The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.—Sir Walter Bilbey
On Saturday, at seven in the morning, the black rotary phone in our rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment shrieked. My parents’ bedroom door opened, and Mom schlepped to our telephone, located in the hallway between the bedroom, dinette, and bathroom. From my bed in the dinette, my head next to the refrigerator, I watched her plotz onto the chair next to the phone. The air whooshed out of the vinyl seat cover.
“Hello,” she said to Uncle Harry.
It had to be Uncle Harry. He was the only one who called on Saturday at seven in the morning.
The dinette had no door, and I could hear his nasal voice through the phone.
“Hello, Helen. You didn’t leave yet? When are you coming?”
Uncle Harry unsheathed what I had learned at an early age was the ultimate Jewish motivator—guilt. No one sat down and taught me that; no one had to. In me, it just grew.
“I have deliveries to make, and I don’t want to leave Joe alone. Half the merchandise will sprout legs and walk out the door.”
Uncle Harry led with the line about Uncle Joe because he knew that would get to Mom. She felt bad for Uncle Joe; if he stood all day, his phlebitis acted up. If she didn’t show up, and Uncle Harry was out, Uncle Joe, the brother she favored, never got a break and stood all day. Mom’s priority was her older brother, not the merchandise.
Her voice quivered. “Soon!”
She slammed the receiver down, but not before Uncle Harry got in his usual last three words. The words that drove my mom nuts. “You belong here.”
Uncle Harry and Uncle Joe worked at the Store full-time; that meant if they were awake, they were working. The Store was open seven days a week, from seven in the morning until midnight, when they went home to sleep. In 1966, they had sold their ancestral Hegeman Avenue house and moved to the First Avenue apartment six blocks from the Store to eliminate commuting time. All my uncles ever did was work. No vacations, no movies, no Broadway shows, no wives, no home life—just work.
The Store was not just a livelihood; it was their life. My uncles knew nothing else, or so I thought. Years later I learned the true reason for Uncle Harry’s early morning Shabbat calls: he was alone in the Store and couldn’t leave to pick up stuff or make deliveries until Mom showed up because Uncle Joe insisted on attending Shabbat services at the First Roumanian–American Congregation on Rivington Street, which had started an early-morning service at Uncle Joe’s request.
Until I turned thirteen and prematurely graduated from Judaism, I walked alone on those Shabbat mornings to the Kingsway Jewish Center on the corner of Nostrand Avenue and Kings Highway in Brooklyn. Dad never joined me. I enjoyed services and seeing my friends. The marble cake at the kiddush after services wasn’t bad either.
My mom’s Shabbat mornings did not involve synagogue. Every Saturday, after Uncle Harry’s call, as far back as I can remember, Mom left our apartment and walked eleven blocks to the Kings Highway subway station, took the D train to DeKalb Avenue, and changed to the double R train, which deposited her at Broadway and Eighth. Then, she walked across town for over half a mile to the Store, where she stood all day long selling bread and cake. Mom never came home before 9 p.m., and for her efforts, she received only whatever leftover bread, cake, or cookies she could carry home.
Mom not only worked every Saturday but during the week as well, filling in when her brothers had to go to the dentist or the doctor, or perhaps even take time to get a haircut. She was never paid. Family members working for free were Uncle Harry’s most trusted labor source. Over the years, a rotating cast of nonrelated hangers-on did make local deliveries or pick up coffee for my uncles in exchange for bread or cake. But at the cash register, Uncle Harry trusted only family.
My memories of the Store begin with one of those Saturday evenings. When I was eight or nine, Dad and I picked Mom up and took her home. Dad didn’t often pick Mom up, but when he did, it was always memorable.
Dad turned onto Ninth Street and double-parked in front of the Store, a tiny one-story shack wedged between two four-story apartment buildings. The fading autumn light shone through the adjacent apartment buildings’ black fire escapes, which pushed down on each side of the Store’s flat roof. Underwear flapped in the breeze on clotheslines suspended between each apartment floor overhead, making the Store appear like a sinking Chinese junk with ragged sails. Next door, a shoemaker replaced soles behind the black cat’s paw sign in his storefront window. And next door to the shoe repairman, the local Democratic Club held court in a one-room office.
Above the Store’s front door, a sign read “BAKERY HOME STYLE BREAD ROLLS CAKE AND COOKIES.” The handwritten capital letters were a bold orange color, and a rainbow and a sun were painted at each end. The sign reflected life in the East Village in the sixties. The Grateful Dead rocked the Fillmore East around the corner on Second Avenue, and for a short time, Jimi Hendrix lived down the block. Young people packed the streets, and the air radiated with the sweet smell of pot.
“Hippies,” Uncle Harry would say.
As I closed the car door, I peered through the two large display windows flanking the Store’s front door to look for my mom. She was cutting a pumpernickel bread in half and didn’t notice me. The orange trim around the windows peeled in strips. One window was cracked; a long piece of gray duct tape ran across it diagonally. In each window, open shelves teemed with gray cardboard cake boxes—some closed, some open, some filled, some empty—and randomly strewn loaves of bread.
Pastries and cakes also filled the shelves: chocolate-chip muffins, French crullers, jelly donuts, cinnamon Danish, marble cake, huckleberry puffs, cherry rolls, linzer tarts, almond horns, crumb buns, apple strudel, bowties (plain and sugar coated), pineapple turnovers, pecan sticks, cheese babka, coffee cake, raisin loaf, devil’s food cake, dinner rings, sponge cake, and seven-layer cake. Uncle Harry told me that if I ate seven-layer cake with milk, it would be an eight-course meal. Whenever Uncle Harry told a joke I understood, which was not often, he made me laugh. Layered between, on top of, under, and inside the cake boxes were white paper bags filled with cookies. My favorites were the chocolate lace cookies Mom brought home as her pay because she knew I loved them.
I stepped into the alcove between the two front windows and peered through the glass front door. A forest of legs grew out of a wooden floor so old that it bowed. The Store was crowded, and I couldn’t open the front door to enter. Dad pushed his way in. That was how I learned the skills I needed later to enter NYC subway cars at rush hour: push first, then say excuse me. Dad now assumed his role as door monitor, not letting a new customer into the Store until an earlier arrival had left.
Inside was an even bigger mess than I had seen from outside. Next to Mom was a small radiator that kept you warm only if you stood within a few inches of it and leaned over. In the winter, Mom wore her coat underneath her smock. A black cat named Suzy napped on top of the heater, curled up in a grease-stained cake box. This was not the same Suzy who had greeted Mr. Cohn in 1947. Through the years, the cats would change, but my uncles always named them Suzy or, to memorialize the previous cat who had run away, Suzy-Q. Only female cats need apply for the job. If a particular Suzy found her way back to the Store pregnant, little Suzy-Q’s would soon be available for the asking.
The wooden shelves behind the counter were laden with uncovered breads strewn about with no semblance of order, like a trailer park after the twister hits. Labeling the shelves was for my uncles a foreign concept. The breads included rye, pumpernickel, black bread, mixed pumpernickel/rye with its ornate swirl, and six-grain bread, which Mom said was the healthiest of all.
In her steel gray smock, Mom bellowed in a loud, annoyed voice to the never-ending line of customers, “Next!” But she smiled when she noticed me. Her straight, light brown shoulder-length hair hung limp, always parted in the middle, ruler-straight, a few strands prematurely gray. On the counter before her was a white porcelain bread scale and a large knife that she used to cut bread and cake, and, often, her fingers. An ancient black cash register sat behind the raised center counter.
Several aging salamis hung from the ceiling behind Mom. I never understood why a bakery had salamis. I guessed that was what they ate for lunch with the black bread. Years later, Dad told me my uncles sold those salamis, and the owner of a competing bakery around the corner once accused my family of mixing milk and meat in a supposedly kosher bakery. Uncle Harry set the other bakery owner straight, challenging him to find a sign anywhere in the Store that said it was kosher. For that matter, he could have challenged him to find a sign in the Store listing prices. Prices were never posted. They varied, depending on the age of the merchandise, the time of day, the customer’s looks, and Uncle Joe’s mood. The only sign in the place was handwritten, in fading black marker on a piece of ripped cardboard thumbtacked to the front of a shelf. “In God we trust, all others pay cash.”
Uncle Joe stooped at the other end of the counter from my mother. Salamis hung behind him as well, making symmetry behind the counter. Uncle Joe was bowlegged and looked like he was about to keel over. His hair was speckled with gray, and he wore thick, Coke-bottle-bottom glasses with dark frames. He never smiled. But when Uncle Joe squeezed a rye bread slowly and deliberately as he took it off the shelf, he reminded me of a basketball referee checking a ball for air before tossing it up at center court to start the game.
Uncle Joe rarely spoke, but when he did, he could make a few words go a long way. Speaking of Uncle Harry, who called the shots in the Store because he had the business education his older brother lacked, Uncle Joe would say, “He’s the boss, and I’m the horse.”
Uncle Joe said “NEXT” even louder than Mom. Other than Shabbat morning, he rarely left the Store except on those occasions when he caught the morning service at the Sixth Street synagogue. Mom referred to Uncle Joe as Mr. Inside.
Both ends of the counter were open, and customers walked unchallenged behind it to get a better look at the seven-layer cakes in the display window or to give a rye bread a squeeze to see if it was fresh. On the customer side of the Store, built-in shelves held metal bins heaped with uncovered bagels and bialies that customers also smelled, squeezed, sneezed on, or shoplifted, depending on their inclination. The smell of the onion bagels and bialys overpowered all competitors. My favorite corner of the Store had a bin with prepackaged Hostess cupcakes.
I walked to the far end of the counter next to Uncle Joe, where an opening with no door led to a narrow, windowless back room that was more like a long closet. When I stood in the doorway, I could smell Suzy’s litter box on the floor next to the toilet. Cat urine overwhelmed the bread smell. To my left, a pile of empty cake boxes, stacked one atop another from floor to ceiling, defied both gravity and the fire code. In between these boxes to my left and the toilet facilities for man and beast to my right was a small chair and a table littered with the day’s newspaper, cake crumbs, used coffee cups, and packages of saccharine. The table had a cardboard covering with names and phone numbers scribbled all over it. And although I didn’t know it at the time, one number must have been Mr. Geary’s. Under the table was that month’s collection of umbrellas customers had forgotten and left in the Store. On a shelf above the table, a cassette player played classical music. One customer never paid with cash, and Uncle Harry had struck a deal with him to swap cassette tapes for his bread purchases.
Since Uncle Harry was out, and it was busy, Mom and Uncle Joe were both working the counter. When things slowed down, Uncle Joe would sleep in the chair in the back room, his head resting on a folded New York Post, then the newspaper of choice in my left-leaning family. The table also held an antique but still used bread slicer. Uncle Joe must have been very tired to sleep with his head right next to that slicing machine; it cut through bread with a sound that reminded me of a jet plane taking off.
Mom said, “Morton, sit. It will be a while until Mr. Outside comes back.”
Mom called Uncle Harry Mr. Outside because he was always either picking up stuff or delivering merchandise to restaurants. At least, that was what he said he was doing.
I didn’t mind staying; I loved the Store. It was an exciting place to me, packed with a choir of customers bickering over babka prices with Uncle Joe. There was surely more to see there than on the bare walls of our apartment back in Brooklyn. I sat down in the back room. I was hungry and had brought three packages of chocolate Hostess cupcakes with vanilla swirls down the middle. When I put the cupcakes on the table, the cardboard became gritty from the spilled saccharine granules. I inhaled the chalky white flour that puffed off the bottoms of the loaves Mom shuffled on the unlined shelves. Once in a while, she grabbed one and brought it to the back for slicing. To the frequent sound of the ringing of the cash register, I lost myself in the sports section of the Post.
Some years later, on Saturday, April 5, 1969, an article titled “East Ninth Street: A Mingling of Old World and Avant-Garde” appeared in the New York Times. The article discussed the stores of Ninth Street, which blended old-world Eastern European (still mostly Ukrainian) and Village bohemian. After praising the “full, rich urban life” that existed on the block, the article ended as follows:
Not too much of this impresses the lady in the Ninth Street Bakery. She’s been selling her cakes, cookies, and breads unfettered by cellophane wrapping for years. Her view of the chic universe springing up around her: Time goes, people keep eating.
That lady was my mom.