Russ & Daughters

by Mark Russ Federman

  Life in the suburbs was safer and easier for the third generation. My sisters, cousins, and I walked to public schools, rode our bikes to the beach, and played in the streets. But for Grandpa Russ and our parents, it meant commuting to the city to work, a forty-five-minute drive “in good weather with no traffic.” One of the few perks of being in the family business was getting to buy a new car every three years. My father and Uncle Murray always chose the same American-made car, but in different colors, starting with Hudson Commodores in 1950 and then switching to Chryslers. Big cars with big trunks could hold many boxes of fish on the days when the store’s truck broke down.

  When stops at the smokehouses were necessary to pick up fish for the store, the commute to Manhattan began at 6:00 a.m. The store opened for business at 9:00 a.m. and closed at 7:00 p.m. On Saturdays during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, we opened at 8:00 a.m. and stayed open until one or two in the morning to capture the crowd just coming out of the many Yiddish theaters along nearby Second Avenue, which was known as the Jewish Rialto. Sometimes the great actors themselves would come in to pick up a late-night snack or fixings for a Sunday brunch: Molly Picon, Menasha Skulnik, Aaron Lebedeff, and Jennie Goldstein were all regulars, the rock stars of our world in their day.

  By the 1960s, when the Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side were a thing of the past, the store closed at 10:00 p.m. on Saturday nights. By then there were two daughters and their husbands running the business, and they divided the long days into manageable shifts of ten hours each.

  The store was closed on Tuesdays. Tuesday was our Shabbos. All family functions—weddings, birthday parties, bar and bat mitzvahs—had to be scheduled for Tuesdays. Death, of course, could not be planned, and so funerals were exempt from the Tuesday rule. Vacation times were also set in stone. The store was closed during Passover, because bagels—the most popular accompaniment to smoked fish—cannot be eaten during the eight-day holiday. And it was closed for two weeks during the summer, when everyone tried to escape the city’s oppressive heat.

  Whatever Jewish life and commerce managed to survive on the Lower East Side through the 1970s slowly began to disappear in the 1980s, hastened by the repeal of the Sunday blue laws (retail stores such as Macy’s and Gimbels weren’t legally allowed to be open on Sundays until the 1970s, but stores on the Lower East Side were exempt from this law) and the advent of suburban malls. Consumers, particularly nostalgic Jewish consumers, no longer drove into Manhattan from Long Island or New Jersey to shop for bargains on Sundays. The Orchard Street shops that once teemed with customers lining up to buy discount designer dresses, men’s suits in large and portly sizes, brassieres and undergarments at half price, the latest shoes and handbags from Italy, and socks and underpants—by the dozen only—were often empty. As the immigrant and first-generation Jews who founded these shops grew older, they followed their customers to the suburbs or closed their businesses altogether and moved to Florida.

  But then something interesting began to happen. Writers, artists, and musicians started moving into the neighborhood, attracted by the cheap rents and the “energy” of a neighborhood in economic and social free fall. Sometimes they would come into the store to buy some dried fruit or a bagel; they weren’t rich or famous enough yet to afford the lox. That would come later.

  City services also abandoned the Lower East Side. The successive waves of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who now inhabited the tenements of the Lower East Side found their buildings painted with graffiti and their dirty streets populated by drug addicts, prostitutes, and petty thieves. The shops that did remain in business adopted a siege mentality. Stores were shuttered each night with roll-up gates made of solid sheets of metal. Russ & Daughters was one of the few shops that kept its old-fashioned latticework gates so pedestrians could view the merchandise. The family’s reasoning was simple: Who would want to break into a shop that sells fish? But, as extra insurance, my parents and uncle and aunt made a habit of inviting the cops on the beat to have bagel-and-lox lunches in the back of the store, hoping that this would result in our benefiting from a little more “protection.”

  Aunt Hattie and Uncle Murray intended to retire in 1975. They had put their entire lives into the store and they were tired. Though Murray was slipping just a bit, they were in sufficiently good health to enjoy the remainder of their lives in Florida, where Murray would become the shuffleboard champion of Bal Harbor and Hattie would become the president of the local ORT (a Jewish charitable organization). But they had to put off retirement for one more year to cover the store while my father recovered from his seventh heart attack. As is often said in the Russ family, “A mentsch tracht und Gott lacht” (Man plans and God laughs).

  And then, in 1978, to the astonishment of everyone, I left a job at a highly regarded uptown law firm to sell herring and smoked fish on the Lower East Side. You could say I went from Lex to lox. But more about that later. First, meet the rest of the family.

  Mushroom Barley Soup

  MAKES 6 TO 8 SERVINGS

  ½ ounce dried Polish mushrooms or dried porcini mushrooms*

  6 tablespoons unsalted butter

  1 medium onion, diced

  3 cloves garlic, minced

  ¾ pound fresh mushrooms, trimmed and thinly sliced

  2 stalks celery with leaves, diced

  1 large carrot, peeled and diced

  ¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

  1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

  1 quart low-sodium beef broth

  ¾ cup barley, rinsed

  2 teaspoons kosher salt

  Freshly ground black pepper

  Put the dried mushrooms in a bowl and cover them with 2 cups of boiling water. Allow them to soak for 1 hour. Strain the mushrooms through a cheesecloth-lined sieve into a bowl. Reserve the liquid. Coarsely chop the mushrooms and set aside.

  Melt the butter in a large, heavy stockpot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the onions and sauté until softened and translucent, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté until fragrant, about 2 minutes more. Add the fresh mushrooms, celery, carrot, and half of the parsley, and sauté until the mushrooms are golden and the celery and carrots are beginning to soften, about 10 minutes. Stir in the flour until well blended. Stir in the mushroom soaking liquid, soaked mushrooms, beef broth, and 4 cups of water. Stir in the barley, salt, and pepper to taste.

  Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring frequently. Reduce the heat to low and simmer until the barley is tender, about 30 to 40 minutes. If the soup is too thick, add a little more water. Adjust the seasoning with more salt and pepper if necessary. Sprinkle with the remaining parsley before serving.

  * * *

  * Using a blend of fresh mushrooms is also nice. Try shiitake, cremini, or button.

  2

  The Family

  Growing Up Fishy

  Medical benefits, 401(k)s, and vacation and sick days were unheard-of during the early years at Russ & Daughters. There was no such thing as a human resources department to hire and fire employees. For Joel Russ, his family was his labor pool. And it was pretty cheap labor at that. In 1935 Grandpa Russ paid Hattie and Murray twenty-five dollars a week. For both of them. He paid the same salary to Ida and Max. Anne was still in high school then and worked only on weekends. She knew better than to ask for a salary for her work. She wouldn’t have gotten one.

  The Wife

  Grandma Russ was Grandpa’s first employee. Grandma’s style of dealing with customers was the opposite of her husband’s. At the slightest hint that a customer might be difficult, Grandpa Russ would say, “Rebbetzin, tog mir a toyveh, fahrlir mein ahdres” (Lady, do me a favor, lose my address), first in Yiddish and then English. Grandma Russ, on the other hand, would say only, “Vifil kimpt mir?” (How much do you owe me?). She had a heart of gold and would do anything to please a customer. But she couldn’t read, write, or add up a column of figures, so she had to ask the customers to tell her the price of each item, to calculate the total, and t
o count out the change she owed them. Needless to say, her employment at the store was short-lived; she soon went back to cleaning their tenement apartment, shopping from the pushcart peddlers, and caring for her family.

  Grandma and Grandpa Russ

  The Brother

  When Joel Russ’s older brother Shmemendel (the name is a combination of his first name, Shmuel, and his second name, Mendel) arrived from Poland in 1921, he needed a job. Grandpa Russ needed help in the store, so he hired his brother.

  Shmemendel was a very religious Jew. Like many Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he brought the shtetl ways and his religious practices and beliefs with him to America. He wore a black Hasidic caftan, had a long beard and peyes (sidelocks), and spoke only Yiddish. He kept strictly kosher.

  Shmemendel’s brother Joel (known as Yoi’el back in Poland) wore American-style clothing and taught himself to read and write English. Joel kept a kosher home because his wife insisted on it, but he ate trayfe outside the house and sold non-kosher sturgeon in his store, which he kept open on the Sabbath to cater to other nonreligious Lower East Side Jewish families who wanted to buy fish on Saturdays. Joel gave up the shtetl way of life as soon as he stepped on American soil. He referred to his brother and other Orthodox Jews as fanatishe chnyuks—over-the-top religious fanatics.

  Grandpa Russ and Uncle Shmemendel

  Because he was Orthodox, Shmemendel refused to work on the Sabbath. But that wasn’t what got him fired. It was more a matter of his unique ideas about customer service. When customers came into the store, Shmemendel would say to them in Yiddish, “Why do you want to shop here? Don’t you know this store isn’t kosher?” When Joel found out about this, Uncle Shmemendel was gone the next day. He moved to Brooklyn and became the sexton in an Orthodox synagogue. Grandpa Russ and the rest of the family had almost nothing to do with him after that. Shmemendel occasionally showed up at the store, looking for “some help for the shul” from his brother, which he always got.

  While researching this book, I found Shmemendel Russ’s descendants living in Borough Park. Shmemendel’s great-grandson David heard that I was writing a book about the Russ family and wanted his side of the story included. “If you’re gonna write about the irreligious Russes,” David said, “you should mention the religious ones, too.” He then told me a story that has become part of his side of the Russ family’s oral history: “Yoi’el Russ had one barrel of herring. All day long he would stand in front of that barrel. When someone came along and asked for a schmaltz herring, he would turn around and pick a herring from the front of the barrel. If someone asked for a matjes herring, he would turn around and pick from the back of the barrel. And from one barrel of herring Yoi’el Russ macht a lebn [made a living]!”

  The Nephew

  Aaron “Ari” Ebbin, son of Grandpa Russ’s sister Channah, was the next relative to be offered the opportunity to earn a living in Joel’s store. One day, Joel accused his nephew of stealing the day’s cash receipts instead of taking them to the bank. Highly insulted, Aaron quit. The money was found a week later on one of the store’s shelves in a brown paper bag behind the jumbo ripe olives. Just where Joel had left it. Joel didn’t apologize—it was not in his nature—but he did ask Aaron to come back to work. Channah, though, stepped in and said no. Her son couldn’t work for someone—especially an uncle—who thought he was a thief! Some years later, when Aaron wanted to set up an auto-wrecking business on Staten Island, he asked his uncle Joel for a loan. Joel thought it was a good investment opportunity and offered to put up the money in return for part ownership in the business. Aaron said there was no way they could be partners after he had been accused of being a thief. And so Aaron got the money someplace else and established a successful auto-wrecking company, which eventually became much more profitable than his uncle’s fish store. Aaron came to regard the “stealing” incident as a blessing in disguise; it got him out of the Lower East Side and out of the fish business.

  The Daughters and Their Husbands

  Grandpa Russ was running out of relatives. Then it occurred to him to look closer to home. Hattie, his oldest daughter, started to help out in the store on weekends when she was eight years old. Almost immediately, Grandpa realized that he was onto something here. Unlike her mother, Hattie could read, write, and make change. And although she spoke not a word of English until she entered public school, by the time she was eight she was fluent in her new language. When she was sixteen, Hattie dropped out of school to work in the store full-time. It was 1929, the stock market had just crashed, and the Great Depression had begun. Until then the store had been doing well, but the failing economy began to take its toll, business slowed down, and Hattie was needed only on weekends.

  In the Old Country, Grandpa had been apprenticed to a shoemaker at the age of nine, then to a baker. If he was sent out to earn money for the family, he figured his daughter should do the same. Hattie, the dutiful Russ daughter, never questioned her father. It was always “Yes, Papa.” Hattie’s first job was with Wildfeuer Brothers Shoes. They had six stores, including two on the Lower East Side, but Hattie applied for and got a job in the fancy-schmancy flagship store on Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, where, she reported, “all the big people shopped, even Clara Bow.” She kept the books, took stenography in the office upstairs, and, when needed, modeled shoes in the store. She was a perfect size 4B. Occasionally, the owners sent her a few blocks away to I. Miller on Forty-second Street to buy a pair of shoes, to “see what’s doing at the competition.” Hattie fit right in at Wildfeuer; she was always impeccably dressed for work and wore fashionably high heels in spite of the long walk from home to the subway. According to her baby sister, Anne, Hattie always looked “like she stepped out of a bandbox.” But family was family, after all, and Hattie continued to sell lox and herring for her father on the weekends. And in 1932, when Wildfeuer went bankrupt, Hattie went back to work in the store full-time.

  But shoes continued to play a major role in Hattie’s life. While shopping with Ida one day at A. S. Beck, Hattie met Murray Gold, a shoe salesman who fell in love with her perfect size 4Bs. The deal was sealed when Murray found out that Hattie’s mother made gefilte fish “on the sweet side.” He, like the Russes, was a Galitzianer, and his food preferences tended toward the sweet rather than the salt and pepper of the Litvaks. Galitzianers came from southern Poland and the western Ukraine; Litvaks came from Lithuania and northern Poland. As if Eastern European Jews didn’t have it bad enough, what with the ever-present threat of pogroms orchestrated by the neighboring gentiles, these two groups became the shtetl version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. Litvaks were considered more intellectual and studious; Galitzianers were thought of as more spiritual and emotional. Each ridiculed and looked down on the other. And according to the Litvaks, one of the worst things about Galitzianers was that they put sugar in everything—including, heaven help us, gefilte fish.

  Hattie and Murray Gold

  Murray’s interest in Hattie, plus the anticipation of sweet gefilte fish, emboldened him to invite himself over for dinner one Friday night. Envisioning how good Murray would look behind the fish counter (he was said to look “just like the actor Brian Donlevy”) and appreciating his experience in retail, Grandpa Russ approved of the match. Murray and Hattie married in 1935, a few months after they had met, and Murray became Grandpa Russ’s newest employee. In the beginning, Murray found the early-morning trips to the smokehouses difficult; after all, shoe stores didn’t open until 10:00 a.m. But Murray eventually got used to the hours and, after her second child was born, Hattie was finally able to “take it easy.” Which is to say that she had to work in the store only on weekends and holidays.

  When I was a kid working on the candy side of the store in the 1950s, I would watch Hattie handle the customers on the fish side. I have never seen anything quite like it. She was short—maybe five feet tall—and could barely see over the high counters. But her voice traveled easily enough, conveying a combination
of pride in her product and regret over each piece of fish she sold, as if it were a child about to be given up for adoption. When the customer begged for a particular piece of fish, Hattie would give it up only with the greatest reluctance (“Mrs. Feigenbaum, this is the prettiest fish I’ve seen in years. I hate to part with it.”). After I took over the store in 1978 and was the only Russ working the counter, I tried several styles of salesmanship, including Aunt Hattie’s. One day, I held up a particularly fat whitefish for a particularly old and difficult customer, saying, “Have you ever seen such a beautiful fish? This is the fish I should take home to my family.” Whereupon the customer replied, “Listen, son, do us both a favor. You take it home. And let me give you a piece of advice: Don’t fall in love with the inventory.”

  Ida, Grandpa Russ, Hattie, Grandma Russ,

  and Anne at Hattie’s wedding

  Ida and Max

  Ida was born in the back of the Orchard Street store in 1915. When the back room that housed Joel, Bella, Hattie, and the herring barrels became too small, Joel moved his family across the street. There was no hot running water in the family’s fourth-floor walk-up, but at least it had two rooms.

  Ida was a handful from the start. Hattie recalls, “There were lots of pushcarts and people on Orchard Street; you could hardly move. Sometimes Ida would run up to the roof and I had to go look for her. I told her that it was dangerous to run away. But nothing scared Ida. She jumped up and down on the bed until it broke and then blamed me. I was a year and a half older and in charge of her.”