Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky by Nora Rose Moosnick

Author:Nora Rose Moosnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Haymarket section of Louisville, ca. 1920s. (University of Louisville Archives.)

A couple of years after World War I, Elsie’s parents arrived in Kentucky. “They stayed with my daddy’s cousin,” she said. “He lived on Wallace Street in Louisville. My daddy worked as a busboy in Seelbach Hotel. He made a little money, and then they got a room where all the Lebanese people had one or two rooms [in an] apartment complex. They opened up the fruit stand. And then my daddy opened up a little meat market on First and Jefferson. Then he moved back down by where the [fruit] stand was—there was an empty store. [He] and my uncle, [who] was married to my mom’s sister, they opened up a meat market, and we were there for sixty-eight years.” The family store stood in the Haymarket section of downtown Louisville for all those years. Today, the Haymarket is only a memory. Photographs chronicle how this part of town, from the late 1800s to the 1960s, was a vibrant merchant area where Lebanese, Italian, and Jewish immigrants sought to make a living. It is wistfully relished by some, while others unsentimentally relegate it to the past. For Elsie, who is not at all maudlin, it is simply the place where the family lived among other immigrants. “Well, there were Italians, Jews, and Lebanese. Yeah, most of the Lebanese, Italians, and Jews lived down there by the old Haymarket.”

In the Haymarket, divisions between work and family blurred; immigrant families lived above their stores, and all family members assisted in the family businesses. Unlike in Lexington, where Jews stuck together in a nonimmigrant Christian setting, in Louisville, various immigrants resided together comfortably. Elsie’s mother even developed a mother-daughter relationship with a Jewish woman. This woman “had three sons and no daughters,” said Elsie, “but she loved my mother like her daughter. She said, ‘You’re my daughter.’ And when my mother would get a customer, one of [the woman’s] sons would go out and wait on them. Oh, they treated my mother so good, treated my mother very good.”

Inevitably, tucked into many nostalgic stories told by Arab and Jewish immigrants are hardworking and determined characters, and Elsie’s mother was one of these individuals. “My mother, she couldn’t read or write, but she worked, gave change, and then later on when my daddy turned the business over and my brothers took over, he opened up a grocery store on the corner, and my mother helped him sell whiskey. She couldn’t read, but she knew just where the bottle was.”

Elsie’s parents were determined to provide for their children, which included passing the meat market business on to them—but only to the boys. Elsie understood that the business would go to her brothers and not to her. “Oh, my daddy told me, ‘I love you more, but you might get married and bring your husband in here to work and come between your brothers, and I don’t want that,’ so that was okay [laughing].” Although

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