Even her stern and strict papa found it difficult to control Ida. She argued with him about everything and anything; no one else dared to. She began working in the store on weekends when she was twelve years old, and then became a full-time employee after graduating from Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. It wasn’t as though she had any other options. It was 1932; jobs were still scarce, and Grandpa Russ needed help in the store. College was out of the question. Getting married appeared to be the only way out for Ida. Less than a year after Hattie married Murray, Ida married Maxie Pulvers, who seemed to be a young man with potential. He had his own business, a luncheonette. But Max’s business was in even worse shape than Grandpa Russ’s, and so he also wound up working for his father-in-law. And he and Ida moved with the rest of the Russ family into the two-bedroom apartment in the Ageloff Towers.
Ida and Max
But there was soon trouble in paradise. Neither Grandpa Russ nor Uncle Murray could abide Uncle Max, who had the habit of getting lost for hours—and sometimes for days—when making deliveries of herring and lox. Apparently the feeling was mutual. The story goes that one day Max was driving the store’s truck in a heavy rainstorm, saw his father-in-law walking in the rain, and didn’t stop to pick him up. The other family members never forgot this slight. By 1950 Max and Ida no longer worked at Russ & Daughters. Whether they quit or were fired remains a family mystery to this day. Ida went to work at the appetizing counter of a supermarket, then had a stand on the weekends in a farmers’ market on Long Island, where she and Max sold herring and smoked fish. Ida eventually opened her own appetizing store, proud of the quality of her fish and her heritage as one of the Russ daughters from the Lower East Side. Several years later Ida and Max divorced. In those days divorce was something of a scandal in a Jewish family. But in this case, everyone thought “it was for the best.” Her second marriage, to Louis Schwartz, was much happier.
Even with business and marital difficulties, Ida always stayed in touch with her sisters and her parents. There was never much time for a visit; everyone worked in retail. But by the 1990s the three Russ daughters, now retired and widowed, moved into the same gated community in Florida. Anne, the youngest, did the driving at night. Ida had the best palate and determined where they would eat. And Hattie, the eldest, kept the peace.
Anne and Herbie
Born in 1921, the youngest of the Russ daughters, Anne was happy living in the big house on Avenue O in Brooklyn. She had lots of friends, and by age ten, even a boyfriend. Except for weekend shopping trips with her mother to the pushcart vendors of Orchard Street, she wasn’t as familiar with the Lower East Side as her older sisters were. She enjoyed the trips by trolley and train, even if her mother embarrassed her by talking to anyone and everyone in her heavy Eastern European accent. “Those who were not that familiar with Jews,” she told me, “thought that Mama was speaking Italian. In our big house in Brooklyn, Mama finally seemed to be happy in America. She loved to grow things in her garden and would buy plants every week from the man who drove by in his horse and wagon. Sometimes on Saturdays she would take me with her to the movies and the five-and-dime.”
Anne least understood and most resented the move back to the Lower East Side, the move that “broke the heart and the spirit of Mama.” The economic depression that had engulfed the world was taking its personal toll on the Russ household as well; Mama’s long disappearances into her room would be attributed to “high blood pressure” by the family, but everyone knew what was really behind them.
At age fourteen, Anne began working in the store on weekends. And following the path that her papa had laid down for her sisters, once she graduated from Seward Park High School (her classmate Walter Matthau once walked her home and carried her books), she began working in the store full-time. But it was different for Anne than it had been for Hattie and Ida. The baby of the family was now an employee with five supervisors: her father, her sisters, and their husbands. She was not happy. No one saw her as a teenager with a life of her own; she was just cheap labor. But Anne never complained, although she resented the ten-to-twelve-hour workdays and not being able to join her friends at parties or sports events.
“Papa didn’t know from baseball,” she would tell my sisters and me when we balked at working in the store on weekends. And when the Russ daughters did have the opportunity to socialize with friends, they usually declined. They were too tired, had to wake up too early for work the next day, and recognized that they smelled a bit too fishy.
A formal lunch break for the Russ employees would have been unheard-of. Lunch was usually a piece of bread with some lox or herring that was consumed in quick bites between waiting on customers. Sometimes Anne would steal away to have a favorite lunch of bananas and sour cream at Shwebel’s Dairy Restaurant on the next block. On one such occasion she returned to the store quite sick to her stomach. She asked if she could go home. Her brothers-in-law refused. They assumed she was faking it, since she never really wanted to work. And what was she doing eating bananas and sour cream for lunch at Shwebel’s, anyway? Wasn’t there enough to eat right here in the store? She had an upset stomach, they said, a touch of food poisoning, and it would pass. But her sisters realized that Anne was quite ill and sent her home. When Bella saw how sick she was, she rushed Anne to nearby Beth Israel Hospital. The diagnosis: acute appendicitis that required immediate surgery. But there was nothing to worry about; the surgeon was a Russ & Daughters customer. Once he’d opened her up, the surgeon determined that she actually had a bleeding ovary. But as long as he was in there, “so it shouldn’t be a total loss,” he took out the perfectly fine appendix. Some time later the surgeon was shopping in the store and whispered to Grandpa Russ, “Your daughter has female problems. I suggest you get her married as soon as possible.” So much for doctor-patient confidentiality in those days.
Anne behind the counter, waiting on a customer.
She was probably about sixteen at the time, so this would have been
around 1937. Hattie is behind her, closer to the front of the store.
Anne met my father, Herbert Federman, through his mother, Mamie, who was a regular customer. One day while Mamie was shopping in the store she announced, “I have a son; he’s the sheik of Brooklyn. Which one of the Russ girls is not married?” Anne was intrigued. “I’d like to meet the sheik of Brooklyn,” she said. Anne and Herb were married in 1940. The affair (“maybe twenty people, tops,” according to my mom) was held—on a Tuesday, of course—at Garfein’s Catering Hall on Avenue A. Ida bought Anne’s wedding gown at S. Klein’s department store, on Fourteenth Street and Union Square. She paid ten dollars for it, and it fit perfectly. The newlyweds moved into a studio apartment on East Third Street, and the rest, as they say, is history. My history, to be exact.
Herbert, who quickly became known as Herbie, immediately took to the family business. Word of his talents as a slicer and a schmoozer (that’s Yiddish for “conversationalist,” although it definitely loses something in the translation) spread to customers who had moved from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, to New Jersey and Connecticut. When they came into the store, they wanted the legendary Herbie to wait on them. Mr. Spanell was one such wealthy uptown customer, a fellow who had “made it big in plastics.” He loved to watch Herbie slice his lox. Spanell thought that Herbie should put his hands to better use and made Herbie an offer: he would pay for Herbie to go to college and then medical school with no strings attached. When Herbie told Anne about the offer, she didn’t need any time to think it over. “What do you need that for?” she said. “Don’t you realize he’ll own you for the rest of your life?” When Herbie turned down Spanell, Spanell stopped shopping in the store. And so Herbie wasn’t owned by Spanell for the rest of his life; instead, he was owned by his father-in-law for the rest of his life. But that was different; that was family.
The “sheik of Brooklyn,”
my father, Herbert Federman
Joel Russ didn’
t insist on arranging the marriages of his three daughters, the way it had been done in the Old Country and for him here in America, but he did retain what is called in business today the right of first refusal. He would size up each potential suitor (and there were many for the three pretty, hardworking girls whose father owned a store and not just a pushcart), his evaluation based solely on whether this potential son-in-law would make a good worker for Russ & Daughters. Was he strong enough to schlep barrels of herring? Smart enough to add up a column of numbers on a brown paper bag? Could he make change? Would he look good behind the counter? Did he speak English well? (As the years went by, knowing Yiddish was becoming less important for dealing with our customers.) Fine, you can marry him.
The store sometime before the 1950 renovation was completed.
Herb is behind the counter; Murray, two unidentified men,
and Grandpa Russ are in front of it.
In 1952, with his sons-in-law working in the store full-time and his daughters now tending to his seven grandchildren and working only on weekends, Grandpa Russ retired. Which is to say he would henceforth work only four or five days a week, not six. He had bought the building on East Houston Street that housed the store from the estate of Mrs. Franck, a German lady who had told Joel Russ in no uncertain terms that she would never sell her building to him while she was alive. Once he owned the building, he supervised the renovation of the store, which included adding a refrigerated showcase for the fish, so daily deliveries of ice were no longer necessary; installing a big kitchen in the back, complete with stainless-steel fixtures and terra-cotta floor tile; and putting down a new linoleum floor in the front of the store, which eliminated the need for sawdust and made for much easier cleanup (except when herring brine sloshed over the barrels). He broke through to Baskin’s Bakery, the store next door, so he could add a candy counter near the entrance. And he officially settled into his retirement by bringing his old red leather chair, cracked and stained with fish oil, from his little office in the back and positioning it next to the candy counter, where he would continue to give orders to his family by pointing with his gold-handled cane and calling out “Nisht azoy!” (Not like that!) whenever anyone did something that displeased him. Until his death in 1961, everyone in and out of the family knew that Joel Russ continued to preside over the house that herring built.
From the East Side to the Seaside
In 1949, when I was four years old, Grandpa Russ moved the entire Russ family—his wife, his three daughters, their husbands, and the seven grandchildren—to Far Rockaway, Queens. As young as I was, I brought with me memories of the Lower East Side as being a dark, scary place. The suburbs, by contrast, felt open, free, and safe. Far Rockaway was a good place to grow up in the 1950s. We walked to school with our friends and came home for lunch. We played punchball and stickball in the streets, never worrying about cars. When a car came by, the driver waited until the boy at bat finished his turn. Everyone in our neighborhood was Jewish—cultural Jews who went to synagogue on the High Holy Days, had their sons bar mitzvahed (bat mitzvahs for girls didn’t exist yet), and wouldn’t let pork into the house but ate it in Chinese restaurants. The Italians and Irish lived on “the other side of town.” Blacks lived in the housing projects. We had traded an urban ghetto for a suburban one.
It didn’t take me long, however, to realize that my family was different from the other families in our neighborhood. I soon discovered that no other house had a “herring closet” in the vestibule, in which clothes that smelled of smoked fish and herring were to be hung before entering the main part of the house. Our house had one, and so did those of my grandparents and my aunts and uncles.
But it wasn’t just the herring closets that made us different from other families. Most of my friends’ fathers were accountants, engineers, lawyers, or teachers. They didn’t work on weekends, so their families got to do all sorts of cool stuff together: attend baseball games at Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, or the Polo Grounds; ride the bumper cars at Rockaways’ Playland or the Steeplechase parachute jump at Coney Island; choose from column A or column B at a local Chinese restaurant or eat a lobster dinner with the world’s best biscuits and sandiest steamers at Lundy’s; swim in the ocean at Far Rockaway Beach or in a pool at one of the fancy beach clubs that lined the oceanfront; or take evening strolls on the boardwalk while noshing a slice of pizza, a hot dog, or a knish.
Once Grandpa Russ had his daughters’ husbands firmly ensconced in the business, the women’s responsibilities were to be fruitful and multiply, and stay home with the kinder. They no longer had to work in the store during the week, but they were definitely expected to “help out” ten hours a day on weekends and holidays. At such times, my sisters, Tara (born in 1943) and Hope (born in 1949), and I were left in the care of Grandma Mamie, my father’s mother. Grandma Mamie was not your typical warm, sweet, protective grandmother. She was built like a tank (she stood five-foot-one and weighed about three hundred pounds) and cursed like a tugboat captain. She chain-smoked Pall Malls and ate everything and anything. Huge amounts of smoked fish and herring were brought home from the store so Grandma Mamie would have “something to nosh on” while she stayed in our home to “watch the kids.” There was never any food left over by the time Sunday evening came around. The meals she prepared for us were usually combinations of whatever happened to be in the refrigerator at the moment. Her theory of cooking: “It’s all going in the same end and it’s all coming out the same end.” There was no challenging her cooking, and she insisted we finish everything on our plates. Her own favorite snack was garlic rubbed on thick slices of pumpernickel bread, which were then slathered with chicken fat. Grandma Mamie intimidated everyone. In the middle of a serious punchball game in front of our house, she thought nothing of embarrassing me by screaming that it was time for me to come in for a nap. She then screamed at the other kids to “go play on your own block,” even though she knew we all lived on the same block. None of my friends came into my house on the weekends when Grandma Mamie was in charge.
Grandpa Russ, Grandma Russ,
and the gold-handled cane
The Russ clan at my cousin Paul Gold’s bar mitzvah in 1956.
I’m at the extreme left.
If we ever did something together as a family, it was on a Tuesday, when the store was closed. But this didn’t happen very often: when Tuesday came around, my father was usually too tired to do anything. He preferred to soak in a hot bathtub most of the day and then putter around his basement tool room—he called it his “sanctum sanctorum”—where he was never to be disturbed. On Monday nights he hosted a poker game for his friends while my mother played mahjongg or canasta with her friends in another room. They always put out a big spread of smoked fish and herring, dried fruits and nuts, chocolate coffee beans and rum cordials, halvah and rugelach, all of which delighted their friends, who took home doggie bags filled with what they couldn’t finish during the evening. On most other nights, he fell asleep in front of the TV.
When I did spend time with my father, it usually ended badly. He taught me how to ride a bike by letting go of it at the top of a steep hill. He taught me how to swim by pushing me into the deep end of a pool. He could be wonderfully playful at one moment but then, without warning, begin screaming and become menacing. While all of the customers and our neighbors loved “Herbie,” I grew up angry and jealous that he never showed the same charm and patience with his own family. But when I attempted to fill his shoes behind the counter, I learned what it meant to be completely spent after a day of arguing with suppliers, customers, and employees. Everything was a fight in those days.
Father and Son Go Fishing
The best days with my father were when he took me to work with him. We left the house at 5:00 a.m., the same time we would have left to go on a real fishing trip. He drove the big red truck with its hand-painted sign in an elegant, old-fashioned typeface that I always felt was somewhat incongruous, given that it adorned a truck that wa
s used for transporting smoked fish and herring:
Russ & Daughters
Queens of Lake Sturgeon
The first stops were to several Brooklyn smokehouses, looking for the one place that would satisfy my father that morning with the quality and amount of fish being offered.
The sights, the smells, the tastes—in a smokehouse, everything assaults your senses at once. Cavernous rooms with soot- and smoke-blackened walls. Intense smells, some sweet, others acrid. All manner of fish, submerged in their briny baths in huge steel vats, hanging from their tails punctured by wooden hooks, splayed out on racks going into or coming out of smoke-filled oven rooms, and finally packed into boxes, hundreds and hundreds of them lining the walls, ready for jobbers to deliver to stores, or to be picked up by merchants like Russ & Daughters who insisted on seeing, smelling, and having a taste from each lot of fish before buying it. It’s an experience that either leaves you nauseated and disgusted or imprints your sensory memory in such a way that experiencing those sights, smells, and tastes again half a century later feels like coming home after a long trip.
The actual fish tasting was quite a show and followed the same script each time. (Although the store was named Russ & Daughters, and the presence and hard work of the Russ daughters was a large element of its success, not one of them ever went to the smokehouses. In those days, that was considered a man’s job.) After carefully turning a fish skin side up and digging a small hole through its center so as not to damage its look and ultimate sale, a small sample was extracted, tasted, and then spit out. (A fish is split in two before it’s smoked, so there are two pieces, each with a skin side and a flesh side.) Then came the discussion of whether this particular batch of fish was good enough to be sold at Russ & Daughters. Actually, it was more of a verbal brawl than a serious business negotiation. Particular catchphrases were always used: “This fish is uglier than you.” “If you knew anything about fish, you wouldn’t have to sell it to make a living.” Shouting and cursing were the accepted forms of communication, and there was no attempt to tone it down at all, even in the presence of a ten-year-old boy. Looking back now, I suspect that part of the show was for my benefit, with the underlying message being, “Look, kid, every day is a battle. We enjoy our battles; it’s all we know. But you don’t need to do this for a living. You’ll get a good education and won’t have to sell fish.”
Russ & Daughters Page 6