Happy 100th to My Great, Great Uncle Himey
My late grandmother’s uncle Hy Ainbinder turned 100-years old last week. Himey, as he’s known, immigrated to the U.S. 95 years ago from Beresdov, Ukraine.
Normally all this would be worth celebrating but would not be terribly relevant to this here foodcentric blog audience. But Himey was–until the year before I was born–a damn fine Kosher butcher in Peabody, Mass., the city I lived in for my first three years.
The Jewish Journal, on Boston’s North Shore, has a nice piece celebrating Himey’s 100th. A snippet:
Hyman parents, Samuel and Zelda Ainbinder, lived at 13 Mill Street on the second floor. On the first floor, Samuel ran his butcher shop, recalled Hyman’s nephew, Harold Singerman, age 80.
“The shop was interesting,” Singerman reminisced. “There was a stairway leading to their apartment and in the back, they had chickens. The slaughterer would come around Thursday or Friday to kill the chickens.”
Hyman was raised in that home. After working for several other employers, he went to work for his father, and eventually took over the business, which he later moved to Main Street in Peabody’s downtown square.
Singerman calls Hyman “the quintessential kosher butcher.” He had to be “made of iron,” Singerman said, to put up with all the yelling of the Jewish women when they burst into his shop a few days before Shabbat to get their orders in.
“You can’t imagine the stresses at the end of the week,” he quipped. “Take me first, no me first. The woman would be yelling.”
Hyman operated the Peabody Kosher Meat Market at 101 Main Street from 1945 until he retired in 1971. It was one of three kosher butcheries in Peabody, which supplied meals for all the Jewish homes. Singerman worked in the shop at first sweeping the floors, but Hyman “never liked the way I did it,” Singerman said. Hyman had to keep teaching him over and over. Eventually, he sent Singerman out to deliver meat to his customers’ homes.
More here. Congrats to Hy and his youngish (98) wife, Freida. And thanks to my incredibly great uncle Harold, quoted at length in the piece, for alerting me to the article.
The lower image on the cover of this book about Peabody, by the way, is (if I have my facts right) the Mill Street home as it looked about the time Himey and my great grandparents moved in (replacing, I’m told, the oldest candy store in America with the aforementioned butcher shop in the process).
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Rob Ainbinder
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rbbpeaks
