Passing by Simcha’s shop, you wanted to hurry and avert your eyes. The old-school sign was cute, but the fruit piled on a table outdoors, at the corner of Saint-Laurent and Napoleon, sometimes had visible rotten spots. Simcha, a stooped man in a dirty white grocer’s coat, would look on as you passed, your bags loaded with food bought elsewhere. 

I’d never been inside, but one day, my friend Adam and I were trying to make matzo-ball soup. I had never made it and was, relatedly, not very secure in my Jewishness. We were all jokes, but underneath, I was embarrassingly earnest. Could I do it? 

We needed matzo meal and walked into Simcha’s gloom, asking about it. He scowled. “There’s matzo,” he said, pointing to boxes on the shelf. He told us to crush it with a wine bottle like he did as a kid. Matzo meal, or pre-ground matzo, had been common for decades. Adam and I stared, and if Simcha could have spat at us, he would have. We meekly bought a box, went home, washed a wine bottle, and crushed it—the matzo and the soup. 

A few months earlier, I told my grandfather that I’d gotten my first-ever apartment, on Rue Clark. I was nineteen and at McGill. It turned out that he’d lived across the street after he’d arrived from Poland at seventeen, in 1929—I could see his old place from my roommate’s bedroom. 

In the neighbourhood, sixty years felt like barely a blip. The big Warshaw’s store had recently disappeared, but L. Berson & Fils was still engraving Hebrew tombstones near the tiny synagogue across from my sister’s apartment. Businessmen streamed into Moishes and students wandered into Slovenia deli. Most of Montreal’s Jews had moved to the suburbs, but their old haunts lived on. 

A while after the matzo episode, I noticed a sign on the door of Simcha’s shop: “Wanted: pickle helper.” Simcha was, as always, alone inside. My sister and I wondered how he survived, and I’d occasionally bought an apple from him out of pity. “I saw your ad for a pickle helper,” I said. He glowered and looked me over. “I usually get a boy for that,” he said. Picturing a knickerbocker-wearing lad from the musical Newsies, I shrugged apologetically. “I think I can do it,” I said. “What exactly is the job?” 

Simcha led me back to his tiny storeroom. The produce in front may have been slowly rotting, but back here, Simcha was a cucumber artist; he lifted the tops off huge barrels, revealing a murky, scummy liquid. I’d never even considered the idea that dill pickles could be homemade. I’m going to do it, I thought, suddenly passionate about learning the trade. 

“Come every morning at 6 AM and stir the pickles,” he said. Then I’d come back around 4 PM and stir them again. There may have been other tasks—I can’t remember. I recall him saying the job paid about $3 an hour, less than half of minimum wage, and I already had a summer job. “So I’d need to be here twice a day at a strict time, and you’d give me about $5 a day?” I asked, trying to keep my voice polite. Yes, he said. I told him I just couldn’t manage it and that I was really sorry. 

In 2022, Slovenia announced that it was packing up, its red-and-yellow sign about to disappear forever. When L. Berson & Fils had moved off the Main, a few years earlier, I’d teared up. When Moishes left, in 2021, I covered it as a reporter, feeling pandemic grim. But, now, I thought of Simcha. 

I recently learned that Montreal filmmaker Ezra Soiferman made a documentary about Simcha, specifically about how his legendary pickle recipe died with him in 2005. He was born in Romania, worked on a ship, survived the Holocaust, and had that shop with his wife for forty years. They never had kids. 

I didn’t need to know about the lost recipe to regret not apprenticing myself to Simcha. My grandfather, my zaida, died the year I moved to Clark. I never met my grandmother, only to realize in my thirties that no one in my family even knew where she was born. The hundreds of letters she wrote in Yiddish were thrown out long ago by some relative who, I imagine, felt there were countless ones like them—which there were, back then. 

These days, my nostalgia for the old Montreal can be overpowering; it sometimes feels like Covid-19 is erasing people and places right before my eyes, stopping the generations from their mingling. But, really, I think the virus just made me finally face it. 

Simcha, of all people, wouldn’t care. He would tell me to make my own pickles or just shut up. ⁂

Selena Ross was the editor-in-chief of Maisonneuve from 2018-2020. She's also a long-time reporter who has worked for the Globe and Mail, the Washington Post, the Chronicle Herald and CTV Montreal.