The Matzo Ball Heiress (4 page)

I have to grin. Jake is such a lovable screwball. Lately he has taken to wearing a white coat during the Passover season as if he is a Doctor of Matzo; he claims it doubles sales in the same way cinnamon and other baking scents do when piped through the ventilation system in shopping malls. Customers seem to think the matzo is more kosher when there’s a man in a white coat inspecting the halls.

But white coat or not, Jake can’t erase the ugly truths about America’s most famous Jewish dynasty.

I suspect matzo means money and disconnection to everyone in my family. Even to Jake, who puts up the best front. I can’t be the only Greenblotz who stares at a dividend check with ambivalence.

Interview with a Matzo Heiress

T
he interview! I can’t just lounge around in reverie. After a quickie shower, I put on my stripy blue-and-green silk blouse that I snapped up at Language during their August sample sale. I’m nearly out the door went it hits me that this is TV and a stripy blouse makes the screen go crazy, so I change into a dark red cashmere sweater I bought the same week at Barneys warehouse sale. During the cab ride downtown I pick off a few red lint balls on the sweater and ponder what new tidbits about Izzy I can give this Steve Meyers of unknown religious persuasion. There are stories amusing to Jake and me, like the time Jake removed the back drawer of his desk to give it a good clean. Along with three dimes so old they had portraits of Mercury on them, he found a set of false teeth. “Whose teeth are they? Izzy’s?” he laughed hysterically into the phone. The thought of the anonymous dentures amused me for weeks. But by my first traffic light I come to the conclusion that I ought to stick to the historical angle.

Ben Franklin didn’t invent electricity, but as every schoolkid knows he took a lot of credit for reshaping it. The same goes for Izzy Greenblotz regarding matzo, but even though his legend was passed down through our family, somehow Izzy’s name hasn’t made it to the history books. Until Izzy Greenblotz came into the picture, matzo was mostly made the traditional old way, by hand, as it had been since the days of Moses.

When Izzy Greenblotz started making matzo he baked with the help of simple machinery that didn’t do much to speed things along. He’d apprenticed at a traditional matzo baker, and was a quick study: he was manager of the shift workers within a few years. A young man with no family to support, he squirreled away his earnings. In 1915 he was able to buy a Model T that he hooted and tooted all over the Lower East Side. The baker was upset that his manager was upstaging him. Izzy had a brainstorm on how to leave this irritant boss behind.

He looked to America’s most famous industrialist for inspiration.

If I could rewrite family history, I’d have my great-grandfather’s moneymaking “Eureka!,” or whatever the Yiddish equivalent is, come one day at the epicenter of Lower East Side intellectualism: the East Broadway Garden Cafeteria, where Emma Goldman and John Reed plotted cultural revolt and slurped borscht. (I saw the campus film board’s presentation of Warren Beatty’s four-hour
Reds—
with an audience of two—and read Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
during my brief obsession with Lyle Finkel, my twenty-one-year-old anarchist resident counselor my freshman year at Brown.) We’d all like to reinvent our roots; even Alex Haley did some tweaking.

Alas, I know my great-grandfather was way too much of a brash entrepreneur to be involved in Goldman and Reed’s leftie lot. I know from family lore that even though he managed to save money, he was big on cards, especially pinochle. And he was also big on whores from Allen Street brothels. Imagine his kosher-factory inspiration hitting there. Wherever the breakthrough came, Izzy Greenblotz soon became the Henry Ford of Matzo.

It’s ironic that the famously anti-Semite Ford was the role model for this aspiring immigrant Jew. According to a PBS
American Masters
special I helped research with Vondra, by 1916, the time the Greenblotz factory was up and running, Henry Ford and his $5 daily wages that allowed for worker satisfaction and rapid assembly of his automobiles were folklore. Henry Ford’s big year was 1913, the year he launched assembly-line production of the Model T. Izzy Greenblotz’s big year was 1916, the year he launched his factory. Izzy—gung ho about mass production after reading a newspaper article about Ford—enlisted an engineer and showed him drawings he had sketched that are now under glass at the factory. You have to wonder where the hell he found a backer. Or for that matter, a suitable engineer. In any case, the engineer he found to bring his ideas to fruition did a top-notch job, because those very same machines are still used in our factory. Outdated, but functional. Who the hell makes modernized matzo machines? With so few companies in the ring, there’s no money in it.

Primitive matzo machinery had been around for almost fifty years when Izzy put his mark on it. They probably used it in the bakery where he apprenticed. So Izzy wasn’t de facto the inventor. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car either. But Izzy and Henry both perfected what others had done, and made their families rich in doing so.

As my cab zigzags through the streets close to the factory, I eye the new Lower East Side with ambivalence. It’s sad if you’re the nostalgic type. Every month an old stalwart like Schapiro’s Wines closes and a new boutique or trendy bar opens. The old Kedem winery on Norfolk Street is now the nightclub Tonic. The owners have turned the old wine kegs into booths for groovy customers like Sean Lennon and the aging hipsters from Sonic Youth.

My cab also passes Lansky, a restaurant in a former speakeasy named after Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky. When the restaurant had just opened, in a red-hot incarnation called Lansky Lounge, it was ridiculously hard to find. It was hidden in the ass end of Ratner’s, the legendary dairy restaurant where generations of my kin ordered cherry and cheese blintzes.

In those embryonic days, the gossip columns often ran beautiful-people shots of Madonna at Lansky Lounge, slumming it downtown, sipping a pink cosmopolitan. Lansky Lounge’s popularity soon eclipsed Ratner’s and for maximum profit, Ratner’s has shut and the bar has taken over, graduating into Lansky, a swanky place that fills both of the old spaces. For a while, the new owners tried to keep the two establishments going so that the older customers would still come to spend money. They changed Ratner’s menu, from kosher to “kosher-style,” a fuzzy hyphenation that means they shed rabbinical supervision. Dairy-only Ratner’s is, or should I say was, a BIG tradition, and no one who cares about such things was pleased by the bastardized version, not even my usually apathetic mother. She called in shock when a neighbor told her about the changes:
Ratner’s is selling steaks!
I had to laugh, considering that she’s not even remotely kosher. A presidential election determined by faulty polling machines, a mayoral election bought by a billionaire and a war that in my humble documentarian opinion was more about protecting our oil source than securing human rights—none of that elicited even a grunt out of her. But you would think they tore down Yankee Stadium the way Mom carried on about the addition of meat at Ratner’s.

The cab lets me out in front of our factory, and when I put away my wallet I stroll over toward Upsy Daisy, a vintage boutique a few doors down. An adorable keyhole-neckline polka-dot dress in the window display has caught my eye. Behind the glass, a salesclerk in blond pigtails and a faded Madonna T-shirt (“Like a Virgin” era) is desperately trying to catch my eye through the glass door, pointing at a brown disco boot. She looks panicked, like she’s been held up—but I don’t see any customers inside.

I push open the door to check. “Are you okay in here?”

“Ohmi-
gawd
. Help me, please!” My grandfather’s lingo, of the
Dem bums
and
Toidy-toid and Toid
variety, has largely gone the way of Ye Olde English language, but so far the new century has brought little change to the mall-girl lilt that first reared its cartoonish head back in the mid 1980s.

“What’s wrong?”

“A rat’s in, like, one of the Gucci boots. Crawled in when the last customer was here.”

“Why don’t you tip it out?”

“Are you kidding? What if it bites? Rabies!”

Rodents have never agitated me. When your family owns a food factory, an encounter with a furry visitor is no big news. I’d place a sure bet that the rat crawled over from the factory and into the boutique. I say a silent prayer to the Rodent Goddess (M-Isis?) that Steve Meyers doesn’t see any critters when we do our interview. Greenblotz factory rats are especially robust from the abundance of flour to feed on. Dad used to call them “Elvis” rats: they’ve got such heft that their hips sway from side to side. The factory has two fat and happy cats helping in the crusade against rodents: pitch-black Moses, and the tabby, Elijah.

“Open the door,” I say authoritatively, and the terrified girl gladly complies. Or is she a woman still peddling cutesiness past the age of twenty-five? With those pigtails, it’s hard to tell.

I grab the boot, run out to the street and tip it by the lone oak tree in front of the store, the one with a painted-green wooden-plank border that my grandfather planted as a sapling in 1950. (Grandpa Reuben was given the hard sell by a Jewish charity to fund a forest in the new State of Israel; the oak was his defiant I’ll-plant-whatever-damn-trees-I-want gesture.) Out of the Ultrasuede flies a terrified black squirrel that immediately runs up the bark.

“Ohmi-
gawd
, a
squir
-rel!” The cutesy salesclerk laughs. It amazes me that nobody ever thinks of cuddly-looking squirrels as the disease-carrying vermin they are, but the clerk is so much mellower now that I’m not about to go into semantics and whip her into a frenzy all over again. Beneath her blond, the girl-woman has dark roots that are fashionably meant to be there. With her exotic face, I’d venture she’s half Japanese and half Anglo. “I’m Sukie by the way.”

“I’m Heather.”

“Take a blouse or skirt, any one that you like. I’m soooooo grateful.”

“You don’t have to do that. Really. Besides I have to head over to the Greenblotz factory right now for a meeting.”

“No, you were
so
great the way you picked up the boot. You were, like, fearless.”

“Tell you what instead. Give me a good discount on that polka-dot dress in the window, and I’ll snap it up.”

“You’ve got a deal. I
knew
someone happening would get that dress. Don’t you love polka dots? So
Valley of the Dolls
.”

“A knockout. I have a launch party coming up that it will be great for.”

“What kind of launch party?”

“For a digital-film magazine.”

She pauses, and decides to continue her thoughts out loud. “You’re in marketing, something like that? Those matzo guys need a community-relations lesson, they don’t give their neighbors the time of day. Any store that is new is garbage to them. They keep to themselves, those people.”

“I’m a film producer. Heather
Greenblotz
. One of
those
people.” I’m taken aback by Sukie’s prejudiced comment, but I know what she’s saying has some truth to it. Jake doesn’t get the young boutique owners at all, and got into an argument with a prose poet over Jake’s meager ten-dollar donation to
Phlegm
, a failing e-zine published in an apartment around the corner from the factory. The factory workers are also outright annoyed by the funksters. Their presence has jacked up neighborhood costs, so there’s no longer a dollar hamburger at the corner joint. In fact, the restaurants in the surrounding blocks have some of the hottest tables in the city. You have to wait a month to get a reservation at both 71 Clinton and even longer at über-chef Wylie Dufresne’s newest restaurant, WD-50.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to insult—”

“We’re a bit old school, Sukie, but we’re not so bad once you get to know us. I’m sure my cousin Jake would love to give you a tour. If not I will. I only work there around—”

“I really wish I could take that back—”

I check my watch. Almost eleven. “No problem, trust me, but I got to fly. I’m taking over a media tour today for my cousin. I help him out when there’s too much going on. Don’t think twice about what you said. My cousin
is
brusque if he doesn’t know you. And I’ll be back for that dress after my meeting is over.”

“I’ll put it
aside
,” she says, the last word an octave higher than the rest of her sentence. She decides on a spur-of-the-moment hug.

I gear myself up for the task ahead and open the front door of the factory, a sprawling five-story building with eye-straining industrial light. There’s not an iMac or track-lighting rod to be found—we’re one of the last Age of Manufacturing holdouts in downtown Manhattan. If a developer could ever talk my family into breaking the no-sell wills that are kept in the factory strongbox, he or she would be hard-pressed to remove the musty scent of ninety years of flour caked into the walls and floor.

There’s a chorus of “howsits” from the staff as I walk toward the back area where Jake’s office is. The majority of the thirty or so workers have known me since I was a tot. The newer employees are Dominican and they call out
Shalom!
with a heavy Hispanic accent. I wave back. The din of machines, and the pulsating, rhythmic Latino music on the soundspeaker makes it hard to hold a conversation. This time of the year everyone and everything is in overdrive, as ninety percent of our annual business will transpire in the next month and a half.

The small factory store adjacent to Jake’s office is a mecca for Jewish tourists, both observant and those simply nostalgic for the Lower East Side in its Jewish heyday. It brings in minuscule profits, but we keep it open because its raison d’être is the same as those tony Fifth Avenue boutiques that give cachet to mall spin-offs in mid-America. (Our true big business is in the supermarket chains, like Florida’s Publix and New York’s D’ Agostino’s.)

Greenblotz has employed Gertie, the elderly sweetheart who runs the store, since the forties. Gertie is bent with arthritis and has such a gaunt bloodless face that I always think she might pass out any second. She refuses to sit, even though she is thin and frail, and may be eighty, even ninety. No one dares to ask her exact age, because she will work here as long as she wants to. Gertie is as much of a lure for the tourists as the specialty macaroons.

She lights up when she sees me and beckons me in with a crooked finger.

“Ess, kindele.”
She says: “Eat well, my child” in Yiddish.

The smattering of Yiddish I know includes the words and phrases I picked up from Gertie talking with customers, and the expressions I’ve gleaned by listening to New Yorkers talk in supermarkets and department stores. This includes
schtickel
, which means a piece, as in:
Give me a schtickel of pickle
. My favorite Yiddish word is the one that pretty much sums up my life,
farblungett
, which roughly means
lost without a damn clue how to remedy the situation.