At a party celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary, Hy stood up and made an unforgettable speech. He rambled on at length about how he knew Robert Moses and how important Ratner’s was to the community and totally forgot to even mention his wife, Mildred, who was a fairly obvious and equal co-reason for the celebration. By this time, he was starting to lose it somewhat and I think he believed he was being honored by the United Jewish Appeal instead of celebrating half a century of marital bliss. At some point, as he finally veered back to talking about the family, one of his two daughters-in-law stood up and, good-naturedly, called out, “You forgot to mention your wonderful daughters-in-law.” My uncle Hy glared at her and, rather viciously, spat out the words, “You’re not blood!” It was a touching and lovely moment, treasured by all concerned.
Most relevant for me, the uncle-cousin takeover of the restaurant eventually spelled the end of my free eats. After I’d returned to New York in my minuscule-earning early twenties, I made weekly sojourns to the family restaurant and ate enough to fill me up for pretty much a whole day. Then, one Saturday morning, I went to Ratner’s with a close friend for breakfast. By this time, Hy’s son Bobby was essentially running the joint. Bobby was five or six years older than I was and didn’t have a lot to talk about other than his family, the weather, and golf. And even golf and family conversations were pushing it.
When my friend and I finished our lox, eggs, and onions—perfectly crisp onions, sliced large enough to provide real texture, and small but thick, salty chunks of lox—the waiter came over. I’ve done an injustice by neglecting to mention the Ratner’s waiters, who were as legendary as the food. Most of them had been there forty years, almost all of them shook so much that if you ordered soup you’d wind up with about half a bowlful by the time it got to your table, and most of them didn’t actually pay attention to what you ordered—if they didn’t like your choice, they would simply bring you whatever they thought you should have. The waiter who was serving us this day, whom I’d known since I was a baby, handed me a bill. At first I didn’t reach for it, never having seen a bill before in the restaurant, and figured he’d finally gotten so old he didn’t remember who I was. So I said, “I’m family. Judy’s son.” He had the good grace to look a bit embarrassed when he said, “Bobby told me to give you a check.”
I nodded, told my friend I’d be right back, walked to the rear of the restaurant where my cousin was lurking, trying to avoid my seeing him, and showed him the check. “What’s this about?” I asked.
He said, with much less embarrassment than the elderly waiter, “We decided it’s too expensive when you come in and bring friends. So this is the new policy.” And then, I guess feeling awkward since I was just staring at him in disbelief, he said, “I’ll give you a fifty percent discount. Starting now.”
Quietly, I said, “Gramps would be turning over in his grave if he knew his grandchildren had to pay at his restaurant.” Bobby didn’t respond—I don’t think he cared too much about Gramps or his grave—so I delivered my only possible threat: “Just so you know, I’ll never come in here again.” He didn’t say anything in response to that comment, either, but his eyes did light up slightly and I realized that was not a threat in his book, it was the desired result.
I took the check to the cashier—my aunt Natalie!—and paid it in full, refusing to take the 50 percent “discount.” All she said was, “Bobby’s running the place now.”
Later that day, my parents, three thousand miles away in L.A., heard about this penurious turn of events, so they called Bobby’s father, good old Uncle Hy. This wasn’t the first time they had had a financial run-in with Hy. A couple of years earlier my dad had found out that the other family members had been getting a weekly check, as per my grandfather’s will. The funds came from a somewhat mysterious piece of real estate that my gramps had bought and bequeathed to all his children. It wasn’t a lot of money—something in the range of 150 bucks—but it was nothing to sneer at, especially when considering the lump sum that had accumulated over the lengthy period of misappropriation. In the ten years or so since her father had died, my mother had never received one single check, so my dad called Hy and asked him about it. Hy coolly replied that he’d been banking my mother’s checks and investing them, since he figured he knew more about finance than my father (who was a very successful TV writer and producer and director, did quite well financially, and actually had a business manager who knew a thing or two about investing money). My dad was furious: he told Hy to send him all the money that was due to them and, from that point on, to send the weekly check as well, he’d do his own investing, thank you very much.
So now, after Bobby’s reversal of sixty years of family tradition, all my dad did was ask why I’d been given a bill for my meal. Hy’s response was, “It’s not about the money.” My dad followed that one up with the very logical question: “What’s it about then?”
There is an old adage that, in a courtroom, a prosecutor should never ask a question to which he doesn’t know the answer. This conversation was proof of something similar: no relative should say anything completely moronic to another relative unless he can defend his statement/bald-faced lie/just plain stupidity to at least some degree. My uncle Hy was completely stumped by my dad’s simple question since there was not one single answer to the question that made any sense at all other than, “Money.” After a lengthy, painful silence, while my uncle strained to come up with something, my dad decided that enough was enough and told Hy that he should just bill him directly any time I came into the restaurant to eat. My uncle said that would be fine—offering further proof that it was about the money.
When my dad called to tell me about the conversation with Hy, I thanked him for his defense—in fact, I was thrilled by his outrage—but told him I doubted I’d ever go back to the family restaurant again. My mother, who was also on the call, spoke up then, telling me not to overreact and anxiously assuring me that this would all blow over in a few weeks and that everything would return to normal. It was very hard, at that time in her life, for my mother to accept anything—or even discuss anything—truly negative about any member of her family; it was only later that she became an unsentimental realist about most things family-related. The more independent she became, the stronger she became and the less she needed to fall back on rose-colored glasses.
From that point on, when friends from out of town insisted on going to the legendary Ratner’s, I took them. I always paid in full. Other than that, I never stepped into my family’s restaurant again.
That, however, was not the end of my mother’s complicated relationship with the Ratner’s side of the family.
Although my mother had no work connection to Ratner’s, she knew the food well. And her serious interest in food had developed partly as a result of her personal connection to the restaurant. In 1974, she and her niece, Belle’s daughter Beth Lefft, cowrote The World Famous Ratner’s Meatless Cookbook. The publisher decided, in 1981, to try to give the book a new push and to breathe new life into what had been a solid backlist title. The two relevant stories about the book come a little less than a decade apart.
The first is before the book’s republication. The publisher was hoping to come up with an appealing cover, something that is especially important for food-related books. They wanted something as irresistible as possible. The editor, doubling as the food stylist on the cover shoot, called me up from the restaurant in a bit of a panic. “We’re using a whole bunch of food on a table for the cover photo,” she said, “all the dishes they’re best known for, and I want one of them to be a beautiful-looking plate of lox.”
I didn’t really need to ask. My lox radar immediately went on red alert. “So what’s the problem?”
“Your family won’t give it to me. Your uncle told me it’s too expensive for them to hand it over for free.”
“Did you explain to him how much the book is going to benefit the restaurant? And how they’re going to make money selling the bo
ok there?”
“Trust me,” she said. “I tried every single thing I could think of. He’s not handing over the lox.”
“How much is it?”
“I think about fifteen dollars.”
“Seriously? He won’t give you fifteen dollars’ worth of smoked salmon?”
“I swear.”
“That’s the retail price, right?”
“I think so,” she said.
“So he’s actually making a profit on this. If he’s asking for fifteen bucks, he probably paid five or six. Or two or three.”
“It’s insane.”
“You have no idea,” I told her.
I thanked her and told her to sit tight, then called my mom who, when she heard what was going on, was stunned into silence. “How about if I just say that you’ll pay for the lox,” I said. “I don’t want the publisher going into this thinking they’re dealing with total crazy people. Even though they clearly are.”
“Oh my god, yes.”
“They’re your family,” I said. Her only answer was to sigh. Deeply.
I called the restaurant, got my aunt Nat at the cashier’s booth, and asked her to put my uncle on the phone. When Hy picked up the receiver, I didn’t ask any questions, I just said, “My mom will pay for the lox. Will you trust her to send you a check and let them use it for the photo shoot or do I have to come down there and hand you cash?”
He made some odd noises, none of which seemed to be any real language, and finally I said, “She’ll send you a check. Just tell me how much it is.”
We settled on twenty bucks—five dollars more than the price he’d given to my mom’s editor, just in case there was any need for a few extra slices. In the end, my mom never had to send the check because the editor gave Hy the money in cash. No way was she going to let the author of the book pay for a plate of smoked salmon.
The book was republished and it did quite well, selling steadily for years.
The coda to the story came about a decade later. I found out that Ratner’s—where they’d been selling a lot of copies of the book on a weekly basis—had run out of books. They’d been out of stock for a few months but hadn’t said a word to my mom. The publisher had finally let it go out of print; even the couple of hundred books sold every month at the restaurant wasn’t enough to justify the publisher’s printing and warehousing costs. I could not believe my relatives hadn’t bothered to tell anyone they’d stopped selling the book, although why I was surprised is beyond me. But it seemed wrong to eliminate such a steady and perpetual market, so I arranged for my mother to buy the original printing plates from the publisher and have the plates shipped to her house in Los Angeles.
The World Famous Ratner’s Meatless Cookbook. Note the lovely plate of $20 lox.
Right around then, my mom was staying with me in New York so, in person, I explained how the self-publishing process would work: she and her niece/coauthor would pay to print the books and ship them to Ratner’s. They’d sell the book at the restaurant, my mom’s and Beth’s costs would be deducted from the sales, and I told her that if she wanted to be nice, they could split the profit with her brother and nephews fifty-fifty. She thought that all sounded fine and fair. So she called Hy and told him what she wanted to do. My uncle immediately said that he thought it would be better if he oversaw the printing and shipping and paid my mother and her niece a dollar per book (to be clear, that’s total, not each, and that is significantly less than the authors would have made if they’d split the profit fifty-fifty, as proposed). I’d been listening to my mother’s end of the conversation and at this point I made her hang up. We went through the steps one more time, and I instructed her to tell her brother that she owned the publishing rights to the book, and she also owned the printing plates, which were being stored in her garage, and that it was a take-it-or-leave-it offer. No one was ever going to get rich off the book—it was really just a question of keeping the book in print and providing Ratner’s customers with a valuable keepsake. The whole concept of the deal was to be fair to both sides—once again, a way of thinking as alien to Hy as string theory. She called her brother back, followed my instructions quite well—she was steamed and it was impressive to see how much her anger stiffened her spine—and Hy said he would think about it and would call her back. About fifteen minutes later, my brother Eric called from Los Angeles. He informed us that Hy had just called him to say that our mother had given Hy permission to print the books. He told my brother to go to our mom’s house, find the printing plates in the garage, and mail them to him. Eric was calling because he said Hy’s description of the arrangement just hadn’t sounded legit.
My mother was shocked to the point of near paralysis. When we got off the phone with Eric, she just sat in my living room and said, very, very quietly, “I can’t believe how dishonest he is.”
It was a watershed moment. Up until that point, my mother had always tended to block out the things she didn’t want to know or hear, especially about her own family. But now we had a long talk about family and trust. She proceeded to tell me a lot of things I’d never known; her brother’s petty treachery seemed to have opened her up emotionally. She talked about how the best thing that had ever happened to her was moving to California and away from her family when she was forty; being away from her domineering brothers and sisters had let her grow up and become confident and finally develop a real sense of self. That’s when she told me that Hy had behaved terribly after their brother Ted had been killed. Once he had control of the family finances, Hy basically cut Ted’s widow and three children off from the family. We also spoke about the fact that Hy had held on to the weekly check that belonged to her—and she acknowledged that if my dad hadn’t confronted him, she never would have gotten the money. As we talked, she kept saying, “I never realized my brother was such a bad guy.” But then, at some point, she said, “I should have known.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“After Pop died”—she called her father “Pop”; all her siblings did—“Hy didn’t bother to pretend he cared about the food. The food hasn’t been good at the store since he took over. It used to be such high quality. It used to be so respected. He didn’t care about any of that.” She looked up at me, a real sense of wonder on her face, and even at this age—she was pushing seventy—there was a sense that a rite of passage was taking place. “I should have known not to trust anyone who’s so disdainful about the quality of food.”
Because she was so rattled, I asked if she wanted me to call my uncle back to give him the bad news that he’d been caught lying his thieving little head off, but she said no, she’d do it. And she did. Calmly, with no anger, she told Hy that she’d spoken to Eric, who’d told her what he had done. She said that she would still agree to give him 50 percent of the profits but that Hy would now have to pay his half of the costs up front. She wanted a check for $11,500—50 percent of the cost of printing two thousand books plus 50 percent of the cover price for the sale of those books. When she got his money, she’d print and ship the books. When the books were sold, Hy could keep all the money and make his nice little profit. She stressed that would be the exact same process going forward, too—he’d send her money and she’d get him the books. He objected, of course, and denied her allegations, saying he had just misunderstood their previous conversation, and tried to cajole his little sister out of such a dastardly scheme.
“I’m sorry,” Hy’s little sister, my nearly seventy-year-old mother, told him over the phone, “but I can’t trust you to do the right thing.”
I was a bit awed by the courage it took for my mom to stand up to her brother—and for herself—the way she did. Her anger and firm sense of right and wrong overrode almost seven decades of familial deference. It was a turning point in her life. I don’t think she was ever bullied or cowed by anyone ever again.
Hy caved, of course. Making a profit after cheating someone was best but just making a profit was good enough. The book stayed in print
, snatched up by Ratner’s customers at a brisk rate, until the restaurant closed for good a little over a decade later. It closed because Freddy and Bobby, the sole owners by that point, knew they could make a lot more money renting the building—over half a century earlier, my grandfather had bought the property on which the restaurant sat—than they could by running a kosher meatless dairy restaurant. None of the money from this or future transactions made its way to any other family member, of course.
But their real estate obsession did lead to one last attempt at a sibling swindle. Everything was strictly kosher at the family restaurant except the family’s ethics.
In the late nineties, a couple of years before Hy died, my mother called me to say that she had just gotten off the phone with her brother. Sure enough, he’d done it again. On the phone, he told her that their father, my gramps, had many years ago bought another piece of property across the street from Ratner’s—this was the same mysterious source of the weekly checks that my father discovered years earlier hadn’t been coming my mother’s way. On the call, Hy explained to my mom that the property wasn’t worth very much but that if they ever wanted to sell it, it would be complicated to do so because each of the siblings, including my mother, owned 10 percent. Well, except for Hy, who somehow owned 50 percent. He said that he had already passed his 50 percent on to his two lovely sons, Fred and Bob. It would be a lot easier, Hy stressed, if the two sons owned the whole thing. Just in case, mind you, they ever wanted to sell.
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