When Julius (né Yudl) Karp was still a child, just beginning to outgrow the crankiness of his coddled infancy, his grandmother Yokey, known in the Pinch as “that ice cream person,” would recite to him his family’s history:
“Yosl King of Cholera from Boibicz, who married Chava Babtcheh, her that died from giving birth to Salo that they called him Frost-bissen”—pausing to catch her wheezy breath—“who married the sharp-tongued Basha Puah who begot in Lodz first the twins Yachneh and Yoyneh, who ran away to Palestine, then me,”—pause—“Jocheved, who begot in America with my poor husband Shmerl your father Ruben Karp, who was in the Yichud a holy terror before he got wed to his wife that was shlangbissen”—pause—“snakebit after already she begot you…”
A mannish creature with her cropped hair and coveralls, her chin whiskers and camelbacked spine, she informed little Julius of what he would have preferred not to know: that there was an umglik, a curse on the Family Karp that goaded them to extreme behavior. But as far back as he could remember, he’d determined that the curse would pass him over, maybe skip a generation, though God forbid it should be visited instead on his children. Not that he believed in curses. For even as a boy Julius Karp was on his way to becoming a forward-looking young man, and as such never saw much percentage in looking back. He grew to forget most of the names in his grandmother’s catalog, just as he tended to forget his grandmother herself though she’d practically raised him. Neither did Julius retain any vivid memories of the apartment that he and his widowed father had shared with the mildly demented Grandma Yokey on a leafy street in midtown Memphis.
He was not an endearing man, Julius’s father, no one would have called him that, but neither was he hard or cruel. Though his features were regular enough, if a bit chapfallen, his short frame solid and well knit, he made little impression on acquaintances and seemed devoid of any passion save his dedication to making a living. So conservative was he in his dress (everything steam-pressed and Sanforized) as to appear almost camouflaged, so self-effacing in his manner that he might have been about to disappear; and although Julius admired and even emulated his father’s industry, there were times when he thought there was something rather calculated about his ordinariness—as if in performing the routine functions of a common merchant he were practicing some dark ritual. After his checkered stint in the Holy Land, he’d returned to the States a widower to raise his son in a less embattled environment. For a time he scooped sundaes in his mother’s vest-pocket parlor, where Jocheved comported herself less like a soda jerk than a necromancer; but when that shop went the way of all the others on North Main Street, Ruben appealed to his uncle Marvin for a job. Though Marvin Karp had never approved of his nephew, the kid (now in his middle thirties) seemed chastened since his return from abroad, and as a favor to Ruben’s mother Marvin took him on in his home appliance emporium, the new embodiment of his old general merchandise relocated from North Main to a shopping plaza out east. The business had always fared well, but owing in part to Ruben’s knack with machinery, which helped secure its reputation for service and dependability, Karp’s Appliance began to outdistance the competition. For while he was never especially personable with the customers, Ruben made himself readily available for installations and spot repairs, and stayed abreast of the latest advances in compact freezers, convection ovens, and blenders. Later, as the aging Marvin began to wean himself from business with a view toward retirement, he allowed Ruben to buy into a partnership; then retiring in earnest, he sold his own share of the establishment to his nephew. Karp’s Appliance Showroom, while it wasn’t quite the institution it would become after Julius took over, prospered under Ruben’s management; it survived the general collapse of the city’s economy following its wholesale abandonment by the white population, whose flight to the hinterlands left the inner city nearly a waste.
When, after a few incurious years of college, Julius accepted his father’s invitation to come to work in the family business, it was clear from the start that the young man had a vocation. His