… eaten at a sunny table overlooking a koi pond in Elk Mills Maryland. Over breakfast, UD tried to remember as much as she could about her grandfather’s store in Port Deposit, her visits there… She knows more about her mother’s side of the family, the Wassermans and Kirsons, than she does the Rapoports and Snyders. She knows that her father had a Dickensian childhood, his parents’ marriage a disaster, his mother eventually institutionalized with depression (she died institutionalized), no money. After her death, Joe Rapoport married Sadie Glass, a down to earth hard-working woman, and they ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit together. The store thrived because of the naval training base established in town soon after they moved in. (They lived above the store.)
It must have been in the early ‘sixties that they sold the store and moved back to Baltimore, where they retired to an apartment in a part of town full of people just like them – old observant Jews. I remember visiting them there and always leaving the apartment with pickled lettuce and tomatoes that my grandfather made. He died in 1974, in his eighties.
Off to Port Deposit.