Metro Pulse/Secret History/Falling Leaves

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Addie Shersky: A farewell to a friend

by Jack Neely

It seems like everyone's dying, my teenage daughter said the other day, and this fall it seems almost true. Besides some celebrities she liked, young parents of friends of hers have died untimely. We can't write about all of them, of course. Reporters tend to write about the lives whose loss will be noted by many: politicians, athletes, artists, performers, tycoons—and, sometimes, restaurateurs.

Our good friend Addie Shersky, the longtime co-proprietor of Harold's Kosher Foods, died last week, after a long struggle with cancer, at the age of 83. She was buried in the New Jewish Cemetery on Sunday, the day before Yom Kippur. Her service was an especially unusual one for Heska Amuna Synagogue in that it incorporated eulogies from a rabbi, a prominent attorney, and Father Francis Xavier Mankel, who, like many Knoxville Catholics raised at Immaculate Conception, had grown up going to the kosher deli down the hill. I was out of town that day, but the service was, by all accounts, an extraordinarily large one, drawing hundreds of representatives of several races and denominations.

Her maiden name was Adeline Katz. Originally from Louisville, Ky., she married a serviceman named Harold Shersky, the Knoxville-born son of a Russian immigrant, during the last world war. After a stint as a shoe salesman, Harold opened his deli at 131 South Gay Street in 1948. Addie was in her 20s when she started helping her husband out there, and for the next 50-odd years, Addie baked desserts: her cheesecakes and apple-nut cakes were legendary. She also did some managerial and catering work, and sometimes even ran the cash register. But I'll remember her best for her presence on my side of the counter. Every lunch hour at Harold's was an easygoing party over which Addie reigned as the congenial hostess.

She'd walk from customer to customer, not so much checking on their meals, their pumpernickel reubens or corned beef and cabbage or bagels with lox, but on their lives: asking about children, their jobs, their friends, their lives beyond the 100 block of Gay Street. She'd often gesture at the blur of motion behind the counter with a mixture of admiration and exasperation; she called Harold a "workaholic," and made it clear that she was content to enjoy her own lively brand of retirement.

If she knew you, she might sit down at your table and chat. It seemed perfectly natural. When it's humming, Harold's is kind of like a big, jolly wedding. You probably don't know everybody there, but you may know several, and you know you've got something in common with the others. At 131 South Gay Street, it's impossible to maintain the status of stranger. Some newcomers say they moved to Knoxville only after ascertaining that the city contained a place like Harold's.

Addie didn't tolerate melancholics, either. If you went in feeling gloomy, she'd shake that out of you quick. Addie's big, honest grin was convincing propaganda that life was worth the living.

She maintained a lively curiosity about her adopted home, and often read the latest Metro Pulse before its staff writers did. If I'd come in for a bowl of soup on a Thursday, she'd often sit at the counter next to me and comment or challenge me on a point we'd made.

She enjoyed a good laugh, and if I could make Addie laugh with a column, I considered that column an unqualified success, no matter what anybody else said. But when we made fun of people she feared had been hurt by an editorial barb, she'd often speak up for them. Her highly refined sense of decency once surprised me.

Addie had told me she feared that she and Harold were a dying breed, that the Mom and Pop restaurant was a thing of the past, slowly being displaced by the giant fast-food chains. But she bore them no ill will. Once, when one of my colleagues wrote something that poked fun at McDonald's, she had a word with me. She worried that we had hurt feelings and might have cost them some business. It wasn't easy to run a restaurant, she said, no easier to run McDonald's than to run a kosher restaurant on Gay Street. She told me McDonald's was just trying to make a living, the way she and Harold were. My heart's not nearly as big as Addie's, but I haven't made fun of McDonald's since.

Harold's is still in business in downtown Knoxville, and McDonald's isn't. It's just my opinion, Addie, and I don't wish McDonald's any harm, but I think downtown got the best of that deal.

I knew her only in that wonderful room at 131 South Gay Street, where everyone's always happy. Addie and Harold were religious people, and there was one time of year when they didn't come in. Until Harold and Addie explained the Day of Atonement to me several years ago, Yom Kippur had only been a strange phrase on a calendar, appearing in red at unpredictable intervals. As I came to understand it, Yom Kippur is a serious day of contemplation, fasting, prayer, and self-denial. To me it will always be a reminder that every day can't be like sitting at a table with friends at 131 South Gay on a day when Harold and Addie are both there.