Kim’s Cleaners. Asbury Park. April 24, 2021. By Paul Goldfinger. Blogfinger.net Click to enlarge.
By Paul Goldfinger, MD. Blogfinger.net
It was a classic immigrant story: come to America, harness your skills and start a business. You work hard and your kids grow up in the shop–waiting on customers and doing their homework in the back. It is a dream of success in the golden land. The Kims, a young couple, bought into the American dream, but Covid-19 beat them down and extinguished that dream.
I don’t know them except as a customer, but I bet they will land on their feet somehow, somewhere in this great country. They left a handwritten note on the door of their Sunset Avenue shop thanking their customers. No sour grapes from the Kims.
I know this story because my grandfather, Hyman Demby, came here about a hundred years ago. He opened a tailor shop in Bayonne, a blue collar town in Hudson County. He and Grandma Helen Demby had 9 kids; 3 were born in “the old country–Poland.”
Of course they were never Poles, just Jews. They loved being Americans. I have Grandma Demby’s citizenship papers. 4 of my mother’s brothers went to war, and they all came back. I was a little kid, but I thought they were so brave.
They made it through the Great Depression. At one point their Bayonne home burned to the ground, but all of them worked, and they bought another home in Bayonne–a row house with one bathroom. My uncles slept all over the place including the furnished attic and one in the basement by the furnace.
I miss them all, and in their honor, I served in the US Navy and became the first of the clan to graduate college. Yet I learned so much from all of them—-more than I got in college.
MAUDE MAGGART SINGS IRVING BERLIN: