Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [108]
Ignoring the commodore’s effusions, Moses already had the measuring tape out. “We must start without delay.”
IN THE ENSUING week, the commodore and the Romanian/Irish/Jewish tailor were thrown together for hours on end and evolved a friendship of sorts. Balaban’s two little boys were adorable, about the age of Holifield’s own sons. But Moses Balaban was a difficult man to know. He snipped out his words and was always cavalier in manner.
Holifield would enter the shop and invariably see the slender Moses sitting cross-legged on a pillow atop his cutting table, stitching away meticulously by hand. Balaban would greet him with a mere nod.
He learned that Moses had been born in the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta, where his father and grandfather had established a paltry means of livelihood with a tailoring business specializing in naval uniforms. Most of their work consisted of repairing enlisted men’s clothing, with a few odd commissions for uniforms for low-ranking officers. The captains and admirals had theirs made in Bucharest or Paris.
The Balabans were a typically large family of a dozen children, eight boys and four girls. Only one of the sons, the oldest, could take over the family business. The others had to look to emigrate. Three of the Balaban males went to England and Scotland, where tailors were in demand.
One of them, Herman Balaban, a confirmed bachelor, signed up for a British transatlantic passenger liner, as ship’s tailor. After a couple of rough crossings, he decided that life at sea was not his cup of tea and he jumped ship in Queenstown, where he eventually opened a shop on the quay.
“And your three other brothers, Moses?”
“In Savannah, Georgia. They are out of the tailoring business entirely, and for the best.”
What he did not tell the commodore, of course, was of his lifelong reputation as a disagreeable, even nasty, person. His family in Constanta did not want him, nor did his brothers in Scotland and Savannah.
It boiled down to brother Herman, toiling in the remote colony of Ireland, who finally sent for Moses to assist in the shop. Moses was fifteen when he arrived in 1875, and in a matter of five years took over the shop when Herman died in a cholera epidemic.
The Jewish community of Ireland consisted of a few hundred families, mainly in Dublin and Belfast, with but a handful in Cork. Life was generally peaceful for the Jews, although there was a terrible sense of isolation. Cork had one synagogue and one kosher butcher, but there was little in the way of traditional communal life: no Hebrew school, no Yiddish newspaper, no debating societies, dramatic clubs, or ritual baths.
This did not seem to bother Moses, who existed as a loner. He’d go to Cork to synagogue during the holidays, or for special occasions, but his little shop in Queenstown was a personal bastion of his orthodoxy. Moses was largely friendless, a dour, stingy man who seemed to do little else but sew, pray, and play checkers with an old pensioner.
A few years after obtaining the business, he entered into a marriage contract with the daughter of a poor Belfast cabinetmaker, who bore him two sons, Saul and Lazar. The mother died in childbirth, with the new infant.
As a widower, Moses continued along, raising his sons in the small flat in back of the shop, with the help of an aged Irish nanny.
Moses had put out feelers to make an arrangement for a new wife, but he found the doors closed to him in the Jewish community in Ireland because he had earned a well-deserved reputation for meanness. Moses was known to burst out of his deep shell with sudden violent fits of temper that often included wife and child beating.
With no Jewish girl available to him in Ireland, his alternative would be to work out a costly arrangement with a matchmaker to have a girl in the old country sent over to be wed. But who would come to Ireland, to Cork? Some third-rate ugly who couldn’t find herself a husband in Romania.
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