The Matzo Ball Heiress (2 page)

Sell, Sell, Sell

A
frantic but jovial call from Jake starts my day. “Hello, Sunshine. You free later this morning? I’ve got a double media booking.”

I eye the clock. Nine-fifteen already! Didn’t I set that alarm? “I’ll grab my datebook,” I say sleepily.

“You don’t have a PalmPilot? You, with all your technological know-how?”

“God, no. I had one, but it crashed before I backed it up. Never again. The thing was ugly anyhow.”

“I’ll wait,” he chirps.

There’s the damn Filofax, by the microwave. I open it to the right day. “So, it looks pretty light. A phone meeting I’m sure Vondra can cover. Sure, okay, what time do you need me to be there?”

“You’re the best,” Jake says after a bite of what sounds like apple. “Eleven o’clock is when your guy from the Food Channel is coming. I’ll be at City Hall for a presentation to Jewish purveyors.” Despite his money, Jake says
purr-vay-yahs
with that special Jersey accent that could land him continuous character-actor work.

“Is that a big deal?”

“Guss’s Pickles will be there. And Second Avenue Deli of course. Mayor’s having a full-blown Yid press conference. It’s black-
yarmulke
time.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Every politician in New York has two
yarmulkes
, black for daytime luncheons, and white for fancy dinners. Trust me. I’m the one who gets photographed with them.”

“What happened to Schapiro’s Wines? How come I saw a For Rent sign when my cab drove past?”

“I didn’t tell you? I heard this direct from Norman Schapiro. They cashed in on the Lower East Side real-estate boom. They closed the factory and opened a little stall in the Essex Market for the nostalgic customers. But the family moved all their manufacturing to Monticello. Norman asked me why we’re not doing the same.”

“Did you tell him about Izzy’s proviso?”

“Why give anything away in this business? Norman may be wine but he still goes to the kosher-food conventions.”

“So much for the old neighborhood. Probably you’ll see condos pop up in their old factory with some cutesy name like the Winery. I just can’t believe we’re the only ones left downtown.” I sigh and say, “You excited to meet the mayor?”

“He’s been by the factory already. Twice. Even if he wasn’t Jewish, it’s a regular pitstop for every mayor when he decides it’s time to court the Jewish vote. I’d rather tour the Playmate of the Month and give her any Greenblotz macaroons she wants.” After I laugh weakly, he says, “So, I’m glad you can do the Food Channel thing. I don’t trust anyone else from our staff with the TV interviews.”

“Anything special I have to know?”

“Nah. Their reporter’s doing a special on food pioneers. Mostly want to know about Izzy. You’ll know what to give him. The business is recession-proof because we’re in the Bible, families get together whatever the financial circumstance, that kind of bullshit. Have a pen?”

The first one I pull from the drawer is the one with Heather Greenblotz printed all over it in different cheery colors and sizes; it came in a cheery pitch letter from a new charity called the Tumor Society. “Uh-huh, go ahead.”

“His name is Steve Meyers.”

I size up my interviewer. “Meyers? A Jew. Easy as pie.”

“They still have to ask the same questions for their segments.”

“But I won’t have to give him the whole spiel. Last year I spent fifteen minutes explaining the significance of the shankbone in the seder to the WCBS
lite
reporter, like I know anything about it. I even printed a page about it off your computer and we read it together. He still couldn’t get it. And he wouldn’t start in on the matzo until he got it. Then when we started taping he kept calling the factory a cracker factory.”

“Oh that old fart, I’ve seen him on TV. Did a segment where he asked Carnegie Deli what part of the cow pastrami is from. Why do the schmucks always succeed? What’s his ridiculous name?”

“Talbot C. Kelton. That bow tie and seersucker suit is part of his ‘I’m a funny WASPy guy’ shtick.”

Jake snorts a bit. “Generally speaking, men with bow ties should be shot. Anyhow, I’m not so sure you’re right about Meyers. Look at Springsteen. German names can go either way.”

“Beck’s Jewish,” I say. How long can we keep up this amusing departure from our usual conversation? I usually talk to Jake about matzo and matzo alone. Occasionally his former days at the dog track filter in, or his yummy-yummy thoughts about how slutty the latest pop kittens are. What is it with grown men and Britney Spears?

“Who’s Beck?” Jake says after another crunchy bite.

“Rock star. Critics’ darling. C’mon, you never watch the Grammys?”

“If it’s not Springsteen or Billy Joel, I want nothing to do with it. Look what time it is. I really gotta go already. My day is already packed with or without the mayor. We have three million orders to fill.”

“Okeydoke. I’ll be by at eleven.”

“Thanks again. I won’t be here, but the place will be in full gear.”

Jake and his brother, Greg, who has stiff bleached hair that stands up like wiry grass, and lives in a fancy condo in South Miami, are the sons of my aunt Elsa and uncle Nathan, who died in 1991. They were skiing without their boys and were both decapitated during a six-car pileup outside Casey’s Caboose, a family restaurant in Killington known for its happy service and lobster tank.

Of the two of them, I’m much closer to Jake. Despite the brutality of his parents’ accident, he finds it in himself to treat other people with kindness. Plus, he’s a lot funnier than Greg.

The best sound I’ve ever heard in my lifetime was the laugh that came from Jake’s mouth the year after the big car accident. Jake and Greg had each received reminder postcards from the cemetery that unveiling headstones was the Jewish tradition on the anniversary of death. They jointly called my house to remind their father’s brother, my father—Dad in turn asked me to find my way back into NYC from my dorm at Brown so I could be an extra source of emotional support.

At the cemetery, Greg and Dad had to pee. Not wanting to desecrate anyone’s ancestor, uncle and nephew drove back to the office before any prayers were read. Alone with me for the first time in years, Jake said in an unreadable voice, “Did they have to be so showy?”

“Showy?” I said nervously. I wasn’t sure what emotion Jake needed from me to get him through this sorrowful day. Unlike Greg, Jake had steadfastly refused therapy.

“A
double
decapitation?” After his year of unhealthy stoicism, an unbridled guffaw was an unlikely event. But there it was and God bless it; it paved the way for his first honest weep and a pledge to me that he would see my father’s famous shrink.

The three of us—workhorse Jake, flaky Greg and book-smart me—are three of the five Izzy Greenblotz descendants with voting power in our privately held company. Mom has never had a vote on Greenblotz Matzo’s family-run board of directors because she is not a full-blooded Greenblotz, although she wouldn’t want a vote in the first place. She’d consider it a curse. Mom hates “the fucking holiday” that she is convinced ruined her marriage. Maybe the fact that she married a mostly gay man has more to do with their early break than Passover stress.

None of us talk to Marcy and Rebecca, my two other first cousins who also hold board votes. They are the estranged, backbiting nutcake kids of my backbiting nutcake aunt Shara Fishbein (née Greenblotz) who died in 1994 from cancer my branch of the family had not even known about. I was not invited to Aunt Shara’s funeral, nor was my father, her only living sibling. Neither was Jake or Greg as Aunt Shara had always felt that her two nephews hated her (they did), and thought that they were my father’s allies in our family warring (they were). Jake and I were notified by Shara’s lawyer after the burial. Dad had just moved to Bali and I had a phone number for him then. I called to tell him about his sister’s passing and the funeral situation. Dad was flabbergasted (breast cancer!), and distraught, and pissed off. Surely he had a right to be there even if he hadn’t talked to Shara in the year since he’d told her that she was a public nuisance for writing irate letters to the Museum of American Folk Art about their continued refusal of her “masterpiece” fruit-themed quilt festooned with Granny Smith apples, lemons and mandarin oranges.

My mother and father may have major differences, but not about that branch of the family. Even during the final cold freeze in their disintegrating marriage, they drew together in a shared revulsion over Shara’s and her daughters’ mad rush to Grandpa Reuben’s house in Jersey after a vague stipulation in his will was read: “Divide personal items as the family sees fit.” By the time my immediate family and Jake and Greg walked into the three-story house in West Orange—the so-called “good” Orange as the real-estate agents say—the cedar fur closet was threadbare. Mom thought Shara’s posse must have carted away Grandma Lainie’s old minks the previous day. Shara’s daughters apparently weren’t through with their booty hunt, because when Jake and I opened the guest-room door, we came upon my dear cousins crawling around like lice, double-checking if there were any secret hiding places under floorboards for Grandma Lainie’s lavish jewelry that hadn’t been doled out after her own death. (Marcy had a small Tiffany lamp in her hand, which she tried to inconspicuously roll under the bed when she spotted me with mouth agape.)

Now all communication with Marcy and Rebecca, such as dividend discussions and financial decisions, is through their new lawyer, Mortie Altman, who carts along a tarty female associate we all think he’s screwing—or
schtupping
, as our matzo customers like to say—to serve as the other proxy during big votes.

We licensed out our name to other product lines in the 1960s for buckets of money. Jars of gefilte fish, chicken consommé and borscht, tins of chocolate and plain macaroons, and plastic-wrapped boxes of multihued half-circle candied fruit jells carry the Greenblotz name. You have to keep current in the Jewish-food business. In 1985, our family board voted to phase out Greenblotz prune juice, and phase in dark chocolate-covered matzo. That was my aunt Shara’s one brilliant suggestion during her lifetime. She had taken a weekend quilt-buying trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with her youngest daughter. They’d seen tourists devouring salted Amish pretzels covered in chocolate. Later that week, Aunt Shara argued with my dad that if the Amish can update their food, why not the Jews? Dad may have a high-genius IQ, but he was wrong, and Shara was right. After potato-pancake mix, chocolate-covered matzo is now our biggest-selling auxiliary offering. Last year’s addition of white chocolate-covered matzo (a product I jokingly suggested to Jake) is doing almost as well.

We stock these “extra” products in our tiny store in the ground floor of the factory on Attorney Street, but we don’t really manufacture them; our licensees do. We do make the plain matzo for Passover, and the Passover egg-matzo variant. The chocolate matzo is egg matzo we make, and then ship to a candy factory. There’s also egg and plain matzo for year-round use, matzo that hasn’t been under the militant Passover eighteen-minutes stipulation. But God forbid we should sell the Manhattan factory. Izzy Greenblotz was smart enough to envision a day when his pride and joy would be in jeopardy, and he legally saw to it that we would have to keep the original factory going. If we sell the matzo factory, resulting revenue must go to charity. We’re talking a many-multimillion-dollar business we would walk away from. Three hundred million dollars, cool. Even my soul-searching, gadabout father depends on his payouts. Izzy’s son, Reuben—my father’s father—put the same dopey clause in his will to be true to Izzy’s vision. Now five of us are next in line: Jake, Greg, Aunt Shara’s brats and me—a motley quintet fettered together in a loophole-proof fate.

Whenever I start feeling too sorry for myself, I think of a TV documentary I saw last year about a Polish American family in South Dakota. For generations the family has been collectively carving a statue of Chief Crazy Horse out of a mountainside deep in the Black Hills, not far from the Mount Rushmore monument. Except the entire Mount Rushmore carving—all four of the presidents’ faces—would fit in Crazy Horse’s forehead. The Crazy Horse carvers are going for a three-quarter portrait on horseback. It took me a minute to process the magnitude of this project—Mount Rushmore is seen only from the front! Their first carver, their Izzy, insisted way back in FDR’s day that the family never accept government money or assistance from federal laborers. Even though he was about as Indian as Izzy Greenblotz, he detested Uncle Sam for carving white men’s faces out of a sacred Sioux mountain. With government millions and manpower, Mount Rushmore was finished in a matter of a few years. With a policy that limits workers to family members and funds to public donations, if your fate is to be born into the Crazy Horse family, you must carve and fund-raise until you drop. This is their family mantle. I feel the grandchildren’s pain: by their standards, I have it easy. And I don’t have to gear up with drills every morning.

When my cousin Jake first volunteered to oversee the factory year-round, I gladly gave my yea vote. Surprisingly, there was no backlash against Jake’s rise to power from the Aunt Shara branch of cousins. But then who else would have the inclination to run a matzo factory these days, while we lucky descendants get enough money from dividends to never work? Things are continuing the way Izzy wanted. Money and family. Dad once told me that Izzy wrote our slogan before he even had offspring or a business going. With only slivovitz and fellow cardplayers for company, he was the sole immigrant in the new land from his Polish
shtetl
. But perhaps he imagined the fruit of his loin, the joy his offspring and their offspring would bring him, as he optimistically scribbled a slogan into his penny notebook:
Buy Greenblotz—Because Family Is Everything
. The scribble stuck; it’s the slogan printed on every one of our many products.

Since Passover falls late this year, I’m still in the safe zone. Last year, when Passover popped up in March, I was caught off guard with no game plan. I had been seeing Daniel Popper, an intense Jewish on-the-rise associate editor for the
New Republic
who sports a luscious head of black curls many women among New York intelligentsia would love to unfurl.