THE MUSEUM OF FAMILY HISTORY presents
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Jews in Small Towns: New York
ALAN D. LEVITT--SHERMAN, NEW YORK
I was born in Rochester, New York on February 1, 1946. My mother tells me that it was a snowy day and that I was born on Shabbos. My parents were both born in America. Though the children of immigrants, they spoke only English in front of us children. My grandparents were born in Russia and Poland and it is from them that I first learned what little Yiddish I know. I am not sure how my grandparents on my father's side met but I know a lot about my maternal grandparents. We lived in a two-family house in Rochester and my family lived in one part of the house while my maternal grandparents lived in the other. After graduating from high school I went to college to become a pharmacist. I graduated from Pharmacy School in 1968, in the middle of the Vietnam War. I enlisted in the Air Force and was discharged in 1972. I traveled around the country and, after some ups and downs, found a job as a pharmacist working for a small drug chain called Eckerd's in Jamestown, New York. About thirty miles due west of Jamestown was a small town of about one-thousand people called Sherman, New York. Sherman once had a thriving pharmacy but in 1962 the pharmacist died and the drug clerk bought the building from the estate. The drug clerk ran the store as a health and beauty aid store, not remodeling the store. In fact, Sherman Pharmacy had never been remodeled; it was the same in 1973 when I bought it as it was in 1862 when Sherman Pharmacy first opened for business. Sometime after 1962, when Sherman had a medical doctor but no pharmacy, the local Lions Club organized a committee to recruit a pharmacist to come to Sherman. I was the third to hear about a town that wanted to recruit a pharmacist and the third one to meet with the committee. But I was the first bachelor and still young enough to be willing to do all the hard work involved in running a pharmacy. I also fell in love with the charm of Sherman Pharmacy, the original soda fountain, and old displays. I did not have very much money and so this was probably the best chance I thought I would ever have to buy my own drugstore. On May 12, 1973 I purchased the Sherman Home Store and changed its name back to Sherman Pharmacy. Since it needed a great deal of remodeling I spend the first months of my stay in Sherman -- both day and night -- trying to build up a business from almost nothing. Sherman, New York was a small farming community (population about one thousand.) I was not the first Jew to live in Sherman, although I might have been the last. Sherman was once a hustle-bustle town in the 1920s, a stop on the railroad, and a dairy and dry-goods exporting town. To the best of my knowledge, a Jew named Harry Wake first settled in Sherman. Mr. Wake traveled selling thread, cloth, and other materials and, sometime in the early 1900s opened what was to become the Sherman Department Store. Harry Wake lived his entire life in Sherman. He married one of the local girls and had two children with her. During the Great Depression the Bank of Sherman failed, and the story has it that Harry Wake ran a banking business from his store making loans to farmers. In the 1950s Harry Wake sold the store to Otto Gratzer, who was the first "closet" Jew I ever met. It was not until two years after his death that Otto Gratzer's son-in-law came into my pharmacy and told me that Otto Gratzer was indeed Jewish. Otto Gratzer eventually became the treasurer of the major church in Sherman, The Community Church. I always thought this to be an irony. From 1973 until my marriage in 1978 I lived alone in the apartment above Sherman Pharmacy. I occasionally dated some of the local women. I even went so far as to send flowers and a Jewish cookbook to one of my girlfriends. When this girl got the Jewish cookbook in the mail she came into my pharmacy and said, "I'm not cooking any Jew food. for anybody." And that was when my search for a wife took a turn; I decided that my wife would be Jewish or I would never have a wife. Around 1975 I had built up my business where I could adjust the store hours so that I could join the synagogue in Jamestown, New York, just thirty miles to the east. Around 1976 the rabbi of this congregation quit and left this small shul of about sixty families without a rabbi. Our congregation was so small that we did not have a Saturday morning service, only a weekly Friday night service. Whether I was asked or volunteered I don't remember, but I closed the pharmacy at seven o'clock every Friday evening and drove the 3thirty miles to Jamestown, sometimes in a snowstorm, and conducted services for the congregation. A member of the congregation, Jack Haber, owned a fur and women's clothing store in Jamestown. On one of his buying trips to New York city he walked into the office of my future mother-in-law and said, "My shul has a nice young pharmacist who owns his own business and is looking for a nice Jewish girl." My future mother-in-law replied, "I have a daughter. She will be going to college in Buffalo this September." Mr. Haber replied "Buffalo is not far (seventy miles north.) Do you have her picture?" Thus began a two-year long distance romance. I am happy to say that I am still married to the wonderful girl I met because I was the temporary rabbi in Jamestown. From the 1920s until after World War II, Sherman was a bustling town. However, when cars became popular and the railroad station closed, Sherman went into a decline.
Since we were the only Jewish family in Sherman, our concept of the Jewish
community included other small towns near us as well as that of Jamestown. A
Jewish "artist," Michael Flaxman, moved to Clymer, New York, a small town south
of us. The area of New York state where we lived had harsh winters. In Clymer,
instead of sending the children out of the school in the bitter cold and snow,
one of the ministers from a local Sherman had a more diverse population than Clymer and the students left school and went to their various churches for religious education. I felt accepted by the townspeople; I was not the first Jew in Sherman, although my wife was the first Jewess. However, there was line we could not cross. One of the school teachers once came into my pharmacy and said she would like to invite my family to her house, but she was not sure what we could eat. I have learned that non-Jews have more respect for someone who is observant rather than someone who is not. I think that the people of Sherman had more respect for me for closing my store early on Friday' night rather than staying open. I did not close the pharmacy on Jewish holidays but hired a pharmacist to cover the store so I could go to shul in Jamestown.
Halloween was always a terrible holiday for me in Sherman. I never knew if it
was an act of anti-Semitism, but one year I had apples thrown through the front
windows of my apartment. And on another Halloween someone threw paint on the
front window of the pharmacy. The most blatant anti-Semitic acts occurred when we were selling the pharmacy.
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