The Kerosener Rov: A Creedmoorer Antecedent of Disrepute

BS"D

In keeping with the timelessness of Creedmoor, in that there is no timeline, rhyme or reason to anything connected with Creedmoor including its fabricated and gloriously fictional history, we bring you a portrait of one of the more recent ancestors of the Admou'r meCreedmoor. Yeridas hadoirois does not apply in Creedmoor either, for each degeneration of the Schmoigerman ancestors outdid the next as they applied modern methods to live up to their ancient designation of Shoiteh, Menuval veGas Ruach no matter where they lived.

Kalman Schmoigerman, or Reb Kalman Kerosener (not to be confused with his cousin Reb Kalman Kerosiner, as one was the Kerosener Rov and the other the Kerosiner Rov) was one of the first to use the Schmoigerman surname with the pride that it deserves, namely the pride of the farm on which he was born as the product of an illicit union between a Ruthenian peasant father who deserted his Jewish consort, a local businesswoman known not too fondly as Zoine Zlate Schmoiger's. Zoine Zlate was the daughter of Shmeel Schmoiger, one of the two Schmoiger brothers, who, with their sister Yachne (the first Yachne to have given rise to the common and derogatory use of this feminine version of Yochanan), ran an inn similar to the one their earliest ancestor had run in the ruins of post-salinated Sdom.

This inn offered a very similar menu to that offered by its earliest predecessor in the Negev of the days of Avrohom Ovinu, or more accurately of Lot's wife. We will spare our readers a description of the gilui arayois that took place here, but suffice it to say that Zoine was an apt description of the proprietress, and her brothers took quite a fee for the services of their rather bold and loose daughters, which did not include cooking or cleaning, let alone makeup or sheitel-macherei for chassunes (after all no one in their right mind held a chassune at the Schmoiger Ranch Inn unless it involved a priest and a nun).

The food was somehow certified kosher, but many a member of the canine, feline and various rodent species somehow entered the outhouse of the inn, never to reappear except as "schlangelach," the long, snake like chopped meat sausage that was the specialty of the Schmoiger Ranch Inn. The inn also was a fueling stop for stagecoaches that needed oil for their lamps. Somehow the oil sold was invariably adulterated with various caustics and vile solvents that necessitated the replacement of the lamps (which the inn proffered at a price about twenty times the average stated in the Ruthenian version of Consumer Reports, and the lamps made on the premises were invariably rated 'fantastically fecal' [formerly 'double dreck' and now 'Solomon Drek'] by said publication, that designation being three levels below just plain unsatisfactory and reserved only for merchandise that had no possibility of functioning properly and safely under any circumstances).

When said adulterants were unavailable, one of the Schmoigers would just sell the unsuspecting mark some water and laugh as the wagoneer, usually an unlettered hick from a remote village, would try to light it. After about ten tries, a Schmoiger child would offer to help and sell the driver a bit of oil supposedly from his own stock, at a price unheard of anywhere even in this very day of high petroleum prices. Failure to buy the oil and light the lamps would mean that a Schmoiger would call the local constable, who in turn issued the wagoneer a ticket for improper lighting that was payable only at the cash desk of the Schmoiger Ranch Inn. The Schmoiger Ranch Inn would split the proceeds of the tickets with the local poritz, Count Kazimierz deGeneratsky, and with the constable himself. Indeed, the only Jews who were protected by the rapacious poritz were his partners in crime and oppression, the Schmoigers.

However, the first generation paled in comparison to the second, that of the Kerosener and the Kerosiner, the two Kalmans.

It was known that in some villages, each trade would have its own synagogue, so that tailors prayed with tailors, shoemakers with shoemakers, and the beis medrash was for talmidei chochomim only. But little Kazimierskow-deGeneratzk was the only shtetl that boasted not one, but two, Firemen's Shuls, each one feuding with the other to the point that they were both covered with pashkvilkes stating that anyone who davened in either one was in cherem by the rov of the other one and at least one more rov, either the Farkoifter Rov (Rav Siechmach) or the Tzidryter Rov (Rav Kapoyer), who were known halachic incisors and inciters in that region. Since the last name of each rov of each shul was called not Feierman, not even Feuerstein, but rather Schmoigerman, one can rest assured that these shuls had nothing to do with Kazimierskov's Bravest. Yes, by now you have probably guessed that the two shuls were indeed the place where the sociopaths and degenerates of the little shtetl, who numbered two or three deciminyonim thanks to some creative Schmoigerman accounting, pretended to daven as they plotted their next fraudulent deals.

(more tomorrow)