A Candle for Grandpa Harry

Harry Edelman, 1914–1998

My grandfather Harry Edelman sold nails, keys and good advice on the same Bronx corner for forty years. He died on Thursday, October 1, 1998, the day after Yom Kippur. He was 84. His first yahrzeit, the anniversary of his death, began this week, and I wanted to write some things down before I forgot them, or before my father starts telling them differently.

I'm Darlene, his granddaughter. I'm twenty-two and I work as an editorial assistant at a publishing house in Manhattan, which means I spend my days opening other people's manuscripts and my lunch hours, lately, writing this. I live in Queens. Grandpa thought the job was very glamorous and the neighborhood was a step down. He was wrong about the job.

A few of my friends who aren't Jewish asked me what some of the words on this page mean, so I've tried to explain things as I go. If I get something wrong, the rabbi will tell me, and I'll fix it.

The store

Grandpa was born in the Bronx in 1914. His parents came from Russia a few years before he was born, and they spoke Yiddish at home and English at the store, and he grew up in a fourth-floor walk-up with two brothers and one bathroom down the hall. After the war he came home with his Army pay and a loan from my great-grandfather, and in 1946 he opened Edelman Hardware on a corner three blocks from where he was born. He ran it until 1986.

It was a narrow store, long and dark, with a wooden floor that sloped toward the back, and it smelled like oil and rope and the radiator. Nails were sold by the pound out of wooden bins. You told him what you were building, and he scooped, and he weighed it on a scale with a brass pan, and he folded the top of the paper bag over twice and wrote the price on it with a carpenter's pencil he kept behind his ear. He always gave you a few more nails than you paid for. He said a man who runs out of nails halfway through a job never comes back to the store that sold him exactly enough.

Keys were cut while you waited, on a machine by the register that made a noise like a dentist. While it ran he would ask you about your family. People came in for a key and left forty minutes later with a key, a washer for the kitchen faucet, instructions for bleeding a radiator and an opinion about their son-in-law.

There was always a cat in the window. Over forty years there were four of them, and every one was named Bolt. Bolt the First was a gray tom who caught mice. Bolt the Fourth was a fat orange cat who slept on the bags of rock salt and caught nothing at all, and Grandpa said that was fine, because by then the mice had heard of the first three.

The neighborhood changed around him over those years. A lot of the families he knew moved to Westchester or New Jersey or Florida, and new families moved in, and he stayed. He learned enough Spanish to sell a padlock and to tell a woman her little boy had gotten very tall. When he retired, the man who bought the store kept the name on the sign for a year out of respect. It's a cell phone store now. I don't go by.

His opinions

On the Yankees: He saw Babe Ruth play when he was a boy, and Joe DiMaggio was the finest man who ever lived, and he would not hear otherwise. He thought Mickey Mantle had more talent than anybody and should have taken better care of himself, and he said so every time Mantle's name came up for forty years. Last year's team won 114 games, and he watched nearly every one of them on the little TV in his kitchen, with the radio on at the same time because he liked the radio announcers better. He saw them win the first two playoff games against Texas. He didn't see the World Series. My father says he didn't need to, because he'd told everyone in April how it would end.

On my boyfriends: Of Julio, in college, he said, "Very polite, and he holds a hammer like a pencil." Of Eric he said nothing at all, which in our family is the worst review there is. He liked Travis, who once spent an entire Passover seder asking him how to rehang a door, and who I am still seeing, so Grandpa, if you're reading this, you were right, as usual. Please don't make that face.

On publishing: "So you read books for a living. Who reads them after you?"

On everything else: Measure twice. Buy the good screwdriver. Never lend anybody a ladder.

October

He had been sick on and off for a couple of years with his heart, and in September he got tired and then he got very tired. He went into the hospital the week before Yom Kippur. My grandmother Maxine sat with him every day. He was awake and himself on Yom Kippur, and he told my father to go to synagogue and not to sit around the hospital fasting where the nurses could see him. He died the next afternoon, with my grandmother holding his hand.

In Jewish tradition the funeral happens very soon, usually within a day or two, so we buried him on Friday morning, before the Sabbath. It was a plain pine box, which is the custom, because everybody goes the same way, rich or poor. Rabbi Weintraub had known him for thirty years and talked about the store and about the nails. Then everybody took a turn with the shovel and put some earth on the coffin, which sounds hard and is, but it's a last thing you can do for someone with your own hands, and I think Grandpa of all people would have understood that.

The shiva week, which wasn't a week

After a funeral the family "sits shiva." Shiva means seven, and it's supposed to be seven days of mourning at home: the mirrors are covered, the mourners sit on low stools, they wear a torn black ribbon pinned to their clothes, and friends and neighbors come by all day long with food and stories, and in the evenings enough people come to make a minyan, the ten adults you need for public prayers, so the mourners can say Kaddish, the mourner's prayer, at home.

Ours was short. Sukkot, the harvest festival, started that Sunday night, and in Jewish law a festival ends shiva early. Rabbi Weintraub explained it to us at the cemetery. Grandma said Harry would have liked that, because he never sat still for seven days in his life.

So we had a Friday afternoon, a quiet Sabbath, and a Sunday. In those three days about two hundred people came through my grandparents' apartment. There were more platters of rugelach and smoked fish than any family could eat in a year. Old customers came who I had never met, and every one of them had a story that started with "I came in for a key." A man who had to be ninety told me Grandpa had extended him credit for most of 1975. My cousins Craig and Jimmy and I sat in the kitchen and listened, and laughed when we weren't supposed to, and nobody minded.

My father said Kaddish for his father every day for eleven months, which is the custom for a parent. He finished at the end of the summer. He is not a religious man, and I never once heard him complain about it. I think it was good for him to have somewhere to be.

The unveiling

Jewish families usually put up the headstone sometime during the first year, and there's a short ceremony called the unveiling. We had Grandpa's on Sunday, August 29, 1999, at the cemetery on Long Island. The stone stands there covered with a cloth. The family gathers, the rabbi says a few words and a psalm, and then somebody takes the cloth away. My grandmother asked me to do it. My hands were shaking.

The stone says his name in English and his Hebrew name, Tzvi, in Hebrew letters, and the years, and "beloved husband, father and grandfather." My grandmother wanted to add "Measure twice." My father talked her out of it. I'm still on her side.

Afterward everybody put a small stone on top of the headstone. People ask me about that. It's an old custom, a way of saying someone was here and remembered you, and unlike flowers, stones last. I'd picked mine up in the parking lot of the hardware store near my apartment. It seemed right.

The candle

A yahrzeit is kept by the Hebrew calendar, not the regular one, so it moves around from year to year. Grandpa died the day after Yom Kippur, and this year that meant his yahrzeit began at nightfall on Monday, September 20, 1999, right as Yom Kippur ended.

On a yahrzeit you light a candle at sundown that burns for a full day. It comes in a little glass, and you can buy them at the supermarket in the kosher aisle for about a dollar. Many people also say Kaddish at synagogue. There's nothing complicated about it. You light it, and you think about the person, and you let it burn down by itself.

So on Monday I fasted for Yom Kippur, and went to services with my parents, and when the fast was over we ate bagels at their kitchen table like always. Then I took the subway home to Queens and lit Grandpa's candle on my kitchen counter, next to the toolbox he gave me when I moved into my first apartment. (It has a hammer, three screwdrivers, a level, a tape measure, and a coffee can full of nails. Too many nails, of course.) The candle was still burning when I left for work in the morning and still burning when I got home. I sat at the counter and ate my dinner with it.

I don't know exactly what I believe about where Grandpa is. I know where he was, for forty years, from seven in the morning to six at night, six days a week, and I know a lot of people in the Bronx still have keys he cut. That will do for now.

If you knew my grandfather or bought a key from him, I would love to hear from you: [email protected]. My grandmother doesn't use the computer, but I print out every letter and bring it to her on Sundays.

visitors since August 1999

Last updated September 24, 1999