resident of Rochester, an hour away, who –a kosher-keeping member of a Modern Orthodox synagogue — was more likely than my mother, Helene, married to a secular German-born Jew, to properly use them.
But Mom got the candlesticks. She had kids – three of us, while Aunt Hennie had none – and it was decided that it made more sense for a daughter who had a family, who had children to whom she could one day pass the treasured objects, to receive the candlesticks.
Mom, while by no means strictly Orthodox, grew more traditional as she grew older. She kept the pair in a prominent place of pride atop a light-brown wooden cabinet in the living room of the Lipmans’ home in North Park, then, after we moved, in the northern suburb of Tonawanda. She would, without fail, light the candles each Friday night and erev yom tov. Sometimes I and my two sisters would gather around Mom.
Dad, disinterested in things of a religious nature, would rarely join in.
As the candles burned, shrinking to differing heights, we would bet which one would go out first.
Mom, who had attended an after-school cheder decades earlier in Buffalo, had not mastered Hebrew. So she recited the l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat from memory, confidently – and incorrectly. She would say the last few words the same way each time, slurring several together into a unique rendition of lashon hakodesh; we restrained the urge to correct her, or to snicker. We understood what she was saying; I’m sure God did too.
After the blessing, Mom would say her own, personal supplications, softly, under her breath. A private conversation with the Creator. “Dear God,” she would begin, followed by “thank you” for kindnesses He had performed for her family or people in her circle of friends; or, “please take care of” ailing or deceased friends or relatives. Or other, similar words of praise or request. In other words, she would review whatever was on her mind.
Like Tevye, but with a Buffalo accent.
Then, “Good Shabbos.” And hugs.
Mom liked telling the following story about the spiritual value of the candlesticks in our family: Several decades ago she and one of her daughters had an appointment at Roswell Park Cancer Hospital, Buffalo’s famed medical center – a check-up that brought no bad news. They were walking on the cancer center’s stairs. “It was a beautiful day,” Mom remembered. Out of the blue, her daughter turned to her and said, “When you are gone, I want your candlesticks.”
Mom always told the story with a laugh. She was not offended. She was still a relatively young woman then. She understood the strong attraction of her daughter – who probably had mortality on her mind because of their presence at a cancer hospital –for the family heirlooms.
Mom said yes to her daughter’s request. In the meantime, the candlesticks remained in the Lipman home, and Mom continued using them.
In 2005 Dad died. The next year the candlesticks, carefully packed in a carry-on suitcase, went with Mom to the Houston suburb where one of my sisters had moved several decades before. There, Mom lived in an apartment, overlooking a small man-made lake, a mile from my married sister’s house.
Again, the candlesticks rested atop the wooden cabinet that had made the move with Mom to Texas.
Again, she lit the candles every week.
Again, the candlesticks shone. Mom, using some smelly pink polish, would shine them religiously, vigorously, employing a soft cloth or gloves specifically designed for that buffing purpose; or, as was more often the case, she would put one of her kids or her visiting grandchildren to work (people without sufficient elbow grease need not apply), making sure the pair gleamed so much you could almost see your reflection in them. It was not a fun assignment, but a labor of love. We all took a turn with the polishing cloth.
God forbid they should show a sign of tarnish.
A pair like that sell for $300-$500 nowadays, maybe more at auction, but to us, for sentimental reasons, they are priceless.
The candlesticks were two of Mom’s most-prized possessions. She would make sure to hide them out of sight if a repairman was coming to her apartment or if she planned to be away for a few days. They were a symbol of her pride in being Jewish, in carrying on the tradition she had learned from her mother. They were not sleek or fashionable, which was fine with Mom. They were antiques, defiantly old-fashioned, remnants of a previous generation. They were a tactile reminder of Mom’s roots, of her long-gone relatives who brought their pride in Yiddishkeit from the shtetl environment that was a world removed from the big cities of the United States.
She would make sure that she was well stocked in candles, keeping a 72-count box at home, buying them at a Buffalo-area supermarket or sending one of her kids on a replenishment expedition when her supply was running low.
Mom was concerned about the candlesticks’ future. She made clear that, when the time came, the candlesticks would pass to a member of the family who a) was likely to use them regularly, and b) was not married then to someone who was not Jewish.
By her last few years, Mom, who died a few months ago on 12 Av, became increasingly feeble and forgetful. She no longer was in shape to light Shabbos candles; I would frequently provide her with small, battery-powered tea candles for her apartment or for the hospital rooms where she often – too often – found herself.
As Mom aged, and did not feel confident having lit candles in the apartment where she lived alone, she gave the candlesticks to the then-out-of-town daughter who had requested them decades earlier. Who uses them every week.
Goldie’s lichtern have a new home, 5,100 miles from their original home in the Old Country.
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Steve Lipman was a staff writer for The New York Jewish Week from 1983 until 2020.
The Jewish Writing Project 