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    The Life and Death of Abraham Massry and Other Stories
    The Life and Death of Abraham Massry and Other Stories
    The Life and Death of Abraham Massry and Other Stories
    Ebook81 pages56 minutes

    The Life and Death of Abraham Massry and Other Stories

    By Joseph Sutton

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    About this ebook

    A collection of 11 short stories based on author Joseph Sutton's Syrian Jewish background. The title story, "The Life and Death of Abraham Massry," is about a Jewish immigrant from Syria, Abraham Massry, who wants his American-born son Jake to follow the business and marriage path taken by him and his ancestors, except Jake shows the true calling of America by blazing his own trail. There are stories about Jake growing up in the wide open spaces of Los Angeles as compared to Brooklyn where most of the Syrian Jews live and who still cling to the religious and cultural customs of the past. Other stories in the collection include "At the Store," "Hebrew Lessons," "Bar Mitzvah Boy," "Syrian Jewish Football," "A Double-Edged Sword" and more. Come and enjoy Jake Massry's Syrian Jewish experiences from boyhood to manhood.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJoseph Sutton
    Release dateJun 17, 2014
    ISBN9781311014511
    The Life and Death of Abraham Massry and Other Stories
    Author

    Joseph Sutton

    Joseph Sutton was born in Brooklyn and raised in Hollywood. He played football at the University of Oregon and graduated with a degree in philosophy. He earned a teaching credential and a degree in history at Cal State University Los Angeles and taught high school history and English for many years. Sutton, who has been writing for more than 50 years, has published over two dozen books. His essays and short stories have appeared in numerous national magazines and journals. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Joan.

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      Book preview

      The Life and Death of Abraham Massry and Other Stories - Joseph Sutton

      THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ABRAHAM MASSRY

      AND OTHER STORIES

      11 Stories

      by

      Joseph Sutton

      Copyright 2014 by Joseph Sutton

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction by the Author

      The Life and Death of Abraham Massry

      At the Store

      My Mom

      Hebrew Lessons

      Bar Mitzvah Boy

      Chuck’s Story

      Syrian Jewish Football

      My Brother Charles

      You Remind Us of Our Fathers

      No Books

      A Double-Edged Sword

      About the Author

      Introduction by the Author

      On the first day back from the 1947 winter holidays in Los Angeles, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Worthington, called on everyone in class to stand at their desk and say what he or she received for Christmas. Mrs. Worthington didn’t know that the subject of Christmas, in front of my classmates, made me extremely nervous.

      What did you get for Christmas, Patty, Jerry, Barbara, Ronnie, Richard, Diane, Anita?

      They all stood, one at a time, and told the class the presents they received.

      What am I going to do? I thought. I’m Syrian Jewish. We don’t celebrate Christmas. We don’t even give Hanukkah presents. What should I do?

      What did you get for Christmas, Joseph?

      I stood up and was speechless.

      Well, Joseph, what did you get?

      I...I got an electric train, I said, feeling like a worm.

      That incident has never left my memory. It taught me a great lesson: to never again be ashamed of who and what I was.

      ***

      There’s a civil war raging in Syria as I write. It saddens me that Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, is being reduced to rubble. I had always wished to visit Aleppo, the city of my ancestors, but now, because of my age and the destruction I read about every day, I don’t think that day will ever come to pass.

      My mother’s parents emigrated from Aleppo at the very dawn of the 20th century. They were among the first Syrian Jews to settle in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. My father, also from Aleppo, sailed with his family to America after World War I in 1919 and settled in the Lower East Side. He and my mother eventually met in Brooklyn and were married in 1927.

      In the Lower East Side, the much larger number of Yiddish-speaking European Jews didn’t recognize the Arabic-speaking Jews as Jewish because of their different language and olive-colored skin. This sense of alienation and culture shock led the Syrian Jews to band together and help one another adjust to life in America. The more settled immigrants helped the newcomers (like my father and his family), providing them with a temporary place to stay and goods to peddle. Instead of assimilating into the masses, the Syrian Jews strengthened their identity by following the religious, ethnic and cultural customs they brought from Syria.

      The community of Syrian Jews moved to permanent residences in Brooklyn in the 1920s. As the community grew, it became more assimilated into American society, while at the same time it continued to nurture and preserve its culture and values. Today a sizable number of Syrian Jews—estimated between 75,000 and 100,000—reside in the New York metropolitan area with the greatest number living in Brooklyn.

      The Syrian Jews have always been a business people. Their means to succeed in America has mostly been through business rather than scholarship. They still do business with one another, as they did in Syria, dealing mainly in apparel, textiles and, after World War II, electronics.

      Many young men and women have gone on to college and joined the professional ranks but they, like the community as a whole, still cling to the traditions and customs of the past. As a consequence, the Syrian Jews are an insular people, mainly socializing and intermarrying within their own community.

      ***

      I was born in Brooklyn, but my family moved to Los Angeles in 1941 when I was a year old. Instead of growing up in the large, inward-looking community of Brooklyn’s Syrian Jews, I grew up as American as any American kid in the wide-open spaces of Los Angeles of the 1940s and ’50s. There was a small community of Syrian Jews that my parents socialized with and, during the major holidays, gathered with in a rented social hall that became a makeshift synagogue. Other than the holidays and the parties that my parents hosted, I was never in the company of Syrian Jews.

      Of all the boys born to my father’s four brothers and one sister and my mother’s four brothers and three sisters, my oldest brother was the first to break away from the tradition of a son joining his father in business. My brother set a model for me to follow. It gave me permission to do what I wanted to do in life and not what tradition demanded.

      In this story collection that you are about to read, I’ve done my utmost to relate my Syrian Jewish experience.

      Joseph Sutton, 2014

      The Life and Death of Abraham Massry

      Where does a 33-year-old man go when he’s just broken up with the woman he’s lived with for four years? Where does he go when his life has no meaning or direction, when he’s confused, bewildered, lost? He leaves Berkeley with all his possessions and drives back to the womb—in my case, back to my parents’ house in Los Angeles.

      After breaking

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