The Seltzerman

Once a week, he came, the seltzer man.  He was as strong as a horse and he smelled like it too, with his sweat and his leather sacking over his shoulder.  He carried two or three wooden crates with big blue bottles of Good Health Seltzer to the house.  All this was necessary for the family and all many visitors who came to see us during the week.  In Jewish tradition, so it is said, shpritzwasser is necessary to break up globules of fat, as in chicken soup or schmaltz herring.

Seltzer, for those who don’t know, you might not live in New York, you might have been born too late in the 1960s or something crazy like that, because it was only babies at such time, anyway: it is shrpitzwasser, soda water, highly carbonated and healthy for you therefore.  You press the nozzle down on the side near the top, and phhzzschhhhh out comes the bubbly drink, guaranteed to cause proper belches, recommended, it is said, by all health authorities, to help with your digestion.  But it is not necessary by any means you have to drink it just as it comes out from the bottle, just like you don’t have to buy from the candy store, unless you don’t have enough money for fruity flavors, instead you can purchase two cents plain.  When possible, however, it is highly recommended by me and other people what know from long years of experience, you can mix in as follows:

A squoosh or two of Fox’s U-Bet syrup to make a chocolate soda (three cents on the corner, but four cents a few blocks away, where you could sit more comfortably), or if you want further, a little milk, to create a wonderful egg-cream (in any store in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx or the City, by the way, this was five cents; on Staten Island, I don’t know).

In an almost empty jar of Welch’s Grape Jelly, with a few twirls of the spoon, to make a lovely purple soda (not available in stores at any price but in your grandma’s or your mother’s kitchen only and for free always).

But is also good as the name implies for the medical benefits, that is, to have just a glass or two of Good Health seltzer during a meal, because it makes you belch or burp or eructate or whatever you want to call it, a way for the body to expel stopped up gases and so make you feel good. 

All this should explain in no uncertain terms why the seltzer man was a vital part of the Borough Park community.  He would know somehow to come on special occasions, not just the regular weekly delivery, like if it was someone’s birthday, a wedding anniversary, a bar mitzvah, or God forbid a week of sitting shiva when in the house a person dies, and, then, of course, the regular holidays, American as well as Jewish.  If he was paid on time, that was fine, and if not, nu, so he understood and waited patiently an extra week or two.  Uneducated, educated, it didn’t matter, to be a seltzer man took more than sheer strength  to carry the crates filled up with so many bottles a special knowledge of and sensitivity to the people on the streets where he delivered. 

Probably our seltzer man had a name and a family, and maybe even my mother who paid the bills and ordered the special flavors when we needed them, knew such things; but not me.  Did I know the name of the milkman who used to leave bottles by the door early in the morning, or the knife-grinder who came around every three months with his little cart pulled by a horse, or the I-cash-clothes man with a bundle on his back who walked up and down the streets calling out his trade, or the ice man who also had a cart in the days when we had ice-boxes and not refrigerators, or all sorts of other people walked or rode through the streets to help keep Jewish society functioning and all kinds of people happy.  On the other hand, the postman we did know, as he was an old friend of the family, or actually a school chum of my father from around the time of the Great War, and he would sit down in the kitchen to have a cup coffee and a piece Danish before he went on with his appointed rounds.  Also we came to know the policeman whose beat was up and down the streets between fourteenth and thirteenth avenue, so that he sat down in the kitchen, had a cup coffee and a piece strudel or other cake from the bakery called Ebbinger’s, and when necessary told me what would happen if I played dangerous tricks in the street with my gang.