SHABBOS GOY MADE GOOD:

Melvin Klein's family had Powell over every week to watch Milton Berle and Molly Goldberg on one of the first televisions in the neighborhood. Powell's sister's "closest" chums were the Teitelbaum sisters. He earned a quarter every Shabbat to turn off the lights at an Orthodox synagogue. And Jay Sickser, the Jewish owner of Sickser's -- "Everything For The Baby" store -- gave Powell a job when he was 14. (Powell's father also worked at Jewish businesses, including Ginsburg's in the garment district, where he rose to become foreman of the shipping department.)

The future general worked at Sickser's until he was a sophomore year in college, and learned a considerable amount of Yiddish there, which he enjoyed sprinkling into his conversations with Jews and even the prime minister of Israel. "Men kent reden Yiddish" he told an astounded Yitzhak Shamir, then Israeli prime minister, ahead of the first Gulf War in 1991. "We can speak Yiddish." [...]

"Let me put to rest this rumor as to whether or not I speak Yiddish," Powell said in a speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington in 1991. "I really do not speak Yiddish, maybe a bissel (a little), who knows?"

It was more than a bissel." In "My American Journey," Powell -- called "Collie" by Sickser -- relates that he had picked up enough Yiddish so that when couples were speaking to each other on the store's second floor about how much they might be willing to spend on a stroller or crib, he understood. But he didn't always let on.

"This shwarz klabe what did he understand?" Powell wrote, using the Yiddish phrase for "black boy," a term now considered pejorative."I'd excuse myself and report to Mr. S., who would come up, armed with my intelligence, and close the deal."

In 1992, Powell recalled, at a Hanukkah dinner at Yeshiva University, that Sickser's would give him a "gezunten keppel", a blessing head, and mimed a slap.

"To keep me straight," Powell explained.

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