Marc Ringel
My mother’s father was from a family of some renown in the region of Eastern Europe where they had lived for centuries. According to a family tree, all in Hebrew, our branch of Epsteins counts a distinguished 16th Century rabbi as its progenitor. There are many more prominent progeny scattered among the branches. Accordingly, my great-grandfather, a pious man who had done well in the dry goods business (that his wife actually ran while he was busy studying Talmud), had high expectations for his four sons; high expectations until a jealous neighbor ratted on him for bribing a military draft official to get one of his sons, Grandpa’s older brother Shmuel “Mully,” out of the standard 20-year service obligation in Czar Nicholas’ army. Jews didn’t do well in the Russian military. The family fled Grodno, their hometown--ruled by Russia at the time, now in Belarus--in the middle of the night, with only what they could carry. They landed in Chicago in 1912. My grandfather, Chaim Yankel “Jack” Epstein, was 14 then.
Jack was not cut out for a life devoted to study and prayer. Anyway, he had to work. He helped out in the family’s market on Division Street. He hawked candy in a movie theater. Eventually he landed a job as a printer’s devil, a gofer in a print shop. He liked the work with the presses. The electrical parts interested him especially. This led him to become a journeyman electrician. For as far back as anyone remembers, Grandpa was the only member of his family who made a living with his hands. He was very proud of his trade and of his union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
Scarcity of construction during the Depression forced Grandpa to give up the electrical business. He still employed his considerable skills on weekends, fixing and installing stuff in the homes of his six siblings and their children. He often brought me along to “help,” while teaching me how to use his tools.
One of those tools is a brace, a crank used to drive a threaded bit into a piece of lumber, thereby drilling a big hole. Grandpa taught me how to work a brace and bit in the basement of his apartment building where he kept his tools in a workbench he’d constructed. He instructed me how to secure a bit in the brace’s chuck then crank on it while pushing it into a piece of wood, which happened to be the wall of someone’s personal storage shed. Though the holes I drilled did the shed no harm, it didn’t really need extra ventilation.
Over the years I have had occasion to use the brace and most every one of the many other tools I inherited from Grandpa. I chose to tell my story about this particular one because I understood, even as we drilled those holes around 70 years ago, that we’d done something a little naughty. And naughtiness is another treasured inheritance from my grandfather.