William Morgan: Joy and sadness with an old knife

My wife, Carolyn, is a potter and a gourmet cook. She depends upon and thus respects her tools, but they are to be used, not objects to be displayed. The tarnished copper pots hanging in a row from a beam above the stove are not there to impress; once in a while I might polish one to a shine, but the pots are there to  be worked. The knives on Carolyn's wall rack are beautiful to her. She recalls every country auction where she acquired each pitted and stained Sabatier,  and knows how each knick was earned. But these blades still need to be used to slice and chop; they are there to serve.

There is one tool, however, that does not get used. Framed, it occupies a place of honor on our kitchen wall. When we first found this in an antique shop on Wickenden Street in Providence we thought that it was a super-realist still life of a knife. The dealer had no recollection of where he picked this up, but it has a framer's sticker from Springfield, Mass.

A faded typewritten note in Hebrew taped to the back revealed something of its history. Two Hebrew-literate friends gave us this translation:

With G-d's Help.

Tuesday - 8th of the Hebrew Month of Av 1948.

To my esteemed and dearest Avraham May Your Light Shine

Shalom & Blessings      

This knife is a gift from your father, of Blessed Memory, that I received from him at the time of my completion of Rabbinic Ordination.         

Your father, of Blessed Memory, used this knife to slaughter poultry at the office of slaughter on 19 Franziskaner Street that he inherited from your grandfather Reb Gershon (of Blessed Memory).

And at the opportunity of this pleasant visit it seemed fitting to give this present to one with a delicate and appreciative palate - that it should be your inheritance from your father of Blessed Memory, and that this knife is a symbol of a bygone and disappeared era.

With a warm handshake of appreciation and to your refined wife regards and all the best

Missing you and your family

Where was Franziskaner Street? There may have been hundreds of streets by that name in Germany and parts of Poland and the Ukraine.  (Franziskaner is a German word referring to Franciscan monks.) Did Avraham's father escape and did he grab the poultry knife as storm troopers pounded on his father's door? Three years after the concentration camps were liberated, and in the year  of the creation of the State of Israel, the knife came to the grandson, now safely in America.

There is both joy and sadness in the knife's coming into our house. How could this tool be anything other than a treasure to be venerated? What descendant could not hold on to this link to past? Yet families can fade into oblivion, while the artifacts of their lives end up in auctions and yard sales. So often the excitement of discovering a discarded gem is tempered by the knowledge that it may well mark the end of a family line.

Reb Gershon's blade for butchering poultry has a special place just above our kitchen table, where we will remember him. Growing up in in rural North Carolina, my wife vividly recalls her mother dispatching chickens with a similar tool. So the knife is a special bond between the butcher shop on Franziskaner Street and our kitchen.

William Morgan, based in Providence, writes on architecture and other topics, mostly design-related.