72 Tenter Street: Gotlib Grocery
In 1961, the last Jewish grocery shop in the heart of the old city was eventually to give way to a new garage and although Berman’s Bakery still lingered on, wafting the smell of oven fresh black bread to rejoice the senses of the passers-by, Tenter Street had by now almost completely lost the appearance that had once been so familiar and so challenging to the old community.
Simon and Mary Gotlib started their shop in 1904 in Silver Street Head. After two more moves, none greater than a stone’s throw, they established themselves in 1917, in the premises on Tenter Street and shuddered as the Zeppelins dropped their bombs nearby a few weeks later. Around one corner was Davidsons and around another, Lessers, both competing for the Jewish trade at a time when few members of the Community bought any groceries other than at a Yiddische shop.
One of the family would arise, bleary eyed, opening the shutters at 4.30 a.m. to catch the housewife seeking something for her husband’s breakfast when he was on the early morning munitions shift. The weary day would end at 11 o’clock as the picture palace crowds came to collect their screws of tea, their ha’porth of sugar or their “pennorth of mixed”.
Three years before, soon after the war had started, the Chevra above the pork butchers on West Bar had moved its overcrowded services and its violent committee meetings to Campo Lane. Nearby Sugarman’s fish and chip shop served a special “family parcel ” for threepence and at Grindlegate, Mr. Alexander would interrupt teaching the “kinder” the alephbeis to kill a chukke for a housewife.
The Gotlibs would be busy pickling fat cucumbers, making butter and kez, ladling off the sour cream, and mincing herrings. Even as late as the 1960s, half a stone of mouth-watering chopped herring passes over their counter weekly.
But Gotlib’s was always more than a shop; it was the social centre for the struggling, voluble, ambitious, untidy and sometimes eccentric Jews, who crowded ten or more to the family in Scotland Street and the lanes and crofts leading off it. Often advantage was taken of the over warm hearts of the owners; customers not only packed the tiny shop, they overflowed into the living room behind and gossipped in the yard whilst selecting their salt herrings from the barrel.
In those days Gotlibs were the town’s Kosher caterers. They provided the roast chickens for the Board of Guardians Ball and the Pickled Meat for the Talmud Torah.
They cooked and served at weddings – and barmitzvahs and knew everyone and everyone knew them.
On Friday evening or Erev Yomtov, ladies on their way to Shul would call in to bensch licht so that the unlucky Gotlib girls had to stay at home to guard the thirty or forty candles flickering in the brown walled room. On Saturday evenings before Havdallah, the ladies would again foregather till Shabbos was out so that they could descend on Mr. Gabbitas for their parcel of fish. Meschullachim on their way through the town would seek them out for a meal. One, in fact, still does, bringing with him a pail of Kosher Milk and a Challah his wife has baked.
Simon Gotlib was a keen Maccabean and inevitably the visiting speakers were entertained in his humble but hospitable home. Isaac Siefl and his sons, of Marks and Spencer fame, were such visitors around 1920 and this time the girls were thrown out for lack of room. Many old Sheffield characters were everyday callers. ‘Lange’ Sugarman might burst into spirit away a vase of flowers for a Shul Simcha. Aaron Chester, Sheffield’s famous fat boy, was in and out collecting his stepmother’s groceries, everyone staring at his lace collar, velvet suit and dangling curls. Jack Cohen would take his tea there on his way to Paradise Square and often enough on his way back, would have his cuts and bruises attended to after his fights with the local toughs who tried to terrorise the Cheder boys.
As the years passed, one by one the Jewish families moved away to Nether Edge and Ecclesall and for a time Gotlib’s had a second shop on Broomhall Street to be nearer their custom. When Campo Lane was bombed, the Gotlib house ceased to be a sick bay for the fainting ladies on Yom Kippur. In spite of the distance, many families found it impossible to break the ties of affection and habit that bound them to this tiny shop. The affable smiles, the unmalicious gossip, the good humoured and courteous service made it well worthwhile to maintain contact with Rose and Jean.
(Source: David Brown, ‘The End of an Era’ in Sheffield Jewish Journal, No. 70, July 1961, pp. 6-7)