My Grandfather's Butcher Shop

Susan Fleischer Breitburg, 55, of Rockville Centre is a technical writer and remedial reading teacher. She remembers her grandfather with pride.

A VAST WOOD floor with sawdust on it. White, tiled walls. A white enamel display case for the meat. The walk-in freezer that frightened us children. Crates of live chickens on the pickup truck in the lot behind the shop.

These are memories from my grandfather Ruben Fleischer's kosher butcher shop in Rockville Centre in the late 1940s. Grandfather always said that when he opened his shop in 1925, it was the first kosher butcher shop on Long Island. For me, that statement has been a lifelong status symbol.

My grandfather was a smiling man, short and skinny like the Yiddish entertainer Menasha Skulnick, with the energy of Jimmy Durante. He had red, swollen hands and sawdust on his shoes. Grandfather woke up at 4 a.m. every weekday so he could travel to Manhattan to buy his meat, or go out east to get poultry.

My mother, my brother, Rich, and I would occasionally make the trip with Grandfather to Zorn's Poultry Farms in Bethpage or McGarrick's in Rocky Point.

Between 1925 and the 1930s, Grandfather's choichet, a Yiddish word meaning slaughterer of kosher chickens, was Rabbi Speier of Rockville Centre's Temple B'nai Sholom. Before my grandfather's shop opened, people would put their live chickens in a bag and bring it to the rabbi, who would perform the act.

Grandfather owned two shops, a chicken market on Merrick Road and a meat market on North Village Avenue, both in Rockville Centre. Grandmother drove the pickup truck and delivered most of the meat.

The chicken market closed in the late '30s and the butcher shop closed in the mid-'50s. After the second shop closed, my grandfather became a partner at his nephew's and aunt's butcher shop in Great Neck. Grandfather was carving up meat even in his 80s. He passed away in the early '70s.

Butchers must pass on mechanical and artistic genes. My dad, Irving Fleischer, was an engineer and violin player. Uncle Jack owned hardware and jewelry stores. My son, Barry, writes humor and studied philosophy and Latin in college, and graduated this May from Boston University.

Thanks, Grandfather.