August 10, 2017--Uncle Morty's Tongue Factory

This is the same Uncle Morty who brought me into the world of Yiddishkeit--

The Tongue Factory

Most people think that the tongue sandwiches available at the Second Avenue Deli come from cows. In fact the tongue comes from Tongue Factories. I know because my Uncle Morty owned one in the 1950s. It was in the South Bronx.

He was actually in the "meat processing" business. People in this business, factory like, would process meat products--smoke hams and pigs knuckles, pickle corn beef, cure pastrami from beef briskets, and pickle tongues.

People in this business were always in a tight cash flow situation because products such as tongues needed to be bought and sold on the futures market--in order to assure a delivery of 2,000 tongues for processing and sale in December, one needed to purchase futures for them in July. At a per pound price fixed in July. Since orders for processed tongues were typically not secured so far in advance, Uncle Morty and his competitors needed to speculate that the price they were required to pay in July would be for orders they might receive in September from retail meat stores and supermarkets which in turn needed to be sold at a price by them in December that would enable the processors to turn a profit.

But since they never had the money they needed in July to secure the September futures, they had to borrow the money. Money that was secured only by hoped-for orders. In a way, Morty and his colleagues were not so different from the George Soroses of the world—just a little ahead of the arbitrage curve and of course in a very different sort of business.

As one might imagine, in an industry so unpredictable and where one's "protection" and union relations were provided for and controlled by the Mob it was not always possible (actually never possible) to borrow money from conventional places such as banks. That's where "factors" came into the picture. Factors provided unsecured, very high interest (read usurious) loans to people such as Uncle Morty, and of course to another uncle, Eli< in the garment industry since he too lived with daunting cash flow issues--he needing to buy velvet in March for clothes that would hopefully be sold in September.

Factors were not nice people. Since Uncle Morty could never secure their "loans," he was forced to give them a piece of the business--in fact a controlling piece. Off the books of course, with Eli listed as the sole owner. He lived that way for years, from month to month, eking out a modest living. But basking in the pride of owning his own business--at least on paper.

His dream was to get a big order from the A&P or Food Fair. This would be such a big order that he would at last be released from the futures-factor cycle and in fact reclaim his own business.

This fantasy came true.

One day, out of nowhere, he got a call from the Macy's food buyer (Macy's at that time had the fanciest, highest quality, highest volume meat store in the City right there in its then one flagship store at the corner of 8th Avenue and 34th Street). The most prominent New Yorkers sent their cooks there to buy prime meats; the most exclusive restaurants sent their chefs there every day to buy the most selective meats and delicacies. Macy's at the time was about much more than mass marketing Levi jeans.

So when the Macy’s meat buyer called Uncle Morty and placed an order for a thousand tongues Morty saw it as his way back to prosperity as well as a way to enter the world of "quality"--Macy's meat store after all was the place where the uptown goyim shopped.

But this magnificent life changing opportunity also presented a conundrum--because of Macy's reputation and buying power they told Uncle Morty not only how many tongues they needed but also how much per pound he could charge them. The problem--he had bought the 1,000 tongues via the futures market for more per pound than Macy's was willing to pay! They planned a special tongue event and thus demanded them from him at a price that would allow Macy's to turn a profit even after placing the tongues on sale.

So what to do. Uncle Morty was constitutionally unable to turn down an order of this kind (after all his customers were places such as Willie's Meat Market on Church Avenue in Brooklyn, where a big order was for two dozen tongues) and all he pleas about how much he had paid for the tongues and how much he would lose on every pound did not move the Macy's buyer. He had a sale planned and fixed numbers in his head. So Morty of course said yes and promised them the 1,000 tongues by next Friday.

I was working for him at the time and among my specialties was injecting the pickling liquid into the tongues. I did this by using a huge syringe attached to a pump that was inserted into a vein at the base of the tongue (the schlong—don’t ask) which then pumped in the brine. The factory was of course federally inspected--this meant that the resident inspectors were changed every six months so as to limit the possibility of corruption. Corruption included over-pumping tongues when pickling them. But of course we managed to find a way around this. Cash in blank envelopes was always helpful. That also was one of my specialties--the delivery of such envelopes.

The federal law allowed us to pump up a two pound tongue to double its size and weight. Uncle Morty, though, had something else in mind for the Macy’s tongues. While the inspectors were on a day long break, with their envelopes firmly in hand, he had me pump the tongues up to triple their original size--to six pounds per tongue. This would mean that he could deliver the tongues to Macy's at a net price that would at least allow him to break even. And perhaps more important--to enter into the goyisher world of fine meats.

The following Friday he proudly and personally delivered the 1,000 tongues to Macy's (with me driving the truck). The buyer was there to receive them and to pay Morty--unfortunately by check. He made note of the tongues colossal size--he had never seen tongues like that. Morty told him that they came from a specially bred herd and that he had made an extra (expensive) effort to secure them for the Macy's order. The buyer appeared to be impressed.

The tongues went on sale the next day and I visited to see them on display in Macy's elegantly iced cabinets. Though I was there for just half an hour, there was a run on these magnificent items: no one had ever seen tongues of this gargantuan size nor at such a price. They were selling like hot cakes.

When I reported this to Uncle Morty he was ecstatic, feeling he was on his way to full respectability and financial security. He would be able to pay his loan sharks and recover control of his business and wouldn't Macy's, coming off this great success, see him to be their provider of choice for his full range of meat products--Paramount hams (the company name), corned beef, pastrami, and of course tongues.

All was well until Monday afternoon. Back at the plant, the phone started ringing. The calls were from irate Macy's tongue customers. All complaining that when they went to steam their magnificent Paramount tongues, to prepare them for dinner (needing to stuff them, because of their size, into huge pots), when they uncovered the pots, after just a half hour of steaming, the tongues appeared to be about one third the size they were before the steaming.

The next series of calls was from the Macy's buyer--all not returned. But he did leave a message for Uncle Morty with Phyllis, Paramount's zaftig secretary (she is another story unto herself). In essence, the messages said, Don't even bother to deposit the check for the tongues since Macy's had already stopped payment.

Morty came looking for me. I was hiding in one of the huge meat lockers crouched between racks of hams ready to be moved into the smoking oven. Phyllis had alerted me that Morty was looking to blame me for over-pumping the tongues.

In fact, he was coming to hide with me in the cooler because the factors had heard about the Macy's fiasco and were on their way to collect, one way or the other. I avoided Morty and somehow he managed to fool the factors that day--they never thought to look in the freezer.

But the day of reckoning from another source soon arrived. While struggling to keep his books in balance and to have some money to pay his own apartment rent, he had neglected to pay the U.S. Government the payroll taxes he had been withholding from his employees. You can run and maybe hide from the factors, but the Feds are another matter. Even though he was just the owner on paper, he was held accountable, tried and convicted, and spent a little time in jail (the family's darkest secret).

But while Morty was "upstate" (in a "sanitarium," recovering for TB we were told), Paramount continued and did generate some income that kept his family going. All transactions were in cash; but since Uncle Morty owed the government back taxes, he of course did not want them to know about this small stream of money. Thus that cash went to my mother who kept it in her safe deposit box (along with her engagement ring).

Escorting her weekly with the cash to the Greenpoint Savings Bank on MacDonald Avenue, to stash it and occasionally to withdraw some, was among the best times of my young life. Because at long last I was involved in mobster-like activity--my career plans were beginning to take shape.

But that's yet another story!

August 9, 2017--World of My Uncles

I've been rereading Irving Howe's brilliant World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life they Found and Made.

I read it when it was first published 41 years ago, but now, at this late(r) stage of my life, it is more meaningful.

My maternal grandparents made that journey in 1913 from Poland to New York City. Years later, still a child I heard harrowing stories about their life of struggle in the shtetl of Tulowice and the bloody pogroms that swept over them and convinced them it was time to leave before it became more than just bloody.

I knew my grandfather came first and managed somehow to save enough money working as a baker to send, two years later, for my grandmother and their five children, including my then five-year-old mother.

I knew they began life in America in a cold-water, one-bedroom apartment in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and then after a number of years moved to a more wholesome and spacious flat in pre-hipster Brooklyn.

I knew that two of my aunts were active in the garment workers union and as suffragettes marched proudly and frequently in support of women's right to vote. This finally was possible as the result of the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

I knew that my mother trained to be a teacher and with "Mooney" as her last name (Mooney, substituting for Munya, was assigned to them at Ellis Island by an Irish immigration officer) and with her blue eyes, she was able to "pass" as gentile and thereby find a teaching job in the NYC public school system, at that time controlled and largely populated, again, by the Irish.

But I knew nothing of their inner lives, especially what they believed and hoped for other than that their children and grandchildren would have "a better life." If by that they meant economically, all managed to do so.

But with World of Our Fathers echoing within me, evoking memories I had not for decades revisited, more of those inner realities are becoming clearer to me. Including my own spirit as, I suppose, I too have been passing.

For example, I learned from Howe how most immigrants experienced three simultaneous dislocations--they left their homes and emigrated to new ones in America; they needed to find ways to support themselves--most had lived rural lives and now needed to become viable in a city of strivers; and under pressure to Americanize they largely abandoned religious orthodoxy and over time even the embracing and comforting culture of Yiddishkeit.

And so what were they left with beyond hoping for better lives for their children?

Taking the place of Judaism itself and the security that Yiddish culture offered, they turned to Zionism (calling for a homeland for Jews in Palestine), unionization (to improve working conditions), and then Socialism and for many Communism (to heal the world).

And they also began to shape a new culture for themselves that centered around Yiddish poetry, folk stories, and theater.

On reflection I now understand better what my extended family, especially my Uncle Morty was urging. This was not always easy to infer as he spoke mainly Yiddish, English haltingly, and I spoke English, with a little halting Yiddish.

He would place me beside him on his collapsing sofa and read in Yiddish Sholom Aleichem stories that appeared in the newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward (affectionally referred to all as the Forverts). He knew of course that the Yiddish was beyond my capacities but I am certain now that he cared more that I absorb the sound and comfort, the soul of that hybrid language than follow the thread of Aleichem's simple narratives.

And then, in his halting English, he would read to me from the other paper he took, The Daily Worker. In this instance he cared less about the intricacy of its Communist orthodoxies than he wanted me to take in some of its fervor.

So now, rereading World of Our Fathers I understand better Yiddish critic B. Rivkin, who Howe quotes--

A huge mass of potential readers was gathering in the cities. Even if they hadn't wished to, they really had no choice but to learn Yiddish. It was the only language that could gradually lead them into the life of the new country. . . . They felt themselves lost in a "desert" where men seemed like grains of sand and the new language, English, was difficult to learn. So they naturally turned back to Yiddish. . . . Even complete illiterates--and there were quite a few among the early immigrants--as well as the many half-illiterates, who could spell out a few words in the Hebrew prayer books, now troubled to learn the alphabet in order at least to be able to read a daily Yiddish paper. 

Even more, I now understand Howe--

Is there anything comparable in the whole modern period? An uprooted people, a broken culture, a literature releasing the crude immediacies of plebeian life, a once provincial in accent and universalist in its claims. As their lives fell into routine, the Jewish immigrants displayed strong if primitive cultural appetites. 

And especially the final word from Rivkin--

Poems and stories helped them to understand their new environment . . . and most of all themselves. They sought in literature the same thing they wanted in a newspaper: a way of becoming somewhat less of a "greenhorn," a way of escaping a little from their loneliness. And when a poem and story gave them a certain enlightenment about mankind in general, the greenhorns began to feel they were becoming a little Americanized.

In a different mode, tomorrow I will post a story I wrote some years ago about Uncle Morty's other life.

June 24, 2014--Cousin Henry-Hank-Henri

Cousin Hank ran out of lives on Sunday and his funeral is this morning.

He faced death so many times, including over the years being placed in hospice care but then reviving, that we came to take for granted every time he was sent to the ICU that this was just another example of Hank being Henry.

When he first joined the family, marrying Cousin Nina, he was introduced to us as Hank, a familiar form of his real name, Henry. But years later, when I came to know he was in fact Henri, these name variations made perfect sense. They were just another iteration of Jewish immigrant life--get anglicized so one could try to "pass," avoid quotas, maybe get into college, attempt to slip through life unscathed, and, if possible, eek out some measure of happiness.

Henry-Hank-Henri managed to achieve all of this while growing more in love with Nina over nearly 65 years.

To me, coming of age in post-World War Two Brooklyn, he was the only family exotic.

There were members of the family who came from Europe--my mother included--but they were Middle-European shtetl Jews, and we lived in a neighborhood among so many others that neither their Yiddishkeit, foods, customs, nor consciousness seemed out of the ordinary. Indeed, they and the lives they led were the ordinary.

Henry-Hank-Henri was to me anything but ordinary.

His English was German inflected, not Polish-Russian-polyglot English. He was from Austria, not an obliterated village "near Warsaw." He drank espresso black, smoked unfiltered French cigarettes, and during the din of family gatherings remained non-judgementally detached, puffing and sipping, taking it all in as if we were the exotics.

For a kid dreaming of getting away, of making something different of my life, I was not thinking about wandering around in the Pale of Settlement searching for my Polish-village roots but wanted something cosmopolitan. Not that I at the time knew what cosmopolitan was, but Henry-Hank-Henri had the aura of that difference and I spent a lot of time studying him.

Secretly, I tried black coffee (hated it) and, with candy cigarettes, practiced holding them between my second and third fingers as Henri did. I also took to ordering Compari and Soda--or as he would ask for it, "Compari-Soda," as an homage to him.

Sad to say, the last time we were together, for the first time I asked him questions about his earlier life, a life up to then I had only imagined and shaped for my own transgressive purposes.

What he shared did not diminish my own version of his life and genealogy.

He indeed was Henri.