After concluding business at the Brooklyn smokehouses and loading the truck with fish, we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge. There was always a traffic cop stationed on the Manhattan side of the bridge who recognized our truck, gave my father a wave and a big smile, and said “Hi, Hoibie.” If there was enough time before the light changed, he might add, “Teaching your kid the business?” Cops were important people in those days. At the time, I had no intention of growing up to be a fishmonger, nor, I’m equally sure, would my father have wanted me to “take over the business.” The plan was for me to go to college and become a professional; that was the unstated but clearly understood trajectory for most Jewish boys growing up in the 1950s. Yet there was something about those visits to the smokehouses and the acknowledgment from the cop at the bridge that made me feel that we were doing something special.
Our last stop before arriving at the store was Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant on Delancey Street, just off the bridge. Unlike the smokehouse or our store just a few blocks away, Ratner’s had the sweet aroma of freshly baked challah, rugelach, mandelbrot, apple strudel, and mun (poppy seed) cake. We walked to the back of the restaurant, where my father joined his cronies. Every day, it was the same people at the same tables ordering the same things for breakfast: “Poached eggs on toast, with tomato and cucumber.” “Two eggs over easy, not too much butter, and a toasted bialy.” “Farina with a big spoonful of butter and a side order of pot cheese to throw in.” “Scrambled eggs, runny. Don’t forget to bring the ketchup.” And when the plates of food arrived, they reached for the salt and pepper shakers before even tasting the food. They drank endless cups of coffee that had to be brought to the table piping hot and to which they added cold heavy cream or half-and-half. And each man carried a little pill case, from which he would extract the tiniest tablet and throw it into the cup of coffee. It was saccharin, a sugar substitute, their perfectly serious attempt at weight control.
The waiters at Ratner’s were legendary for their accuracy in taking and delivering orders but also for a gruffness that bordered on insolence. They shuffled over with trays full of food, and then unsmilingly and unceremoniously dropped the right dish in front of the person who ordered it. The waiter who often took care of our tables was friendlier than the others and would participate in the morning’s conversation about which horse to pick at Aqueduct or which stock to pick on the Big Board. My father and the others always paid attention to his advice. At 8:30 everyone got up from the table, put some money by their plates (each man always knew just how much to put down as his share of the bill), and then went off to nearby stores or offices to start the workday. My father and I got back into the big red truck and drove the few blocks from Delancey Street to our store on East Houston. He let me unload the lighter boxes of fish from the truck as he unlocked the gates. For the rest of the day, he gave me jobs—filling in the candy bins, putting lids on red-and-white waxed containers filled with herring—that made me feel useful and productive. Sometimes I made the rounds with him to local diners and restaurants that bought wholesale from Russ & Daughters. If he couldn’t find a parking space, I had to wait in the truck so he wouldn’t get a ticket. If he could find a space, I went with him into the restaurant’s kitchen, where he and the owner would light up cigars. “This your boy, Herbie?” the man would ask, looking down at me.
“Yeah,” my father would reply. “I’m teaching him the meaning of C.O.D. Where’s the money you owe me?”
Learning What It Means to Make a Buck
Once my sisters, my cousins, and I turned thirteen, it was time for us to “learn what it means to make a buck.” Which is to say, learn firsthand how our parents made a living and why they came home every night smelling fishy. We were required to work in the store on weekends, either on Saturdays or on Sundays. There was no use complaining.
Cousin Nina once tried. She said she wasn’t going and locked herself in the bathroom. Uncle Murray broke down the door. Cousin Paul was an athlete, the only one in the family. He got a dispensation if there was a game he had to play in on the weekend. I was jealous of Paul, not because he was an athlete but because he got out of work.
We were allowed to work only behind the candy counter, never behind the fish counter, where there were sharp knives. The first thing we learned was how to measure out candy for a customer. We scooped candy, dried fruit, or nuts into a large stainless-steel basin that was on the right side of an old balance scale. On the left side we put the appropriate disk-shaped weight or weights—they came in one-, two-, and five-pound increments. In the middle of this scale (which today sits prominently as a display piece in the store, having been replaced by a modern marvel with a digital readout) was a glass-enclosed viewer that had a movable arrow and several hatch marks, the largest and darkest in the center of the viewer. When the arrow and the center marker were aligned, the weight was correct. To get that alignment on one’s first attempt at filling the basin with the proper amount of candy seemed to us kids like hitting a home run, except that no customer was satisfied unless the arrow leaned at least a tad past the center mark toward the candy basin, which meant that they got “good weight.”
My cousin Nina Gold in front of the store,
trying to look happy
We learned how to ring the register and make change, now a lost skill, since digital registers determine and display the amount of change to be given. Today, it’s almost impossible to hire someone who can both slice lox and make change.
Some things had changed since Grandpa Russ’s era. The pay was good, $1.10 per hour, $11.00 per day, which was a lot of money back then. It was enough to buy bubble gum, Milky Ways, Three Musketeers, and other candies our store didn’t sell; go to a double feature at the movies on a non-working Saturday; buy a slice of pizza and a Coke, and have money left over to buy baseball cards, comic books, and thousands of stamps offered “on approval” in the backs of those comic books. Our friends thought that we were rich. The work wasn’t difficult, and we got to watch our parents in action as they greeted each customer as if he or she were a lifelong friend and then showed off each piece of fish as if it were a piece of fine jewelry. The only occupational hazard was those customers who felt it necessary to grab me by the cheeks and say “Vhat a boychik! Herbie, is he going to take over the store someday?” Of course, our parents had quite the opposite in mind.
Leaving Home
What they had in mind was education, and in the 1960s we all headed off to college. That’s why they had worked so hard for all those years. Of course, the sixties were also a time of great social upheaval. Tara and Hope finished college and then both joined an ashram upstate. They were looking for answers. My parents couldn’t even comprehend the questions. It had to do with “spiritual peace,” my sisters said. Somehow, living in a commune, practicing yoga, and learning Sanskrit would make the world a better place. You can imagine the parental heartbreak and tsuris that their decision caused.
I went off to Alfred University, a small college in upstate New York, reachable only by a ten-hour trip on the Erie Lackawanna Railway and outside of the “call zone.” (As in “Mark, it’s Dad. I’m calling because I need you to come home and work in the store this weekend.”) I was in a safe place, where I could be a big fish in a little pond and not have to sell it.
Though I had never before slept outside of my own house, never went to summer camp, there were enough Jewish kids at Alfred to make it feel knowable and comfortable. Some of my classmates came from the New York suburbs and were raised on weekend brunches of “appetizing.” They asked to be notified whenever I got a care package from home, but my parents never sent smoked fish. (There were no FedEx overnight deliveries in those days, so shipping smoked fish was not a particularly good idea.) My care packages often included a salami from Katz’s Deli, which was down the street from Russ & Daughters, and an assortment of hard candies from our store. I became the campus candy dispenser. “Hey, Mark, have you got a mint in your pocket?” This turned out to be ve
ry useful on Alfred’s “dry” campus, with alcohol consumption officially forbidden. Although I came home for summer vacations, business was slow during those times (“dead” was actually the word my parents used), so there was no need for me to work in the store. But I always had some summer job that kept me financed for my new vices: cigarettes and girls. My father usually arranged these jobs by putting the arm on one of our customers. One summer I worked for an accounting firm and was assigned to audit the books of Ebinger’s, a well-known Brooklyn bakery, at their main factory on Flatbush Avenue. It was a summer of significant weight gain. The following summer I worked for the New York City Parks Department, picking up garbage along the Rockaway beaches. An unexpected benefit from that job was that from the hard work and the nauseating smells, I lost the weight I’d gained the previous year working at Ebinger’s. I spent another summer as a messboy and deckhand aboard oil tankers. It was there that I learned that the hard work in the store wasn’t really as hard as I’d thought it was.
As a land-grant school (a school built on land given by the federal government to the state for the express purpose of building a college), Alfred University could and did require ROTC training for all boys during their first two years. After that, ROTC was voluntary, and most of the guys were glad to be done with the drills, the short haircut, and the spit-shined shoes. To this day I can’t answer the question “Why did you volunteer to stay in?” When I began ROTC in 1962, the world (aside from the perpetual fear of an atomic bomb being dropped on us by the USSR) was a relatively quiet place. But by the time I graduated from college in 1966, Vietnam was on the map. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts, a commission in the United States Army as a second lieutenant, and a deferment to go to law school.
I had been accepted by both New York University and Georgetown, so the choice was mine. My father offered me a free apartment above the store, which was within walking distance of NYU, but since there’s no such thing as free anything, I knew that working in the store on weekends and holidays was part of the deal. So I chose Georgetown. My parents were okay with my decision. My education and career trajectory gave them the bragging rights they had long dreamed of. “My son, the lawyer” became an important staple of my father’s conversation, whether he was chatting with a customer, a deliveryman, or a supplier, and no matter what the original topic of their discourse. Three years later I received my J.D. degree, and a few weeks after that I received a letter from the U.S. Army reminding me of my obligation and ordering me to report for duty.
I had a two-year commitment, and the army’s plan was for me to spend one year at Fort Polk, Louisiana—famous for large mosquitoes and even larger rednecks—and then one year in Vietnam. This was not exactly what I had in mind, so I cut a deal with the army: two years anyplace in the world where there was an army base—my choice—and then one year anyplace they chose to send me. So I extended my tour by one year and spent the first two years in San Francisco. It was not bad. I had my own apartment near Golden Gate Park and drove to the base each day in my uniform. I viewed this as an office job with a dress code. The army extracted its pound of flesh in the third year and sent me to Vietnam. My father still had bragging rights in the store: “My son, the army captain …” But I suspect he swallowed hard for the last part: “… is in Vietnam.
It was 1971, and I was assured by those in the know that I would be stationed in Saigon and work as an army lawyer. But the army is big on bait and switch. When I arrived, I was quickly given orders directing me to an “advisory team” in the southernmost part of the Mekong Delta. I was to replace another officer who had been blown up in his jeep by a Claymore mine (used primarily in ambushes). I was loaded, along with a few tons of mail, into the belly of a large supply plane; there was nothing else on board. After a few hours the plane landed on a single strip of corrugated metal. The mail and I deplaned in the middle of a rice paddy in the middle of a monsoon in what looked like the end of the world. This was no place for a nice Jewish boy like me. After a month, I was transferred to Saigon and worked as an army lawyer.
Like many other returning vets, when I received my discharge from the army, I threw away the uniform. There were no brass bands welcoming us home. We were led to believe that we should be ashamed of our service, so it took years before we would admit to it. In any case, I was ready to begin my new life. When I returned to New York, I met my future wife, Maria, a beautiful young woman from South America. She lived just a few blocks from me and was working as a research scientist for a big pharmaceutical firm. I fell in love with her, as did my parents, even though she wasn’t Jewish. We agreed that our children would be raised as Jews. Everyone was happy.
I also began what I thought would be a long and satisfying legal career. My first job, with Legal Aid, lasted less than a year. I quit when I came home from work one day to find that my apartment had been burglarized by someone who fit the description of one of my clients. Then I reversed roles and became a prosecutor. I joined the brand-new Office of the Special Prosecutor, which was created to combat the corruption in New York City’s criminal justice system that had been brought to light by undercover police officer Frank Serpico. My job was to investigate and prosecute corrupt cops, judges, and politicians. At the time, I didn’t know that some of these targets were also customers of Russ & Daughters. Finally, I joined a fancy uptown law firm as a trial lawyer. With two kids—our son, Noah, was born in 1975 and our daughter, Niki, was born in 1977—and a mortgage, it was time to make a living.
But the truth was, I wasn’t happy practicing law. I worked long hours preparing for trials or going to trials. I came home every night with a stack of files under my arm that I had to study for the next day. I wasn’t spending enough time with Maria and our children. Even when we were on a family outing, I feigned interest in the trip to the zoo or the afternoon in the park, but my mind was always on preparing for the next day in court. Yet the work and the work environment just weren’t very satisfying. In a private law firm, you may be outwardly friendly with the guy in the next office, but you know that you’re both competing for the next partnership that opens up. Looking back, I realize that I was searching for a way out of my legal career.
I found my thoughts going back to Russ & Daughters, and to how special a place it was. I saw how this little shop back in the old neighborhood gave my parents and their customers a sense of community, which was certainly not what I felt in that uptown law firm, and I realized that this was something I was searching for, too.
Keeping It in the Family
In 1978 I decided that I would keep Russ & Daughters in the Russ family. If this was something of a disappointment to my parents, who had worked so hard to send me to college and law school, they didn’t let on. They actually seemed relieved; they had no other exit plan. Since the retirement of their lifelong business partners, Aunt Hattie and Uncle Murray, in 1976, my parents were also getting tired, and my father was increasingly weakened by his long-standing heart condition. My plan was to help them run the store part-time and practice law part-time. What was I smoking? The first day I took up my place behind the counter was the last day I practiced law. Even though I had worked there as a kid, I had no idea what it meant to be responsible for every piece of fish, every customer, and every employee every minute of the day. Little did I know that my career as a litigator would not prepare me for the battles of retail: for the endless negotiations with the suppliers, the employees, and the customers. So I began earning my Ph.D. (professional herring degree). And that was the beginning of a new chapter in my life.
It was all a bit too much for me to handle by myself those first few years, particularly after my parents retired in 1978. So I was happy when, several years into child rearing, with the kids well into daily school and after-school activities, Maria (who had quit her job after our second child was born) began to come to the store to “help out.” Helping out initially meant paying the bills, keeping the books, and adding the feminine touch to the
displays that the store had been missing since the retirement of the last of the Russ daughters. Maria also spoke Spanish, so she became my translator for communications with the kitchen staff, most of whom spoke no English.
I came to depend on Maria’s participation in the business. There was no one I could trust as much—with my joys, my frustrations, and the cash. We traveled to work together and traveled home together. We discussed business morning, noon, and night. That part she hated. At parties, people would often want to hear my stories about the store. Maria wasn’t terribly thrilled with that, either. It wasn’t just that she had heard them all before; it was that the store had become our total preoccupation. When we socialized, Maria wanted to hear about everyone else’s world, not ours.
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