“And music, and dancing, with all the food you could possibly eat!” Murray (left) and Sol Handwerker in Europe, 1945.
FOR THE MAJORITY of 11.5 million men and women who served abroad during World War II, the experience represented an indelible and formative part of their lives. Murray and Sol were no different. They were both in the U.S. Army in Europe for over two years, and they both returned to the States changed men.
Murray spent a good portion of his service in France and came away as a confirmed Francophile, impressed with the people, the culture, and, most importantly for his future dealings with Nathan’s Famous, the food.
The idea of cuisine—as opposed to eats—entered his personal makeup. He would forever afterward aspire to fine dining, white tablecloths, sit-down meals. The oldest Handwerker son’s time in Europe worked to separate him from the basic “give ’em and let ’em eat” philosophy of his father. The developing friction did not express itself immediately, but it would soon act as a wedge that came between Murray and Nathan.
Sol’s time with the U.S. Army could best be summed up by the fact that he spent a stretch of his time in Switzerland studying playwriting. He visited art museums. Although he did enter Dresden soon after the city was leveled by Allied bombing and was among the soldiers present at the April 25, 1945, meeting of the Russian and American armies in the city of Torgau on the Elbe River, he never saw actual battle.
This state of affairs is not so odd as it sounds. For the almost two million American soldiers in the European theater, the experience varied widely, from the bloody beaches of Normandy and the horrific winter conditions during the Battle of the Bulge to less dangerous service like Sol’s.
Murray and Sol were quite literally brothers in arms. Incredibly enough, given the absolute chaos Europe was back then, they managed to meet up. Sol heard that his brother was nearby, found a car and driver, and sought Murray out. The two G.I.s had a short but emotional reunion amid the fog of war.
Murray had gone overseas first and returned first also. His parents greeted their all-grown-up boy like a conquering hero. “They were so enthralled,” Dorothy remembered. She portrays Nathan as spreading the news throughout the Coney Island community.
“Thank God Murray’s home,” said the proud papa. “He’s right here!”
Sol took a slightly different approach to his homecoming. One morning in 1946 the First Army headquarters phoned Nathan.
“The first American soldier to meet the Russians at the crossing of the Elbe has returned to the States,” said the officer’s voice on the other end of the line, an embellishment of the truth. “This G.I.’s first request was for a frank at Nathan’s.”
Could Mr. Handwerker possibly accommodate a heroic boy in uniform? Nathan didn’t have to be asked twice. He quickly decorated the store with red-white-and-blue banners normally reserved for July 4th. He hired three musicians to provide patriotic songs in preparation for the G.I.’s arrival.
The soldier arrived with a public-relations officer and a photographer who posed him munching a Nathan’s Famous frankfurter. Nathan came out of the store and pushed his way through the milling crowd, announcing “This frankfurter is on the house!”
His jaw dropped when he realized the G.I. was Sol, a wide grin on his face and a discharge emblem on his uniform. A miracle! And one that tested the cardiac systems of both parents.
Nathan was overjoyed. In celebration of the safe return of his sons, he commissioned a Sefer Torah at the local synagogue. The creation of a new holy scroll was an elaborate, highly prized, and expensive undertaking, a mitzvah that did great honor to Murray and Sol. The inauguration celebration, the Hachnasat Sefer Torah, is based on traditions that are at least three thousand years old. This one filled the streets around the store with dancing, singing, and feasting.
“The entire Coney Island was there,” remembered family friend Claire Kamiel. “All the food that you could possibly eat was brought in by Nathan Handwerker. They walked with the scroll through the streets. And music, and dancing, with all the food you could possibly eat! Nobody was questioned. Only one thing: help yourself, enjoy! Nathan Handwerker!”
In the aftermath of the war’s upheavals, displacements, and horrors, the mood in both the country at large and around Nathan’s Famous centered on an overwhelming urge to return to some kind of normalcy. It was probably a vain hope. Monstrous revelations concerning the murder of six million victims in the Holocaust were beginning to filter over from Europe. Mushroom clouds hung above two cities in Japan. The world could never really be the same again.
But Nathan tried. His vision of normal was simple. He wanted his sons working at the store, continuing to learn the business, making themselves ready to take over when, in some unimaginable future, the founder would be ready to retire. At first, both veterans dutifully fell in line and took jobs under Nathan’s watchful, hopeful eye. But they also indulged in other, grander plans, both entering college under the GI Bill.
Before the war, Murray had attended the University of Pennsylvania, but he returned to the States with other ideas. He enrolled at New York University and graduated with a degree in French. The boy who had so impressed his young girlfriend with a mastery of Chopin was essentially doubling down on his high-culture enthusiasms. How fluency in French might serve him at the store was a question largely left unasked. The father who had never spent a day in class (outside of a brief brush with Hebrew lessons) was probably too impressed with his son’s college degree to voice any doubts.
“Nathan tried to teach his sons what he knew,” said Jay Cohen. “I’m sure that he saw that some things they couldn’t learn no matter what college they went to.”
To some extent, Nathan himself was caught in the middle. To the old guard, he was a god, his way being the only way. He desperately wanted his sons in the business. But he wanted them there on his terms. The difference between the two camps cropped up constantly.
“Murray, you’ve got to be on the line,” Nathan would tell his son. “You’ve got to be in the store.”
“No, no, no,” Murray would respond. “I have managers for that.”
“Nathan was not an office person,” said Jay Cohen. “As soon as lunchtime came around, he would be outside there, watching the potatoes and how they were cooked, how the frankfurters were cooked, and if this or that was served properly and so on and so forth.”
That kind of vigilance was hugely responsible for the success of the store. But Murray and Sol could not bring themselves to follow their father’s lead.
“The damned business was Nathan’s life, and his family probably came second,” Cohen said. “His children were not into the nitty-gritty of the business. Nathan was into the nitty-gritty. He was there behind the potato chopper. He saw to it that you understood what he wanted on a daily basis. But his sons were not into that. They were not into the nitty-gritty.”
No one could challenge Murray’s devotion to Nathan’s Famous. His presence definitely relieved some pressure from his father. With the able Joe Handwerker installed as general manager and purchasing agent, and with his eldest son also taking larger responsibility for running the overall business, Nathan felt that he and Ida could at long last absent themselves from the store for extended periods. He didn’t want to retire, and he still saw himself as very much in charge, but he did want to step back.
Nathan and Ida’s winter sojourns in Florida at first lasted weeks and then stretched to months. They always returned for the season. Winter was a relatively slack time in Coney Island, anyway. There came to be a rhythm to the flow of power at the store. Nathan and Ida always thought it was their patriotic duty to vote. They would wait until after Election Day in November, then they would decamp, turning the business over to Joe and Murray. Months later, the couple would come back to take up their responsibilities during the busy summer rush.
“When Nathan was in Florida, Nathan’s Famous was foremost on his mind,” said Marsha Abramson. “There were calls from him and questions that had to be answered. When he came back to Coney Island in April, you felt his presence. Things started changing as soon as he came back.”
Nathan was a “trust but verify” kind of person. Whenever he left the store for his Florida sojourns, he would always fully reassert himself upon his return.
“It wasn’t a week in the spring when he got back [from vacation] that he changed every padlock in the building,” recalled Jay Cohen. “That man must have gone through seven thousand padlocks in the years that I knew him, because that’s how he operated.”
Transitions were hard. The handover of authority was always a little difficult. Speaking of his father, Sol put it simply: “He couldn’t not be in charge.”
Even from Florida, the store was only a phone call away. Murray remembered a brutal winter day in December 1947, soon after he returned from the war. His father was on vacation and, as Murray phrased it, “the famous store was me.” He and Dorothy lived on Twenty-Third Street between Avenues M and N at that time. Snow started to fall the day after Christmas and didn’t stop until almost twenty-seven inches had piled up. Over his wife’s objections, Murray pulled on his boots and set out for Nathan’s Famous.
“You can’t!” Dorothy wailed, about to be left behind with the couple’s first child, Steve. “The snow is so thick on the roof, it’s going to collapse. You can’t leave me alone here!”
But neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night could stay Murray from his appointed job. “I walked four miles to get to the store from my house, down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island. Not a car was in the street. No cabs.”
When he finally made it to Nathan’s Famous, he found many of the employees marooned there, sleeping overnight because the subways were halted. That morning, the phone rang. Murray answered. It was Nathan, calling from Florida.
“What are you doing in the store?”
“I’m here,” Murray said. “We’re open.”
“How did you get there?”
“I walked.”
“You’re crazy. There’s fourteen inches of snow!”
“Twenty-seven,” Murray corrected him.
A pause. “Did you do any business?” Nathan asked.
“Believe it or not, we sold 150 frankfurters already.”
Murray felt responsible. With Nathan gone, he had to be there. But the store’s clientele had to be there, too. Even in the decade’s worst snowstorm, they heard the siren call of Nathan’s franks. Murray went on to serve six thousand hot dogs that blizzard-bound day.
“People drove up and, so help me God, they didn’t get out of the car,” he remembered. “They drove on the sidewalk, parallel to the counter, opened up the window to the car and called out to us. ‘Four frankfurters!’ We handed the frankfurters directly over to them.”
* * *
Murray was an able steward of his father’s legacy and looked constantly to innovate. But the disagreements that arose between Nathan and Murray became a source of friction around the store during the postwar years.
A prime case in point came when Murray proposed adding seafood to the store’s menu. His father instantly came out against the idea. He thought the move might turn the store’s traditional customers away.
“You want to do seafood?” Nathan said. “People think our frankfurters are kosher. You’re going to sell shrimp? They’re gonna say, ‘Wait a second.’ You’ll kill the business!”
“I never tell people it’s kosher,” Murray responded. “It’s kosher-style.”
“People will stop buying the hot dogs,” Nathan said, thinking of his clientele of observant Jews. “They’re not supposed to buy where there’s nonkosher food.”
“Don’t worry about it, Pop. It’s a new world. The people coming back from Europe, the soldiers, the thousands of soldiers, what did they eat in Italy? What did they eat in Germany and France? They weren’t worried about kosher.”
Round and round went the argument, Murray pushing, Nathan resisting. Finally, Nathan retreated from the field, taking a long winter vacation. “If you want to do it, then I’m going to go to Florida. Do it on your own. I want nothing to do with it.”
With his father gone, Murray was free to do what he wanted. He installed his seafood counter, offering shrimp, fresh abalone, soft-shell crabs, lobster rolls, and a chowder made with fresh-shucked clams.
In terms of Jewish dietary strictures, many of the seafood offerings were trayf. Murray took a calculated risk that customers would embrace the new menu items. After all, didn’t pioneer frankfurter man Charles Feltman start out selling clams?
In addition to the seafood counter, Murray also decided that Nathan’s Famous would be dragged into the contemporary age of proper food service hygiene. Back at the dawn of time, Nathan had installed original shelving made out of wood, a no-no in terms of modern public health concerns, since wood could be a breeding ground for germs.
“I came in early in the morning one day, and I went to the counters in the kitchen,” Murray recalled. “I saw a couple of cockroaches, which just sickened me.”
He confronted Sinta, the absolute ruler of the store’s kitchen. “How the hell can you work in here every day? How do you do that?”
Sinta told him that the kitchen staff had to replace the cardboard lining on the shelves every week, it got so battered in the ordinary course of doing business. Murray ripped the freshly laid cardboard off and dumped it into a waste can.
“Strip the whole counter down,” he ordered the cook.
“How are we going to work here?” Sinta asked.
“You’re working in the other kitchen,” Murray said, referring to a secondary space at the back of the store. “You’re doing a section at a time. I want everything stripped and thrown out.”
Murray knew that wood was unacceptable for kitchen shelving and that the modern standard was sanitary stainless steel. “I called my stainless-steel man, who became very wealthy because of me. I told him to make measurements and that I wanted stainless-steel shelves in the entire kitchen and in the entire refrigeration section.”
“Murray, I’ve got other customers,” the man complained.
“No, no, I’m your only customer right now. You have to help me, because I have to change this whole kitchen. I don’t want to see wood, and I don’t want to see cardboard in the kitchen at all.”
Out with the old wood, in with the new stainless. Murray had the ancient floor planking ripped out, too, and laid new concrete in the kitchens as well as along the counter spaces up front. The clock was ticking, since Nathan would soon be returning from his Florida retreat. When he did show up back at the store, he was confronted by the new world order.
Nathan said not a word. To receive a compliment from Pop was like pulling teeth, “well done” being an almost unheard of phrase around the store. Nathan believed that praise only rendered workers complacent. More than that, a good word might make them greedy.
“We had a little guy who was working on the counter,” Jay Cohen recalled. “The guy was running around all over the place, really energetic. With a slip of the mouth, Nathan said ‘good work’ to the kid. The kid said, ‘Hey, boss, how about a raise?’ Nathan ran. He never once said good morning to that guy after that incident.”
As Sol articulated it, referring to his father, “He was less inclined to compliment somebody on doing something well than to criticize someone for doing something wrong. He was not prone to complimenting people too much, especially his sons.”
Giving a rueful laugh, Sol went on. “He took it for granted that they were going to do something good and that they should do something good. It was expected of them. But that seemed to be his old-school approach to personnel management.”
It was all the more of a miracle, then, that Nathan extended an olive branch to his son when the seafood counter took off in a spectacular way, reeling in profits for the store.
“You had a good idea, Murray,” Nathan said, finally giving credit where it was due, the terse compliment coming as if he were being charged by the word.
Nathan remained wary and slightly cynical about his son’s penchant for innovation. There would be many more ideas emanating from Murray’s young, ambitious, and very active brain. Some of them would be great, terrifically successful along the lines of the seafood menu or eminently necessary like modernizing the kitchen facilities.
Others would lead the business into difficulties.
* * *
When he returned from his military service, Sol went in a direction very different from his older brother.
“I was not particularly anxious to work [at Nathan’s Famous] when I got out of the army. I went to NYU and then worked in a machine shop. I wanted to be on my own. I wanted to be independent. I felt [working at the store] was going to be a difficult thing, with my father and his personality and my brother and his personality. I was the odd man out.”
If Murray came back from Europe with visions of French culture dancing in his head, Sol had proletarian dreams. He became a union shop steward at his new working-class factory job. He continued to be active in left-leaning causes, which in those days meant labor issues and peace initiatives.
The Cold War was ramping up, and the Iron Curtain was slamming down. The American right wing was busy whipping up anti-communist fervor. Almost overnight, the country found itself in the Orwellian position of seeing its former Russian allies suddenly transformed and demonized as the enemy.
As the postwar era bled into the Eisenhower fifties, witch hunts of political radicals began in earnest. It was a bad time to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, which Sol had decided to become. This put him further at odds not only with Murray, whose politics increasingly veered toward moderation, but also with Nathan, the very prototype of a capitalist.
Nathan never forgot his poor upbringing and always arrayed himself on the side of the underdog. So he could be said to be at least partially responsible for Sol’s leftward leanings. But Nathan was also leery of getting too directly involved in politics and chuckled at Sol’s socialist passions.
In reaction to the proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the fiery demagoguery of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, Sol felt that he was vulnerable, and he briefly fled to California. He was probably too small a fish for the red-baiters to fry, but the mood of the country was dark and unsettled. Better safe than sorry. He soon returned to Brooklyn.
On a train ride from New York to Chicago for a Decoration Day peace rally in 1952, Sol found a seat next to a literal fellow traveler, a Brooklyn college student named Minnie Geller, who was headed to the same event. She and Sol had friends in common. Their romance kicked off on the trip, somewhere along the rail line in the vicinity of Cleveland.
“I remember being very impressed by his lips,” Minnie recalled. “They were very luscious.”
When the two returned home to New York, they began dating. Minnie knew the young Sol only as a union organizer and a machine shop lathe tool operator. He didn’t tell her about his Nathan’s Famous connection until they had been seeing each other for months.
“I came from a working-class family,” Minnie said. “I knew poverty. Maybe he was skeptical about anyone who might be interested in him for his background. But when he finally told me, I didn’t recognize his dad’s name. It really meant nothing to me.”
Sol and Minnie made friends among his fellow workers at the machine shop. “We had a nice black couple that we used to go out with, to picnics with the guys from the shop. It was really, really nice.” She laughed with the reminiscence. “Sol had a lot of commie friends.”
Her parents, Chaim and Dora Geller, were simpatico with Sol’s political views. “My parents were very pleased with the fact that he was a progressive person, fighting for good and just causes, which my parents liked very much. Sol’s parents weren’t progressive. But as long as Sol was, I guess that was good enough for my mom and dad. They liked that.” Dorothy Frankel’s parents were also committed leftists.
Sol finally introduced Minnie to Nathan and Ida at a dinner where he also proposed marriage, pulling her into the bathroom for privacy and presenting his sweetheart with what Minnie characterized as a “beautiful” wedding ring. “I guess he was shy or very bashful or whatever,” Minnie recalled. “He didn’t want anyone to be there except the two of us.”
As befits a pair of freethinking iconoclasts, Minnie and Sol lived together before marriage, a relative rarity in those days. They also did not abide by gender-restrictive wedding traditions. They went together to pick out the bride’s dress. They also arrived together at Casa del Rey, the banquet hall on Coney Island Avenue where the ceremony was to take place. It was Nathan and Ida who brought the tradition to the event, fattening up the guest list and underwriting the elaborate reception—not exactly a working-class affair.
Always, the store beckoned. When Minnie and Sol were about to have their first child, Nathan decided the proletariat experiment of the machine shop would have to end. He dispatched Murray as an emissary to lure Sol back to Nathan’s Famous.
“Murray came to our apartment,” Minnie recalled. “I believe I was pregnant with Nora at the time. He came with the request from Nathan that Sol return to work at the business. He was going to have a family, Murray said, and this was what he needed to do.”
Murray added a sweetener to the deal. It is unclear if the suggestion came from Nathan and was only relayed by Sol’s big brother. If Sol returned to work at the store, Murray said, he would have extra disposable income—funds that he could then donate to progressive causes, as both Murray and Nathan knew Sol would want to do. It would not be the first time that the wages of capitalism would be applied to further the goals of socialism.
Sol yielded. Working at his father’s business would definitely be a lot more lucrative than slaving away at the machine shop or organizing labor meetings. He was going to have children to think of now.
In the midst of this, Murray performed a sort of rearguard action to protect his position at the store.
“He wanted a written commitment from our father,” Sol said. “When my father was gone or couldn’t run the business anymore, Murray wanted it in writing that he would run it, that he would be in charge, no questions asked. No threat from me. He wouldn’t have to answer to me for anything. My father wasn’t willing to do that—which was interesting, I thought, but he wasn’t.”
Murray believed because he brought Sol back into the business, that his brother owed it to him to follow his lead. “That was a source of conflict,” said Marsha Abramson, who worked with both Murray and Sol on the business’s PR.
Even without written assurances, by the time Sol came back to work at the store, Murray had a firm grip on the reins of power. He had been his father’s second-in-command for five years and had settled into a management position. His innovation of bringing in a seafood menu was paying big dividends. On the other hand, Sol’s years of independence had cemented his position as an outsider. He was having to play catch-up, and his big brother refused to help.
“He wasn’t interested in helping me learn,” Sol recalled. “Whenever I asked him about anything, he told me, ‘Go out and learn the way I did, on your own.’”
The dismissal burned in Sol’s mind. He would quote Murray’s words again and again, to his wife and, later in life, to anyone who would listen. Go out and learn the way I did, on your own.
“I found that hard to understand,” Sol said. “If I was in his position, I would have been happy to have somebody learn as much as they could and help relieve me of some of the pressures of running the business.”
Marsha Abramson had a measured opinion about the different philosophies of the two men. Sol, she said, “was a very thoughtful, very analytic person. Before he would make a decision he wanted to know all the facts, the positives and the negatives. He would weigh them very carefully and he didn’t rush into decisions.”
Murray, on the other hand, “would move much faster. He was impatient, shall we say impulsive. If he wanted something done it had to be done immediately. There was a clash of personalities. Sol said, ‘I want to know more about it before I make a decision.’ Murray said, ‘I am the older brother and if I say this, this is right.’”
Three years after his brother’s successful expansion into seafood, Sol proposed installing a delicatessen counter in the store. This also involved an expansion from the core menu items of franks and hamburgers. The deli offered sliced meat sandwiches of every kind, and it, too, proved very successful.
The location of the two counters, seafood and delicatessen, symbolized the growing estrangement of the brothers. Sol’s deli opened onto Schweikerts Walk, facing west. Seafood was in the opposite corner of the store. The two new counters were located as far as they could be from each other, while still remaining within the confines of the same building.
“I was very unhappy,” Sol recalled of this period. “It was difficult when I came home at night. I was upset by things that had occurred during the day, the things that Murray had said. I was affronted by many things, because he didn’t understand that I wasn’t a competitor. He saw me as a competitor. It was impossible.”
Much of this was left unspoken at the time. Sol found it difficult to speak to his brother about the situation. When asked, Murray always declined to comment on family frictions.
“I never talked about our differences with Murray,” Sol said. “There was never any discussion about it, never. He never brought it up. He never wanted to talk about it, so why was I interested in talking about it? I would only aggravate myself. So what’s the point?”
Something had to give, and soon enough, it did. But it was Murray, not Sol, who would be the first one to leave Nathan’s Famous. And he kicked himself out of the nest all on his own.