28 - The Old Neighborhood: The Jews and Other Neighborhood Wonders

Next to Christakis’ house on Deligiorgi Street stood the modest old house of Isaac and his older brother Aaron, two Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki who survived the concentration camps and the holocaust and returned to the city where they grew up. They managed to reclaim ownership of their house they were forced to abandon, amongst thousands of their race during the wholescale deportations of 1943. There was a vague aura of mysticism in the Ladino songs the radio was playing behind their half-closed shutters I listened to, sitting on the kerb under their window in the summer afternoons whilst waiting for Kostakis or Christakis to commence our games. Neither Isaac, nor Aaron interacted much with our common neighbors. Neither did I ever come across them outside their house. On rare occasions, I observed a couple of sad stooping figures from above our back balcony sipping coffee silently under the acacia tree in their sunless backyard overshadowed by our tall building, separated from its light-void by a concrete fence. There must have been once some light that backyard. They were the odd, lonely pair of siblings simply waiting for the rest of their little miserable lives broken down in their youth to expire. How they or their family -surely, they must have had one, survived the holocaust remained a mystery no rumors could dispel. Later, having read Primo Levi's "If This Is the Man," I could only surmise that they might have been Kapos in a concentration camp or, merely, by just being young able-bodied men amongst the few fortunate whenever the dice over human lives was thrown in those hells we read and heard so much about.

Behind our building, overlooked by the main balcony of my uncle's family, the first also anonymous alley off Deligiorgi Street, later named Eurydice Street, there was a house belonging to another Jewish family, apparently wealthier than that of Isaac and Aaron. The house had a large courtyard behind iron gates and a well-kept garden with a lawn and trees, even a palm tree. It was the home of a widow called Victoria, a renowned resident of the area pre- and post-war, who, according to Father, survived the camps thanks to her fluency in German, having graduated from the Deutsche Schule of Thessaloniki. The Jews of the city were not an amorphous mass. Amongst those I knew of or got to know them there were was Isaac, Aaron, Victoria, least but not last Miss Varsano, our English teacher, who dazzled us young boys with her beauty. We even had a Jewish classmate in her English tutoring classes: the red-haired Levi who escorted us furtively Maccabi gymnasium, one block from Miss Varsano’s school along Fleming Street, to see some Jewish kids training in the indoors basketball court. Therefore, I had caught up with few remnants of the last generation of the Jews of Thessaloniki, a race that for centuries, since their expulsion from Spain and Portugal, formed a major and vibrant part of the city –so much so, that it was nicknamed “Mother of Israel”. Today only the ghosts of the city’s past hover over its streets -as Mazower would have put it, joined by waves of tourists from Israel visiting for a glimpse in the past of their ancestors.

In the same 1st alley, in the basement of an apartment building, one of the first in the block, at the corner with Deligiorgi Street, there was a carpenter’s workshop, another place of intrigue for curious children. We were attracted by the pleasant smell of wood and varnish, by the sawdust we could collect in bags for no apparent reason. We peeped down the stairs leading to the basement to observe the carpenter's craftsmanship -as much as was possible to discern through the open door and the low, dirty ground floor windows with the grilles, against the bright sunlight outside during the day or through a pale artificial lighting in the evenings. And there was no piece of furniture the carpenter of Deligiorgi Street could not build-to-order! Sofas, tables, desks, bookcases, all this with the help of two young apprentices, with his tools hanging in rows around the walls (hammers, planes, saws, screwdrivers) -the awe and longing of myself and any aspiring artisan. An electric saw was the unique mechanical equipment in the workshop, a hunched figure amidst workbenches, like what I saw displayed in the city’s annual International Exhibition. The sweet and whirring sound of the planer was pleasing to the ears; the thwacks of nails hammered an annoying racket, the thuds at the end a relief. At the piercing sounds of the electric saw we blocked our ears; the ultra-high pitch tones when the saw blade cut through hardwood knots unbearable. On few occasions, we were called in inside by the master carpenter to be handed, a kind of treats, unwanted pieces of wood, short planks and slats for our wooden swords and weaponry, and rods as possible candidates for our birching at school. The teachers asked for a supply of them from schoolchildren at the beginning of each school year. (The brown-noising of a teacher by a few classmates and their parents, to pre-emptively win favors and good grades, manifested itself as an untoward eagerness to procure the perfect rod for our corporal punishments: a necessary component of the educational and disciplinary process that still in force in my time at primary school, in short, a tool for discipline through the exercise of pain. The rods amongst the carpenter's scraps were not as well refined and had no chance in the selection process: the teachers invariably picked ones from the handful of carpenter dads: smooth and round, straight and unyielding, tailor-made to some agreed specifications.

The carpenter of Deligiorgi Street was not the only artisanal producer in our neighborhood. In the spacious basement of the apartment building at the corner of our alley with Gambetta Street, a small shoe factory (yes, a factory!) flourished during my childhood. His middle-aged owner always sported a benevolent smile displaying a couple of golden teeth whenever he greeted our neighbors and always bowed to stroke the hair of children, all potential customers for his shoes. One afternoon, I was watching him from our balcony stacking boxes of shoes of his production in the boot of his estate car, for sale or distribution, personally, to shops in Thessaloniki and towns in Central Macedonia. A salesman, a distributor, a craftsman shoemaker, a cobbler, and the boss of a dozen workers. I had not yet formed any conceptions about small and large-scale capitalist production and the private ownership of its means, or the role of a businessman-proprietor and entrepreneur in it and its place in class society. He gave the impression more of a kind and soft person than a ruthless boss, in the one and only time we went down to his basement with Mother to try a pair of black floaters from the shoes made in that factory. It goes without saying that the range on offer would be considered unfashionable, even crude, by modern standards. He proffered Mother a generous wholesale or ‘factory’ discount, whilst the worker who measured my feet and brought us the suitable size of shoes to try sounded proud with the end-product of his craft and flouted his skills; or he might have been simply taking guidance from his boss's salesman book.

But the artificial light of the basement full of moulds and tools and leather cutting machines, contrasted with the sunny morning outside, the smells of leather and polish were heavy, the eight-hour shifts of the proletarian shoemakers tedious and repetitive, detached from a bright and playful and happy life outside. If I did not do well in school, I was told by adults in the family, I would be condemned to do manual labor in a similar and even worse environment. A life of work in a dull and acridly smelling basement did not appeal to me, indeed; the human spirit was wasted on repetition and monotony. Worse than working in the carpentry around the corner!

The pair of shoes we bought were stiff and uncomfortable. We had to return and exchange them. The worker happily had them remolded, but did not go down that basement of the factory to buy its cheap shoes. Besides, Father had a friend in the same line of business: a merchant owner of a shoe-shop call “The Nest” in Vasilissis Olga’s Avenue, who offered a wide range of more fashionable shoes. Thereafter, he became the exclusive purveyor of shoes for me and Father. It would not have been long before the deindustrialization of the city and its gradual shift to a service-based economy. The workshops and small-factories in our area, the carpentry and the small shoe-factory were not spared and were swept away. Their decline of their business until their folding had been a slow and arduous process –for the owners, the wage-laborers and their families in those basements. They remained shut and deserted in their darkness ever after. The fate of the workers, the master carpenter and the petty businessman-owner is unknown. Few if any people in the neighborhood cared about such trivial events. 

27 - The Old Neighborhood: The Taverna of Deligiorgi Street

The wall of an uninhabited single-room dwelling in our alley, a storeroom more like, with a pyramidal tiled roof without windows and a hidden back door, formed an L-shaped recess with the façade of the Kazineris’ house. The recess and the windowless wall offered a natural, small but useful, area for ball games; for kicking the wall against it wall which also serve as an imaginary goal post, when Kosmas, Kostakis' father, had not parked his car there or Yiannis was not asleep in the bedroom above. Kosmas, a former mechanic then a radio broadcast engineer, was the proud owner of a German Opel from the 1950s, his precious possession was the first car I ever saw parked in our alley. He brought it regularly to wash with a hose and water from his mother-in-law's tap, polished, for hours in a tattered uniform either squeezed under the chassis or peeking under the hood into the engine, inspecting or fixing I don't know what. He enjoyed taking care of his car, the good man Kosmas with the golden teeth and smile, and showed it off to neighbours, proud of his rare acquisition. It was also one of the first cars I remember riding on a summer Sunday for a trip to the seaside village of Epanomi: I, Kostakis and his chubby sister Katinoula were squeezed in the back, Mrs. Foula on the passenger’s seat. Everything was simple and beautiful in that day trip with Kosmas' car: swimming in the sea, our on a blanket picnic with meatballs and bread and tomatoes, kicking a ball in the shade of the pine trees by the beach. It was very much like a trip to the seaside and in a similar car of Mimi and Lola and their parents, the main characters of our first reading book in primary school, which made us dream the Greek summer ahead by the sea.

At the corner with Deligiorgi Street, separated from the storeroom by a narrow corridor behind an old black wrought-iron gate that opened in our alley, a staircase led to the back of the upper floor of one of the most respectable houses in the block -nearly a mansion. It stood out from the Kazineris’ behind it, because of its high ceilings and a balcony protected by decorative wrought-iron railings of its façade above Deligiorgi Street and an elaborate two-leaf front door with ironwork and carved wood. The porch entrance was elevated from street level with five marble steps which led to the first floor with weather-worn railings on either side. The external walls of the house were painted in hues of beige and yellow, matching the brown varnished wood of the door and the shutters of the two large front windows, and the faded earthy red of the ceramic roof tiles -the same color with that of Kazineris’ and the other surviving old houses of Deligiorgi Street, all pale and unkempt and weather-worn. It was the house where the renowned in that area of Thessaloniki taverna proprietor, a widow called Tsapatsaraina, lived with a middle-aged male stout figure, whom Mother called her "partner". In contrast to the house, the taverna that this lady ran was of petty-bourgeois insignificance, frequented by workers, taxi drivers, and other petty businessmen and pensioners, less by intellectual types like Father.

The taverna was an unassuming low-house with a flat-roof on Deligiorgi Street, opposite the front door of Tsapatsaraina’s house, between the corner with our alley and the bridge over the stream. Its pale blue wooden front door was normally locked during in daytime and until dusk. Between the two doors, of the taverna and the grander house opposite, on the tarmac of Deligiorgi Street and its narrow sidewalks, and up to the five marble steps of the porch, the three friends and other children from the wider neighborhood set up our games: single- or two-goalpost mini-tournaments, hide-and-seek, “aiutante”, marbles, skipping, hopscotch.

Tsapatsaraina became a legendary character in my childhood mind, as I never came across her in the alley, or the street in front of her house or taverna. The latter we visited only once in a late evening with my uncle, but she was busy in the kitchen throughout our meal there. She must have been a kind and benevolent character, sympathetic towards children and tolerant of their voices and kicks of the ball at her doorstep; we were always left unimpeded to get on with our play -in contrast to the hostile moods and tellings-off we encountered, sometimes from generally friendly people of our alley, but almost always in the open plot on the other side of the stream. One afternoon, a stray kick of the ball from Kostakis' foot hit and smashed the glass of the side door of the taverna. We panicked and quickly dispersed, in naivety and innocence, before anyone would find out anything about it, and sought refuge in the safety of our homes from Tsapatsaraina’s anticipated wrath. But the incident was dealt casually and sedately between Tsapatsaraina and Mrs. Foula, Kostakis' mother, without reprisals or even restrictions to our noisy games. And we continued them unhindered in the friendly and still clear of cars Deligiorgi Street -with only an innocuous "be careful with your football next time" reprimand by Mrs. Foula and my grandma.

The taverna opened late at night after most children had retired to their homes. Tsapatsaraina’s patrons stemmed mainly from the lower strata of the eastern half of the city. Taxi drivers were regulars of the taverna, too; from our balcony I could see blue Thessaloniki taxis parked on Deligiorgi Street. Most of Tsapatsaraina’s customers were attracted to her taverna for its specialities: char-grilled or fried sardines and anchovies, freshly caught from Thermaikos bay, the smell of which on Saturday evenings pervaded the streets. They were washed down with draught retsina dispensed from wooden barrels. There was not much else in the menu, other than some salads and chips. The sardines and the bulk retsina, which she procured weekly in those enormous barrels brought to her taverna from a cart with tyres that was pulled by a horse, were seemingly enough to content a customer base drawn from the common folk of the city.

No music was played inside barring the sound of the barrel organ played by itinerant musicians in busy nights. Even that was drowned by the ceaseless clamour through the open front door. Late on Saturday nights one could hear the incoherent shouts from drunk customers leaving, but most of the time, as in basement tavernas or cafes for the elderly, the Tsapatsaraina customers enjoyed her sardines and retsina civilly, with low-key conversations and jokes. She was the iron lady, the boss, who would not tolerate trouble and quarrels, as much as she benevolently tolerated the shouts and the occasional mischiefs of children playing at her doorstep in the afternoons. Besides, there was no place for controversial political arguments when Greece was under the rule of a military dictatorship and the police force was still fearsome not just for children. Love affairs and jealousy on the one hand, business and politics on the other, were (and have been through history) the main causes of skirmishes in places where mortals gather. There was no ground in Tsapatsaraina’s taverna did not provide for that type of quarrels, despite (or because of) the predominantly male clientele. There were no memorable incidents triggered by drunken patrons, and the only intriguing events related with the taverna business for the children were the monthly laborious offloading of the retsina barrels of retsina from the horse-drawn cart and loading empty ones for their refill, spreading the unfamiliar but a peculiarly attractive to our noses heavy smell, which in the dusk was overpowered by the unattractive stench of grilled fish and the smoke from the grill charcoals and cigarettes.

Only once did we drop in and have dinner with Uncle and one of his friends, in one of the little rooms into which the small taverna was separated, all of them crowded by patrons. On the back end of the taverna a two-leaf door opened to a back yard with a few tables under a vine, on the bank of the dry in summers Toumpa stream, but that area was reserved for the regulars. Grilled sardines and fried anchovies were unfamiliar and generally undesirable flavors, not to a young child’s taste; nor was the smoky and noisy environment child-friendly. It was not a place for children. But I endured it patiently and quietly amongst the grown-ups, who seemed to inexplicably to me greatly enjoyed all of this: the food and drink and the atmosphere. Our order was taken by Tsapatsaraina’s stout partner, who also brought us the bill at the end. The food and drink were served by the single boy waiter of the taverna, whereas the legendary Tsapatsaraina was rooted in a hidden kitchen, dedicated to the cooking of fish, invisible throughout. And she remained an invisible and mythical person then, as in all my years in the neighborhood. We left the taverna with the smoke of cigarettes and the fetor from the grill absorbed deeply by the fabric of our clothes and the foul smell lingered around us for days after.

After we moved out, years later, Tsapatsaraina’s house and her little taverna were both demolished and gave way to more vulgar apartment buildings. The stream behind its back yard became a busy asphalted road. Deligiorgi Street, which hosted so many of our games on its concrete surface, was inundated by parked cars. Tsapatsaraina and her partner, the old-fashioned male figure in a dark suit and with a fedora hat, had the fate that awaits every common mortal. Just as the idiosyncratic souls who enjoyed the mezes, the retsina and the warmth in the convivial atmosphere of the smoky taverna, a little joy in their short lives, were lost too.