Excerpt from Shlemiel Crooks:

In the middle of the night on a Thursday, two crooks—onions should grow in their navels—drove their horse and wagon to the saloon of Reb Elias Olschwanger at the corner of Fourteenth and Carr Streets in St. Louis. This didn't happen yesterday. It was 1919.

Reb Elias, you should know, didn't have a sit-down kind of saloon with men coming in to guzzle whiskey when they should have been at home helping to fold the laundry. Oh, no! Reb Elias had the kind of saloon with housewives, grandmas even, coming in to buy bottles of wine and brandy, unopened of course and strictly kosher, for the Jewish Sabbath. He was the only one in St. Louis selling kosher wines back then. Listen, he sold kosher cognac too—that's a kind of brandy—and mead which is made out of honey and goes down easy. And for the children, he kept in the back a barrel of pretzels with lots of thick salt on them.

Meanwhile, the two crooks—potatoes should sprout in their ears—were stealing crates of Passover wine shipped special that year to Reb Elias on a boat from the Land of Israel. Reb Elias paid a little more—okay, he paid a lot more—for that wine. Usually he was buying his Passover stock from the Manischewitz family in Cincinnati, but after Mr. Balfour—excuse me, Lord Balfour—a big politician in England, promised to make a home for the Jews in the Land of Israel, Reb Olschwanger thought maybe they could use the extra business there. The Jews swatting mosquitoes shouldn't have only watery soup and a little goat's milk to drink.

Source Note for Shlemiel Crooks

St. Louis Jewish Record
February 21, 1919