Some things distinguish a great schmoozer from a merely good one. The ability to make the customer feel as if he or she is the only thing the schmoozer is interested in at that given moment is essential. To achieve this, you yourself must feel that this customer is your friend, and that the interaction is personal as well as commercial. Of course, the schmoozer must not forget that he is running a business, so this is where multitasking comes in. While listening intently, eyes and ears fixed on the customer, the schmoozer will be able to notice that there are dirty spots on the showcase, herrings in disarray, salads that need to be filled in, and a ringing phone that needs to be answered. A truly great schmoozer can direct other people to accomplish these tasks without ever taking his focus away from the customer with whom he is schmoozing. A good memory is essential, even if you are a natural-born schmoozer. Memory for names is a given, not only the name of the customer as he or she walks in the door but the names of the customer’s spouse and children, as well as any tsuris or nachas related during the last visit. A quality schmoozer remembers what the customer bought last time, which part of the fish he prefers, how she likes it sliced. The perfect schmooze must be a seamless resumption of your last conversation, even if the customer’s last visit was six months ago. For example:
The good schmoozer: “Hello, Mrs. Schwartz. How’s your daughter Rebecca?”
The great schmoozer: “Hello, Mrs. Schwartz. How’s your daughter Rebecca? Did she recover from that twisted ankle? Did you help take care of her two kids, Betsy and Andy? Your grandchildren are so adorable. And smart, too.”
The great schmoozer will attempt to bring other customers into the schmooze. When two or more customers are introduced into the schmooze, they are likely to discover things they have in common: their kids go to the same school, their grandparents came from the same shtetl in Poland, they used the same “top” doctor for hip-replacement surgery. This provides them with a more unique experience, a story to tell over the salmon and bagels when they get home. The schmoozer is humble, more of a good listener than a good talker. While the customers may ask the schmoozer personal questions, that is merely a rhetorical device. They don’t really want to hear about you; they want to talk about themselves. And since they are spending their money in your store, your conversation should be about them. The schmoozer must be able to distinguish between nachas and tsuris, and show the appropriate amount of joy or sympathy, depending on the individual situation. This is not always as easy as it seems. Of course, a birth, bris, bar/bat mitzvah, or wedding is clearly a major nachasdik life event that requires a great display of empathetic joy. Illness, death, and investments with Bernie Madoff clearly fit into the tsuris category. But be careful: divorce, which could be tsuris for the son who is being divorced, might be regarded as a joyful occasion by the mother who never liked her daughter-in-law in the first place.
I learned something very interesting during my years of schmoozing with my customers: the less you say, the greater the aura of knowledge and wisdom you acquire. From years of schmoozing, I came to be regarded by some of my customers as a chochom, a wise man, and I was often asked for my opinions about politics, finance, international relations, religion, and even car repair. Of course, true schmoozer and chochom that I am, I would never give them.
Truthfully, beyond the fish we sell, I know very little about anything else. It is assumed that I am a repository of great bits of worldly knowledge just because for thirty years I stood behind the counter in the same store in the same neighborhood and sold the same fish products that my family had been selling for a hundred years. So I try to accept the role with some grace, and have grown a beard—by now a very white beard. I continue to say very little and listen very well, and at least try to look the part.
From Oy to Yo
When I started working in the store in 1978, most of our customers were Jewish and over sixty. Very few of them still lived in the neighborhood. Today, maybe 50 percent of our customers are Jewish, and most of them are in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Being the schmoozer that I am, I ask them where they live. Many reside in the now-hip neighborhood of the Lower East Side, on Rivington, Essex, Stanton, Ludlow, Orchard, or Delancey Street, in buildings that earlier generations couldn’t wait to move away from (and that have, I should add, been breathtakingly refurbished). “What do you do for a living?” I ask. Design clothes and websites, make movies, write, blog, et cetera. If they’re carrying a guidebook, I ask them where they’re from. If someone speaks with an accent nowadays, it’s a French, Italian, German, Spanish, Australian, or British one—rarely Yiddish. Some customers who live outside the neighborhood still come by subway, some by car, and some by limousine. But we recently installed a bike rack outside the store for those who like to burn calories before eating their bagels and lox.
Though the customers and their ethnic origins, accents, and professions have changed through the years, they continue to come to Russ & Daughters for something more than a slice of smoked salmon. They come for the one-of-a-kind experience. And the schmooze.
Beet, Apple, and Herring Salad
MAKES 6 TO 8 SERVINGS
BEETS
6 to 8 medium beets, trimmed and scrubbed (about 1¾ to 2 pounds)
¾ cup red wine vinegar
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons mild Swedish mustard
MUSTARD SAUCE
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons mild Swedish mustard
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon honey
¼ cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon minced fresh dill
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
SALAD
1 medium Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored, and cut into ¼-inch dice
1 small red onion, cut into ¼-inch dice
2 pickled herring fillets, cut into ¼-inch dice
¼ cup minced sour pickle
To prepare the beets, place them in a large saucepan and add water to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer until the beets are tender, 30 to 45 minutes. Drain the beets and rinse with cold water until they are cool enough to handle. The skins should slip off easily. Cut the beets into quarters.
Whisk the red wine vinegar, vegetable oil, sugar, and mustard in a large bowl. Add the beets and toss to coat. Allow the beets to stand in the vinegar mixture for 2 hours.
Meanwhile, prepare the mustard sauce. Combine the red wine vinegar, mustard, sugar, and honey in a medium bowl and whisk to blend. Slowly pour in the vegetable oil, whisking constantly. Whisk in the dill and salt and pepper to taste.
Drain the beets and cut them into a ¼-inch dice. Place them in a large bowl and add the apple, red onion, herring, and minced sour pickle. Pour half the mustard sauce over the salad and toss to blend. Add more mustard sauce a little at a time until the salad is well coated. Taste and adjust the seasoning with more salt and pepper as necessary.
Fruit Strudel
YIELDS 2 STRUDELS, ABOUT 8 TO 12 SLICES EACH
1½ cups dried apples
1 cup dried Turkish apricots
½ cup pitted prunes
½ cup golden raisins
1½ cups boiling water
½ cup chopped toasted walnuts
¼ cup packed dark brown sugar
1 teaspoons cinnamon
10 sheets phyllo dough, thawed
¼ pound (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1 cup breadcrumbs
1 large egg yolk
Put the apples in the work bowl of a food processor and pulse until coarsely chopped. Transfer the apples to a medium pot. Repeat with the apricots and prunes. Add the raisins to the pot. Pour in the boiling water, stir, and cover the pot. Allow it to stand overnight.
Arrange racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven and preheat it to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
Stir the walnuts, brown sugar, and c
innamon into the dried-fruit mixture. Place one sheet of phyllo dough on one of the baking sheets. Brush lightly with the melted butter and sprinkle lightly with the breadcrumbs. Repeat four more times, stacking five sheets of phyllo in total. Spread half of the fruit mixture lengthwise down one edge of the phyllo, leaving a two-inch border at either end. Fold in the ends over the fruit and roll up jelly roll–style to form a log. Arrange the log seam side down in the middle of the baking sheet. Make another log on the other baking sheet with the remaining phyllo, butter, breadcrumbs, and fruit filling.
In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk with 2 tablespoons of water. Brush the egg yolk mixture over the logs. Bake the logs until they are puffed and golden-brown, about 30 minutes, rotating the baking sheets from top to bottom halfway through the baking time. Cool the logs on the baking sheets, then cut crosswise into thick slices and serve.
5
The Neighborhood
From Pushcart to Posh
Sometime in the 1980s, Ruth Abram, a lovely young woman from a prominent southern Jewish family, invited me to lunch. Believing that I was a person of some weight in the neighborhood, she wanted my opinion regarding her idea to convert a Lower East Side tenement into a “museum of immigrant life.” Great. Another out-of-towner with romantic notions about the Lower East Side. What could she possibly know about what life was like in these tenements and on these streets? Didn’t she understand that from the beginning this was a place people were desperate to leave?
I gave her my usual diplomatic opinion: “What? Are you crazy? Who’s going to visit your museum? A few nostalgic New Yorkers? Maybe a few Jews from New Jersey? But no one from Iowa or even Connecticut is coming to this neighborhood. You need to understand the Lower East Side before you invest your time and money in this farshlugginer [valueless] scheme. After the ribbon cutting, you’ll be selling admissions and nostalgia. I sell fish and nostalgia, and even that’s not so easy to do on the Lower East Side these days. At least they can eat the fish.”
Fortunately, Ruth didn’t take my advice. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street opened in 1993 in an 1863 tenement building that, over the years, was home to seven thousand immigrants from twenty countries. They now welcome almost two hundred thousand visitors a year.
Pushcart Nation
As far back as the 1870s, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was a ghetto of shoddily built tenements designed to maximize financial return to builder, landowner, and tenement owner. As many people as possible—for the most part, newly arrived immigrants—were stuffed into tiny, airless apartments in four- and five-story buildings, with tenants often renting out a small space within an apartment to even newer greenhorns.
The typical early tenement apartment was about 250 to 300 square feet and contained a coal-fired stove and a bathtub in the kitchen. A single bathroom in the hallway was shared by the residents of every apartment on the floor. During sweltering city summers, families slept on fire escapes to get some relief from the heat. Disease and urban epidemics took a large toll on these residents, who lived in unsanitary, crowded conditions. Grandpa and Grandma Russ lost their firstborn, an eighteen-month-old boy, to the 1910 typhoid epidemic that swept through New York.
Employment options for the new immigrants were limited. Men, women, and even children would stand on street corners, hoping to be chosen for some menial day labor. If the newcomer was lucky, he or she might be chosen for piecework, assembling men’s or women’s clothing in one of the local tenement apartments that doubled as satellite garment factories. These sweatshops were notorious for their lack of light, air, and sanitary facilities, and for the low wages the workers were paid. The workers’ living accommodations were not much better. For two or three dollars a week, they could board with a tenement-dwelling family who would rent out any beds that were not already occupied by family members; this would help them to make their own rent payments.
The media of the day, much like today’s media, often sensationalized life on the Lower East Side, highlighting the criminal gangs, gambling dens, and brothels in the neighborhood. Slowly, the appalling conditions began to attract the attention of progressive reformers such as the photojournalist Jacob Riis and the public health advocate Lillian Wald. And gradually things began to change for the better: laws were passed that regulated the amount of ventilation a tenement apartment had to contain, sanitary conditions improved, and social welfare agencies taught the immigrant families how to improve their lives and their living conditions. Ever the rugged individualist, Grandpa Russ had no patience for the “do-gooders” and their social welfare agencies, which included such legendary facilities as the Educational Alliance, the Henry Street Settlement, and the Hamilton-Madison House. He wanted success in America, but to him and most other immigrants, moving up meant moving out of the Lower East Side.
By the 1920s, bridges, subways, and elevated train lines linked Lower Manhattan to the outer boroughs. As a result, people moved as quickly as they could afford to from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The Immigration Act of 1924 imposed strict quotas on the number of immigrants, particularly Eastern Europeans (i.e., Jews) and Southern Europeans (i.e., Italians) who could enter the United States. But the tenements remained full, and there was no incentive to upgrade or even to make repairs to them. Instead, there was a movement to “restructure” the Lower East Side. Grandpa Russ joined the East Side Chamber of Commerce, an association of developers, landlords, bankers, and small merchants who shared a vision of the Lower East Side as a middle- and upper-middle-income “walk to work” residential community servicing the expanding financial industry of Lower Manhattan. It was perfectly situated between uptown and downtown. Restructuring meant slum clearance and relocating the street vendors into brick-and-mortar markets. The plan was to construct high-rise apartment buildings, complete with green spaces, along an East River promenade to attract the growing middle class to the neighborhood. But the stock market crash of 1929, the ensuing Great Depression, and World War II put most of these plans and dreams on hold for the next sixty years.
A few of the plans did come to fruition. The Second Avenue Elevated Line, which started above Allen Street and made the streets underneath it a dark haven for crime, was finally torn down. Prostitution had been a thriving business under the El, and many of the prostitutes had names like Goldstein, Ginsberg, and Schwartz. Allen Street was widened and turned into a tree-lined mall; it was to be a “speedway” for cars going uptown. Aunt Hattie remembers that in 1928 Mayor Jimmy Walker attended the unveiling of the new Allen Street. She also remembers that a few years later he resigned and fled to Europe to avoid prosecution for corruption.
As if the Depression wasn’t bad enough for business, in the 1930s the city began digging up Houston Street for the IND subway line, which was to include a stop on the F train right across the street from Joel Russ’s little appetizing store. Buildings were torn down to widen the street, and a huge hole was extended almost to the curbline. The few customers who were able to put together a couple of cents found it almost impossible to cross the street to spend it on a herring.
The consortium of landlords, developers, and small merchants (some, including Grandpa Russ, who had been pushcart peddlers themselves) focused their attention on getting rid of the pushcarts. To them, this way of doing business was old-fashioned, unsanitary, and inefficient, and they had an ally in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. By 1940 their efforts had paid off, and most of the pushcarts had been relocated to newly constructed indoor stalls in the Essex Street Market and the First Avenue Market. They were a great success, and to everyone’s surprise (the peddlers’ as well as the consortium’s), customers who had moved away from the neighborhood continued to come back to shop at their favorite pushcart stands—even if they were now indoors. The idea of a clean but atmospheric indoor market also proved to be an attraction for the “uptowners” and for tourists looking for some Lower East Side flavor and nostalgia. But truth be told, without the pushcart
s on the street, some of the romance and a bit of the neshuma (soul) of the Lower East Side was gone forever.
New York City’s Multiple Dwelling Law of 1929 was intended to improve living conditions in the tenements, but many landlords simply abandoned their properties because they realized that no matter how much they raised rents, they’d never be able to recoup the money they would have to spend to bring their decrepit buildings up to the new code. Other landlords kept their buildings unoccupied, allowing them to fall into further disrepair as they awaited the long-delayed buyouts from the city government as part of the slum clearance process.
Between 1910 and 1940, the Lower East Side experienced a 60 percent decline in population. Those who remained were, for the most part, the worst off. The saddest, however, were people like the Russ family, who had left the Lower East Side but had to move back to the neighborhood because the financial reversals they experienced during the Great Depression meant that they could no longer afford to live in those coveted homes in the outer boroughs.
The Daughter of Tanenbaum the Baker,
the Wife of Leo the Butcher
One day about a year ago, Ruth Tanenbaum Shapiro appeared in the store and introduced herself to Niki. She was, she said, “the daughter of Tanenbaum the baker” (181 East Houston Street) and “the wife of Leo the butcher” (175 East Houston Street). She hadn’t been to the old neighborhood for years. Realizing that Ruth might be a gold mine of Lower East Side history and information, Niki got me on the phone, and Ruth and I set up a date to talk so she could fill in some of the blanks in my research for this book.
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