Jeweler’s Row
by
Douglas C. Bonanomi
Available from Amazon.com in 2025
Ivan Turchesko wasn’t always a Philadelphia jeweler. As a boy growing up in Russian Siberia, he arose early every morning to work with his father in the coal mines. At sixteen, he left home to join the Soviet merchant marines. At eighteen, he made his way to a New Jersey meat packing plant, working in the slaughterhouse. At twenty-five, he owned his own meat market in the Bell’s Corner village of Northeast Philadelphia. Ivan the Butcher the locals called him.
Ivan met his wife Alexandra when she came into his butcher shop one afternoon wearing a yellow dress. She was a Greek beauty, stunning and demure, but quiet and shy. And Ivan was such a big, burly, boisterous man. Like a big, brown bear, who everybody knew.
Ivan and Alexandra were married a year after they met. Then, when her Greek mother died, Alexandra received her inheritance – a chest filled with sparkling gems ̶ diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, silver bracelets and necklaces, gold rings, and platinum chains. In less than a month, Ivan closed the meat market in Bell’s Corner and opened a jewelry store on Jewelers Row at 8th and Sansom streets in Philadelphia. Ivan’s Jewelry Store the sign outside read.
Exactly nine months later, Ivan and Alexandra were the proud parents of a little baby girl. They named her Iris – and she was Ivan’s “Little Girl”. Iris started to dance when she was six years old. Each year on her birthday Ivan bought Iris a new pair of ballet slippers. When Iris was eight, she was admitted to a private ballet school near the city. When Iris was sixteen, she was accepted into the Rock School of Ballet, the prestigious academy where ballerinas and ballet dancers were trained exclusively for the Pennsylvania Ballet. Ivan was so proud of her. When Iris was eighteen, she asked Ivan and Alexandra if she could move into an apartment on South Street in the city where the other ballerinas were living.
That’s when the trouble started.
Unbeknownst to Ivan and Alexandra, Iris left the prestigious dancing school and started working on her own at the Blue Diamond, a somewhat less-than-reputable Gentleman’s Club – where she meets other girls who are “dancers”. But things don’t work out as planned for Iris. When Ivan goes to the Blue Diamond to investigate, he becomes entangled in another world when he is introduced to a “dancer” known as Jewel.
What Ivan then becomes is unlike anything anyone would have expected.
Is Ivan willing to risk losing everything to capture the heart of the ‘dancer’ he knows as Jewel?