Richard G. Stern
WANDERERS
"Those Jews sure did travel." Miss Swindleman reflecting,
as the bellhops carried away her glowing Collection, the four hundred
and fifty postcards which memorialized the wanderings of Hotel
Winthrop guests for a quarter of a century. A wild shuffle through
the world Miss Swindleman herself knew not otherwise. Unless one
counted the scenic provision of a quadri-annual locomotive ride be–
tween New York City, her place of permanent exile, and Synod,
Missouri, her detested poiI}t of origin. Some provision: the green
pudding of southern Ohio, the hoarse red gullet of southern Indiana,
and that scab of ambitious hummocks called the Ozarks. One week
there with the surviving Swindlemans, and she was ready for another
four years of New York.
Though less and less ready, thanks to the Jews. When she'd
first come, the Winthrop and the Depression were as new as she; they
broke into the New York world together. The clientele was quiet:
widows, widowers, bachelors, spinsters, a few small families, the
ex-rich, learning to adjust their wants to their constricted means,
as she learned to adjust hers to the constrictions of New York loneli–
ness. A quiet, respectable, learning time.
Then, as the Depression slid away and the quiet goyim died, the .
Jews began moving in. They too were bachelors, spinsters, widows,
widowers, and small families, but they had not been broken by hard
times. Decades of finagling, deception, complaints and theft had
hardened and renewed them. From behind the bronze staves of her
ca.'lhier's den, she regarded their great noses twitch with the strain
of hoping she would overlook the delinquent quarters in their
