Cholerye Cleans Creedmoor - Part 1, Klara, Queen of Gownolec

BS"D

Clara, or more correctly Klara, Kosinska, was born and grew up in a little village called Gownolec, located about thirty kilometers from Cracow. To this day, Gownolec remains as forlorn and backward as it had been going back to the very days of its establishment by Count Gowniski, a renegade reprobate who basically invited the least favored peasants in Poland to work the land as his slaves.

A forerunner of Creedmoor, the Count would demand 125% of all crops raised in Gownolec as tribute from each peasant, and when this of course could not be paid, he would throw at least one family member into a dungeon where the debtor was compelled to work day and night making defective horseshoes that the Count would sell at a very high profit. When the horse wearing a "Gowno" horseshoe would break a leg, the Count would volunteer to slaughter and dispose of the steed, promising and never delivering a new mount in his place. That in turn often forced the customer into debt, and into residence at Gownolec, where the count had several enterprising ways of making his victims think they were working off their debts. Of course, all the Gownolec residents were doing was providing the Count with free indentured labor.

It was said that Klara was actually a descendant of this Count and not of the simple Gownolec peasants. Even during Communist times she ran several scams which in essence enslaved her neighbors, and she was always protected by the bribes she was able to give to the Communist authorities.

However, Gownolec was a tiny town, and she searched for greater opportunities. As soon as Communism fell, she knew she had to make her way to America, where so many of her sisters now worked as cleaning ladies for the despised Jews whom they had persecuted for generations. And many of these cleaning ladies actually prospered, some by true hard work and the occasional rogue by dint of theft of jewelry, silver and other valuables from their often prosperous employers.

Klara arrived in Brooklyn, and quickly joined the latter cohort. She claimed she was ready to undertake any task, even at the last moment before Shabbos and Yom Tov. And she did work hard, leaving the home spotless - and devoid of quite a few bechers, lechters and other valuables. As she chose only the most prosperous employers, the defalcations were often not noticed for weeks, and since she never returned or gave her proper name to any given employer, little could be done to prosecute her. Since these sophisticated balabustes had insured their silver, and Klara knew better than to steal heirlooms, they were hardly inclined to seek prosecution or even try to discover who had stolen their silver. At best, Klara's victims obtained required police reports for the sake of legitimate insurance collection and never bothered following up with the police as even had they not received their insurance, the loss meant little to them.

Klara succeeded in using her ill gotten gains to open a beauty salon and Polish restaurant in Brooklyn, which she staffed with fellow Gownolec immigrants and ran in Old Gownolec fashion. The enterprises succeeded, but she would simply fire each new employee a day before pay was due and then lend them money at 140% annual interest. Unable to pay, they would be rehired without salary to repay the debt.

However, she knew that America was not Poland. Moreover, Klara realized that one of the homes she had cleaned and relieved of over twenty thousand dollars worth of jewelry belonged to a woman whose husband had immense political contacts. Therefore, she knew she had to lay low for a while.

Being too ambitious and avaricious to ever stop earning money in Count Gowniski fashion, she soon found out about the one and only Admou"r meCreedmoor and decided that she had to convert to Judaism under his auspices. After all, no one, Jewish or gentile, except perhaps Bernard Madoff or Sholam Weiss, embodied the spirit of Gownolec and its founder more than the great Admou"r.

(NB: For those who recognize the word Gowno/Gowniski/Gownolec as being similar to its Russian cognate, and therefore scatological in meaning, it should be noted that researchers are unsure as to whether the Count was given the name Gowniski in recognition of the quality of his horseshoes, or whether the word entered the language because of the nature of the Count and his enterprises. This is similar to the debate surrounding the theory of the origin of the word Dreck as being a mispronunciation of the surname of Fat Ralphie, ne Rafael, Dweck, a reprobate Syrian Jewish fence and dealer in shoddy merchandise amidst the mostly Ashkenazi community in the Lower East Side of old).