So from age 10 to 20 I lived with my grandparents Piekarski in their President & Utica home while attending Yeshiva in Crown Heights near the Rebbe. I’ve shared several posts of memories about my Zeide Michel and Bubbe Risha: Zeide Piekarski Memories I, Zeide Piekarski Memories II and Zeide Piekarski Memories III and some memories of my very beloved Bubbe Risha (need to add to that some day).
This post is specifically about the Sukkah I’d help my Zeide put up each year on the back porch. It was a small porch, maybe measuring 8 feet by 5 feet, as I remember it. Maybe a little bigger, but not much. It faced the backyard of their second floor home. The floor was the asphalt rooftop of the downstairs neighbor’s (first Dr. and Mrs. Katz, then the Levitz family) covered porch. Two of the porch walls were walls of the house – my bedroom wall, and also a window faced into it from the adjoining bedroom.
That window was a defining feature of this Sukkah, because it was the entry way in and out of the house. You had to put one leg in first, then another. Only in later years, when it got much harder for him to get in and out did Zeide hire a carpenter to turn that window into a window-filled doorway to make the access easier.
When I first came to live in their home in 1983, Zeide Michel made his Sukkah walls out of old doors. Apparently that was quite the common thing back in the day. You’d collect old doors that people threw out, and you’d line the doors up, a mismatch of styles and colors, and presto – you had a wall. As I said, two of the walls of this small Sukkah were the walls of the home, so all that was needed was two small walls of doors.
Zeide had the doors stored down in the basement. We’d go down each year, he had them lined up like soldiers, and have to navigate them up the staircase. It got heavier, he had a breathing issue, so one year he decided to get some type of thick linoleum/formica that he’d tie to the fencing. It was thin, it was light, it had a bluish-cloudy design. They replaced the doors.
Gotta say, the doors had much more character. Each had its own design, its own story, the mismatch added character. They were also weighty, and while that didn’t make putting up or taking down the Sukkah easier, it did make the Sukkah feel more solid. The linoleum would bend, it would weave in and out in the wind. It wasn’t the same.
And the doors seemed to have a message! Like Monsters Inc (but that didn’t exist yet!) a door is a portal, an entryway, an opportunity. It symbolized for me the open welcome of Sukkah, and how a Sukkah allows entryway to spiritual opportunity…
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