{"id":13252,"date":"2026-08-28T15:40:57","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T14:40:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13252"},"modified":"2026-08-28T16:51:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T15:51:37","slug":"my-great-grandfathers-apron-shop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13252","title":{"rendered":"My Great Grandfather’s Apron Shop"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
Image: \u00a9 Charles Eastwood<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Salt, parsley, matzah\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am tying my apron when he wanders in.<\/p>\n

He must be impressed, my elter zeyde,<\/p>\n

because instead of moving on again, he sits<\/p>\n

as if inviting me to make him coffee;<\/p>\n

I pull tight on my apron strings, imagine<\/p>\n

his approval, his apron shop, its peeling paint<\/p>\n

yet another diminishing space proscribed<\/p>\n

into a side street, ripe with the musk<\/p>\n

of horses stomping on soot-blackened setts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But this is where they all come on their way<\/p>\n

to whatever afterlife is allowed to them:<\/p>\n

rabbis and grocers, toolmakers, storesmen,<\/p>\n

chambermaids, undertakers and butchers,<\/p>\n

their aprons, tarnished with gore or boot black,<\/p>\n

will surely outlive them as hand-me-downs,<\/p>\n

chattels taken as bankrupt stock, or theft,<\/p>\n

discarded skins enduring on the hooks<\/p>\n

of grubby basement walls, hiding behind doors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I try to brighten things up a little:<\/p>\n

organise his stock according to class, colour,<\/p>\n

size and origin; he needs to be organised,<\/p>\n

encouraged to put down roots, so I sweep<\/p>\n

and scrub the grime from the flagstones,<\/p>\n

erect shelves of sweet yellow pine to evoke<\/p>\n

Carpathian forests where you could still be lost<\/p>\n

for days, and I keep his racks nearly bare<\/p>\n

like a Gucci store – less to carry if we must flee.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Finally, he speaks, and he talks about the Czar,<\/p>\n

how it was clear that trouble was coming to Kiev;<\/p>\n

in Bialystok bones got broken in hands and bodies,<\/p>\n

people were clubbed to death with rifles, nails<\/p>\n

driven into their heads; how it went on for days.<\/p>\n

The English too hate us, he says, but here at least<\/p>\n

they respect hard work, a fair price for good cloth,<\/p>\n

don\u2019t always demand bribes, and anyway,<\/p>\n

everyone is going to America.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There\u2019s no guarantee that we will die in the place where we were born,<\/p>\n

yet the yellow stars burn everywhere the same.<\/p>\n

I come upon him again in a garden encircled<\/p>\n

by high stone walls and iron gates, where swifts gather at twilight<\/p>\n

sharing news from abroad, ravens bother with salvation tracts,<\/p>\n

and robins in their scarlet aprons turn the soil above his head.<\/p>\n

\u2018Is it always like this?\u2019<\/em> I ask.<\/p>\n

\u2018Always\u2019,<\/em> he answers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

____<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Canning won the Ginkgo AONB Prize for Best Poem of the British Landscape in 2023.\u00a0 He has published two poetry collections,\u00a0An Essex Parish<\/em>\u00a0(2015) and\u00a0The Celestial Spheres<\/em>\u00a0(2020) which was shortlisted in the Poetry Book Awards 2023and in 2021,\u00a0Jim-Jam-Julie<\/em>, an illustrated children\u2019s story in verse. He has been long-listed in the National Poetry Competition, and twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. His writing has appeared in the Sentinel Quarterly Literary Review,\u00a0Places of Poetry,<\/em>\u00a0Magma Poetry, Wet Grain<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0UKClimbing.com.<\/em>\u00a0In 2020 and 2021, David served on the judging panel for the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Image: \u00a9 Charles Eastwood \u00a0 Salt, parsley, matzah\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 I am tying my apron when he wanders in. He must be impressed, my elter zeyde, because instead of moving on again, he sits as if inviting me to make him coffee; I pull tight on my apron strings, imagine his approval, his apron shop, its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[376,441,443],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nMy Great Grandfather's Apron Shop - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13252\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My Great Grandfather's Apron Shop - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Image: \u00a9 Charles Eastwood \u00a0 Salt, parsley, matzah\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 I am tying my apron when he wanders in. 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