TTT

Interviewee:  Mark Federman							      Session #1

Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					           New York City

Date:  January 25, 2011

Q:  This is Judith Weinraub.  It is January 25, 2011, and I’m with Mark Federman at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side.
Good afternoon.

Federman:  Good afternoon to you.

Q:  Why don’t we start with your telling me a little bit about where and when you were born, who your parents were, get into your education, and, of course, the food you ate.

Federman:  I was born on the Lower East Side and, in fact, a block and a half from here.  I was born on Ludlow Street.  I guess if I’m lucky, I’ll probably die here too.  But it’s different.  My story starts here and my family story starts here on the Lower East Side, although it really starts back on the other side, meaning that part of Eastern Europe which was known as Galitzia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but my grandfather never spoke about that part of his life.  It’s like when he landed here in 1907, he just sort of buried that whole thing.  He was like twenty-one years old.  I assume it’s because life was very difficult.  The Russ family doesn’t come from royalty; we come from poor peasant stock in a shtetl, a little town.
I’m now in the process of trying to uncover some of that stuff for purposes of writing a book, the Russ & Daughters book.  But at any rate, I asked my mother and my aunt.  There were three Russ daughters, and I’m the son of the youngest Russ daughter, Anne.  There was Hattie, the oldest, she’s alive and she’s about to be ninety-eight; Ida, who died ten years ago at eighty-six; and my mother, Anne, the baby of the Russes, who’s about to be ninety years old.
So life really started for him here on the Lower East Side, because he came over here, he was sponsored by a sister who had preceded him here, Chana Russ Ebbin, and she was in the herring business on the Lower East Side.  She had gotten here a few years before him.  The herring business then was basically a couple of barrels of herring and a stall which was usually between two buildings.  People would pass by in the street, and the herring was cheap, maybe two cents, five cents each.  The herring would be picked out of a barrel, wrapped in newspaper, and taken home for a meal, maybe sometimes two meals, meaning one meal, if they were really poor, they would just rub the herring across a piece of bread, and that was a meal, and the second meal was actually the herring.  In the newspaper they’d put potatoes, onions, and stick it in a coal-fire stove and that was a meal.

Q:  Why herring?

Federman:  Herring was plentiful and cheap and it was something they had on the other side, salt-cured fish.  Before refrigeration, how do you preserve foods?  It was by salting or drying, smoking them, curing them, pickling them.  Those were the ways to do it.  And herring was a plentiful food all around the world.  Herring was a food fish around the world, and every culture has some form of herring or some word for herring, although I vouchsafe to say that my grandfather had nothing to do with herring, nor his family over there, but they would have seen herring someplace and probably eaten herring cheap over there too.  Herring basically then came from the north Atlantic, and they were known as schmaltz and schmatzes, German and Yiddish for “fat,” and the fat herrings of the north Atlantic are the best. The fatter fish, the better fish.
	So at any rate, he got here and was sponsored by his sister, and the sponsorship in those days was maybe twenty-five dollars, which represented a lot of herring at maybe a nickel each, but she needed help in her business because she married a guy, Isaac Ebbin, who woke up one day and decided he wanted to be a Talmudic scholar and had no time for running this business, however little ungapatchka business it was, or for the many children he had impregnated in her.  So he then was busy with praying and studying, and she called for the younger brother, Joel, pronounced “Yoel,” but Joel Russ.  There was always a question whether Russ was really the name on other side, and turns out by my research—and I had a genealogist just do this—yes, Russ was the name.  It was not uncommon over there in the province of Galitzia, particularly, and may have referred to people who, generations before, emigrated from Russia back into this area, fleeing the czar’s army.  You’ve heard that story about how the czar’s army, conscription lasted twenty-five years and was basically a death sentence for a Jew because there was no kosher foods being served.  At any rate, that’s sort of the family story.
	But the point is that when he got here, it wasn’t about what happened in the old country; it was about this is a new country, this is a new life.  That’s it.
	I was born on Ludlow Street, as I said, above something called, sixty-five years ago, Yavarkovsky Paper Distributing Company, which was there until very recently and was basically a series of little warehouses, one-story warehouses, except that Joseph Yarvakovsky, the founder of this in 18-whatever, at some point one of his children, one of his sons became a dentist, so he built above the warehouse a second floor, and the front was an office for his son the dentist.  So that they should bring in some money since he wasn’t going to charge his son rent, he put an apartment in the back, and so my mother moved us there.  I was born while she was living there.
	She was busy, shortly after I was born, chasing my father around, who was in the service at that point.  This was the very end of World War II.  Then she gave me over for nine months to my father’s mother, who lived in Brooklyn on Empire Avenue not far from Ebbets Field.  I didn’t like that grandmother, and I grew up not to like the Dodgers, so I was a Yankees fan.  [laughter]
	So we lived there some years and then ultimately my grandfather moved the entire family out of the Lower East Side to Far Rockaway, but preceding that, there had been many attempts to get the family out of Lower East Side.  This is a very typical Jewish Lower East Side immigrant story.  This was not a place, the Lower East Side, where you wanted to settle.  It was an awful area.  It was always awful.  In the early 1900s, late 1800s, from 1880 to 1923 is like a million and a half Jews came here to Lower East Side.  There were several million who came.  Some of them wound up in Baltimore, in Galveston, and various ports, but the Lower East Side was the major catch basin until 1923 there was some kind of nativistic law that set a quota so that there would be no more Jews or southern Italians, sort of directed as Eastern European Jews and southern Italians.
	So this was an awful area, and my grandfather made several attempts to get his family out of here.  When he first married, an arranged marriage, he moved to Brooklyn, Myrtle Avenue, and he set up a candy store with his wife, and that lasted a few years.  That was in 1910 he moved out there, and by 1914 he came back to Lower East Side and bought a preexisting smoked-fish store.  “Store” is sort of a grandiose term for whatever it was.  It was like a little space, but the guy who owned it before ran it as a smoked-fish place, and my grandfather took that over and ran it for many years, until in the 1920s he moved his business around the corner to its present location.

Q:  Did your grandmother continue to help at the store?

Federman:  My grandmother was not one for working retail.  Not that she wouldn’t work hard.  She was a peasant lady, very hardworking, apparently a lovely lady, but she was an illiterate and didn’t read nor write English or Yiddish.  My grandfather would at times, in one of the few demonstrations of some tenderness, it was the custom for him to read her something called the Bintel Briefs.  The Bintel Briefs were in The Forward and they were basically Dear Abby kind of things. “My husband ran off.  I’m starving.  What do I do?”  “Dear Reader, do this.”  It’s all in Yiddish, so he would read her that.  But there was never any great show of affection.  She would call him by his last name, Russ, but they pronounced it in the Eastern Europe “Roose,” something like that, and he would call her Zug, which means basically “Hey, you.”  [laughter]  So this was not a love match, but I think it was very typical. 
	But anyhow, he would move the family out and then didn’t have much money, move back to the Lower East Side.  The point is, the Lower East Side was a place to get out of.  He finally got the family out, the family meaning his wife and his three daughters, when they were young.  In 1926 he bought a big house in Flatbush on Avenue O.  It was a two-family house with two stories, two kitchens, two of everything, including two mortgages.  He had two mortgages.  So the Crash happened in 1929.  In 1932, two bankers showed up and said, “Mr. Russ, it’s your house or your business.”  By then his business was over here.
The family mantra, the family slogan in Yiddish was “Vi remptman parnosa.“ From where do we take our living?”  Basically, “How do we survive?”  This was all a matter of survival.  In those days, there was nothing celebrated, romantic about this kind of business, and there were lots of these appetizing stores on Lower East Side.  They were serving daily needs of the people down here.  There was twenty, thirty.  I mean, there were a lot of them.  Basically they were herring stands and then they had some smoked fish and everything was cheap.  You know, that was life.

Q:  Why were they called appetizing stores?

Federman:  Well, nobody knows the answer to that.  Every five or ten years, The New York Times forgets they’ve asked me this question, and they call me, “Hey, Mark, we want to know.  We have a reader.”  You know that “For Your Information” whatever?  “We have a reader who wants to know why it’s called an appetizing store.”  
My stock answer is, nobody knows.  There are various theories.  I was on a panel once with Mimi Sheraton, and she had some explanation that dated to a Spanish thing.  I sort of wonder.  But I’ve never heard that before.  So everybody’s free to make up an explanation.  I don’t know the answer.  But the food is appetizers.  It’s not designed to really be a meal, and it couldn’t be called a delicatessen because the very reason for its existence was to separate it from the stores and delicatessens in which meat was served, since this product was generally served with dairy, cream cheese later on, or butter and whatever, the cream sauce.  So the kosher laws, you couldn’t mix meat and dairy, so this gave rise to this thing.  I don’t know if there were any appetizing stores in Europe.

Q:  Where does the word “appetizing” come from?  Is it meant to be an English word or derived from something else?

Federman:  I have no idea.  I don’t know what the derivation would be.  Delicatessen has a derivation, a French derivation, “delicate eating” or something.

Q:  Sounds like it was created here. 

Federman:  Appetizing.  It probably was.  It probably was, and lots of people, I’m sure, would lay claim to being the originator of that, but who knows.  Who put together the bagel, cream cheese, and lox for the first time?  Who knows.  So it’s fair game.
	Anyhow, we’re far away from my youth.  Do you want to go back?

Q:  Whatever you—

Federman: I could tell the story of the family, because I’m in the process.  I’m retired now, and what am I doing in my retirement?  I’m thinking about these things and trying to write them down, I mean, what happened to the Russ family.

Q:  We want to get you here.  We don’t want you to sort of pop up.

Federman:  Okay.  So the point is that it was moving out and moving back.  If you had money, you moved out.  From the 1880s to the 1920s or 19-whatever, a lot of Jews, pushcarts in the streets.  You’ve seen pictures of this thing.  According to my Aunt Hattie, you can’t believe how crowded it was.  
I go to Florida every once in a while to see if I can get my aunt and mother—they’re very smart and very sharp.  They’re not so mobile, but they’re sharp and smart, but they’re not really wanting to remember this stuff because it was not a good life for them, so you’ve got to sort of prod around, and every once in a while you’ll uncover a little thing and they’ll say something, and you realize it’s a gem and get excited.  “What are you interested in that for?”
	But Aunt Hattie says it was awful, and she was born in Brooklyn, 1913.  1914, my grandfather moved them back to Lower East Side and had his wife, my grandmother, and the eldest Russ daughter, the one who was born in 1913, my Aunt Hattie, living in the back of that little store, very dark and dismal and crowded in the streets, terrible.  And then her sister came along, less than two years younger, Ida, the middle daughter.  Then at some point he moved the family from the back of the store across the street, on Orchard Street now, right around the corner here, to a tenement, a fourth-floor apartment, which was a cold-water flat, toilets out in the hallway.  They’d go out on the fire escape for some coolness in the summer, the streets teeming below.
Aunt Hattie remembers that she was put in charge of watching Ida as they were growing up, and Aunt Ida was just uncontrollable, running around the pushcarts in the street, and Aunt Hattie, the oldest, was so worried about her and then would lose her and have to go up to the roofs of the tenements, where Ida would be hiding, and Aunt Hattie would try to scare her, “You’re going to get caught by Jack the Ripper.”  Apparently in those days, there was some fear for these kids.  But nothing stopped Ida.
My grandmother was working in the store, but she was an illiterate, she couldn’t read nor write, nor did she have a head for business, and so she would have to ask the customers how much they owed, which was not necessarily good for business.  My grandfather would be out on a horse and wagon delivering smoked fish around to whatever restaurants were around the area, but it turned out that it couldn’t last because his wife just was not capable really of running the business.
Okay.  So that’s the scene that’s set up, and then he gets them out as far as Corona Queens.  I think the first stop was Williamsburg he moved them to, then maybe had them move to Lower East Side, then to Corona Queens, where my mother, the youngest, is born in 1921, and in 1926 he moves them to the Flatbush house and they lose it in 1932, when they move back to a terrible tenement on the Lower East Side.  I think it was on Second Street, a terrible apartment, and Hattie said it was awful, roach-infested.  She freaked out when she was taking a bath and some giant cockroach jumped in the bath.  They had to get out of there, and my grandfather was able to break the lease because of cousin Sylvia.  Who was cousin Sylvia?

Q:  Who is Sylvia?

Federman:  Sylvia is the daughter of Tante Pepe.  Who’s Tante Pepe?  Tante Pepe, Pepe for Pauline, was the sister of Grandma Russ, Bella Russ, but the two sisters didn’t get along well.  There was some envy there because Pepe had married a barber, whereas Bella had married Joel Russ, who had his own store, but Grandpa Russ, who was known to be very proud and arrogant—that seems to be a trait, actually, that I’ve inherited.  I think it skipped a generation.  [laughter]  At any rate, Grandpa Russ called in the services of Sylvia.  The barber, I think the last name was Peters or Trumpet [phonetic] or whatever, he had lots of kids.  He and Tante Pepe had lots of kids, but he was able to get each one of his kids—this is in the [Great] Depression—a good job in like civil service stuff, using his connections with the people whose hair he was cutting.  So the barber did all right, and cousin Sylvia, his daughter Sylvia, he got a job with the Board of Health or something.  So they call in the services of Sylvia to condemn the roach-infested apartment so they could break the lease.  [laughter]
	They then move the family to—now I’m talking about 1930-something.  They move the family to the Ageloff.   The Ageloff, which was built and opened in 1929 and built and marketed as the luxury building of the Lower East Side, uptown, downtown.  I saw, in looking through some marketing material, they touted—well, according to my mother, they had a doorman with white gloves, they had elevators.  They exist and they’re inhabited.  They’re on Avenue A, basically.  They front on Avenue A from Third Street to Fourth Street, the whole thing.  It’s a huge complex, twelve stories.  All the other buildings in the area were tenements of six stories.  So this was unusual.  I think they had stone lions in the doorway and they had the gloved doorman, they had elevators, they had all of this stuff, so Grandpa Russ moved the family there in probably 1936 or ’37.
	When I heard this story from my mother and aunt the first time, I said, “How did the Russ family—?”  See, whatever I’ve heard, I have this image of a poor, hardworking immigrant family of fishmongers, herring mongers.  It wasn’t even fancy fish; it was herring mostly, right?  What were they doing in the luxury building of the moment on Lower East Side?

Q:  When you say he moved the family, how much of the family does that mean?

Federman:  Well, that’s the point.  All of the family.  All of the family consisted of Joel Russ and his wife Bella, my grandparents, their three daughters, Hattie, Ida, and Anne.  Two of the daughters by this point, Hattie and Ida, had gotten married, so their husbands were in there, Murray and Max.  They also had gotten pregnant and given birth quickly, so the babies were in there, Nina and Lolly, and the two maids, they say.  I said, “What?  We had maids?”  And the response is, how much could it cost in those days?  A maid was like fifteen dollars a month and they were happy to work.
So they had two maids, because Mama was busy taking care of the kids because the Russ girls worked in their father’s store, and shopping and cleaning and whatever.  They had two maids.  One was from Czechoslovakia and Mama was able to communicate with her in some Slavic tongue.  The other was from the Deep South and spoke English, except nobody was able to understand her.
In the Ageloff, they had this group of people—and we’ll count up how many; I forget—this group living in a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom.  So one bedroom was Grandma and Grandpa Russ.  The other bedroom was, I think, Ida and Max.  The living room became the bedroom of Hattie and Murray.  The dining room became the bedroom of my mother and the two maids and the babies, or the babies may have been with their parents.  That’s how the Russ family was able to live in the hoo-hah fancy-schmancy building on the Lower East Side and have maids.  And they only had to walk from Third Street and Avenue A, or Fourth Street, over here to Houston Street.
Now, this is during the Depression.  “How bad were things in the Depression?” I asked.  I said, “Would you consider yourself poor?”
“No.  Everybody was in the same boat.  We always had what to eat.”

Q:  What about the sisters working in the store?  How unusual was that or ordinary?

Federman:  Totally unusual, totally.  Then by 1936, my grandfather—the store had been known as J. Russ Cut-Rate Appetizers.  I said to Aunt Hattie, “Was that the name?”
	“Yeah.”
	“Why was it called Cut-Rate?”
	Aunt Hattie said, “I have no idea.  Everything was so cheap in those days, what rate could they cut?”  And two doors away was another appetizing store, H. Eisenberg Cut-Rate Appetizers.  It turns out that little anecdote is that Harry Eisenberg worked for my grandfather for some years, but he was religious.  My grandfather was not.  Harry Eisenberg, the deal they had was that Harry Eisenberg—my grandfather would work on Saturday and Harry would be off.  My grandfather would then take off on Sunday and Harry would work.  Then they would, I guess, work together during the week.  So that was the arrangement until, as I understand—I just spoke to Harry Eisenberg’s son, who I know, Murray, who’s in Florida, retired, way in his eighties—apparently my grandfather, Joel Russ, asked Harry to come in on Saturday nights after Shabbat was over, and Harry lived in the Bronx, so that he should take care of the trade that was coming in, the after-theater crowd from the Yiddish theater that existed along this whole area here, Second Avenue, mostly.  And Harry refused.  
That was the end of that relationship, and Harry opened two doors to the left or right, depending on which way you’re—but according to my aunt, Harry really couldn’t compete.  He didn’t have the same merchandise and he didn’t have the three pretty daughters selling the stuff, but he lasted some years, not too many.  Then I think he went to work for Scotty’s or somebody, another appetizing store in the neighborhood.
	So the deal with the women was not usual, and the concept of calling it something & Daughters, Russ & Daughters, was definitely unusual.  There are those who ask me sort of rhetorically, “So your grandfather was an early feminist or women liberationist.”
	I say, “You don’t know my grandfather.  Definitely not.”  But if anything, he had a business sense, and he knew of all the twenty or thirty appetizing stores here, they would have over the door somebody Cohen or, Saperstein & Sons.  Nobody had “& Daughters,” and he had three pretty daughters and they were starting to get married, and he wanted Russ & Daughters.  It didn’t say Russ & Daughters & Sons-in-law.  It was Russ & Daughters.  So that’s what happened.  Their husbands ultimately became partners, but it would never be called anything other than Russ & Daughters, and he was very proud of that.
It also was sort of a recognition of a business necessity.  My grandfather was, I suspect, a typical Eastern European self-taught hardworking survivalist to the Lower East Side, and in that, he wasn’t long on patience.  I’ve inherited that also.  So if they gave him a hard time, which typical customers here do, “I don’t want that one.  What do you think, I’m a greenhorn?  You want to give me that?  Go in the back and get me—no, don’t try to give me that one.”  And if they did that to my grandfather, his response in Yiddish—and I haven’t gotten the Yiddish translation—was to the effect of, “Lady, do me a favor.  Lose my address.”  [laughter]  But this is not a great attitude if you’re in retail.
Fortunately, he had three pretty young daughters who started working when—I think Aunt Hattie, when she was eleven, and Aunt Hattie never finished high school.  Ida was allowed to finish high school and my mother, too, but it was clear that they would be coming into the business.  So they started as young girls on the weekends, and then when they finished school or dropped out, they worked full-time.  They were able to charm and disarm the crowd, the toughest customer, and the customers here in those days were tough, and it was shopping as a cross between an art form and an act of war.  You weren’t going to put anything past these customers.  They’d watch you, make sure all your fingers were off the scale.
When I came in in the beginning of 1978, which is long past all of this, I inherited still some of those customers and there are anecdotes about some of these that I remember.  This kind of customer really doesn’t exist anymore, but it’s something I grew up with, and even before that would hear stories about this one and that one.  It’s something that I actually miss now.  These were customers that wanted not even a quarter, but a halb a fertl, half a quarter, an eighth of a pound of lox, and at the same time wanted your kishkes, your insides, on the scale at no extra charge in the package, right?
So it was a constant challenge to deal with this when I came in.  It was also me being puffed up and being a lawyer.  I practiced law for a number of years, and here I was, and they were going to try this, and I was going to let them know I was a lawyer.  Well, that didn’t work.  They couldn’t care less if I was a lawyer behind the counter, there was something wrong with me.  “What happened, you failed?”  [laughter]
But I miss that kind of customer.  Now what you find is--because we’re somewhat celebrated because we’re still around.  If for no other reason, we’re around.  And this kind of business is not around anymore.  It’s too hard.  Why would you do this kind of thing?  This is not a good business model.  It’s labor-intensive, it’s a product that’s very expensive to us and finicky.  It’s a labor force that doesn’t exist; you have to create it.  Then once you create it, you’ve created prima donnas.  This does not make sense as a business model of an appetizing store anymore, so you don’t see any new appetizing stores anymore, really.
Where was I?  But now because we’ve been around so long and dedicated to our business, we’re dedicated to our customers, to our product, and we [unclear] to that, every piece of fish, every customer, whatever, we got caught up in this whole celebration of food.  I don’t know when that started, in the eighties or nineties, Food Network, Food Channel, food this, Hot Chefs, Star Chefs, whatever.  The food world got like Hollywood, and somebody must have said, “Hey, look at Russ & Daughters.  They’re cool.”  And once somebody says that, everybody says that, and then all of a sudden you have this aura about you, whereas to us, the Russ family, we’re still the herring mongers on the Lower East Side, dedicated to our products.  But now they come in, the customers, and they thank you.  Whoever heard of a Jewish customer thanking you for waiting on him?  It was like somebody was doing somebody else a favor.

Q:  Which you are.

Federman:  Right.  So they thank you.  They wait.  If you’re here before a holiday, used to be before Yom Kippur, the break fast, the place is crowded.  Now, that’s an ugly scene.  We can get into this later, but that’s like thousands of Jews have a headache in advance, thinking about not eating for twenty-four hours.  They’re not in a good mood.  Then there are always those that feel sort of entitled, a celebrity.  “I’ve been shopping here since your grandma.  What, me take a number?  What is that?  I should take a number?”  [laughter]

Q:  When did you come along?

Federman:  I came along September 2, 1945.  I was actually born in Beth Israel Hospital, but we lived over here above Yavarkovsky Paper Company.  Remind me at some point to tell you the story of Yarvakovsky and my grandfather.  But I was born then.  Then within about four or five years, my grandfather had finally gotten us out of Lower East Side, he expected for good, and it was, to Far Rockaway, moved the whole family.  He was constantly moving the family and never telling anybody.  We would come home and we’re moving.  Wouldn’t tell his wife, wouldn’t tell anybody.  Made a decision—this is my grandfather—“We’re moving.”  And so they picked up and he moved everybody out to Far Rockaway, and that’s basically where I grew up till I went off to college, which was a very lovely insular Jewish, mostly Jewish community.  You know where Far Rockaway is on the peninsula?

Q:  Yes.

Federman:  And in those days it was quite lovely.  As a kid growing up, you get on your bike and go anyplace, the bay, the beach, whatever.

Q:  Did the whole family go out there?

Federman:  Yes, the whole family did.  By then, the middle daughter had left the family, left the business, she and her husband.  It’s never quite clear whether she was fired by my grandfather or she quit, but it’s clear they didn’t get along.  The irony here, jumping way ahead, is that there’s a family plot at Beth David Cemetery, the Russ family plot, he bought twenty-nine gravesites, so his children and their husbands and the grandchildren and husbands and wives, and it’s on a corner, a corner plot.  This was real estate.  A lot of the old Jews came over, it was about real estate; they bought some property here on Lower East Side, whatever.  But this was a piece of real estate and twenty-nine gravesites, with a big oak tree and a stone bench.  “You should come, bring some food, sit down, have a visit.”  [laughs]  Aunt Ida, who’s the first Russ daughter to die in 2001, got buried.  Joel Russ and Bella Russ, they are there, 1959, 1962, I think.  But then Ida Russ Schwartz [phonetic], the middle aunt, died in 2001, she’s buried right next to her father, and they fought all of the time.  I think there’s something ironic about that.

Q:  What were your expectations for yourself when you were going to high school?

Federman:  Well, for myself or expectations for me?  They’re two different things.  What I was going to tell you is, just to relate my youth to our business here, so we moved out and the concept was to get out of Lower East Side and into suburban life.  It was post war America and New York and everybody was moving someplace, buying houses.  Levittowns were being built and whatever.  That was the dream, right?  So my grandfather picked Far Rockaway by the sea.  Maybe he wanted to be by water and fish.  Who knows why he did.  But it was a schlep to get into the city, so we moved out to get away from the Lower East Side, but it occurred to me at some point, maybe I was six or seven or eight, that we really brought the Lower East Side with us, and we did it by virtue of the smells that we brought, so that working in the store, my grandparents, my parents, my aunts and uncles, we all had a particular smell of this smokiness and fishiness and whatever, and you couldn’t help it.  You were around it all day long.  
We thought every house had a herring closet.  I was surprised to find out that there isn’t a herring closet; it was just our family.  So when they came home from work, there would be a vestibule area, and you’d take off your smelly outer clothes so you wouldn’t bring it into the house.  They assumed it didn’t go into the house.  Of course, it did.  So, you know, it was clear, by virtue of the smell, that we were different, because our house smelled different and our parents smelled different.  No matter how many baths and how much cologne, we smelled differently than everybody else.
There’s other differences that I realized growing up, and someday I should discuss this with my sisters, to just see what their impressions were, is that everybody else’s parents, their fathers, mostly it was fathers working and mothers not, but their fathers would go to work, put on ties and jackets and whatever, they were teaching, they were this, maybe they had some business, they got dressed up, they smelled nice, they went to work, they came back, they commuted, and they worked five days a week, generally, and they were off on the weekends to do fun things with the family.  They’d go to Coney Island or they’d go whatever, Yankee Stadium, you know, whatever families do together.
My family worked on the weekends, and not just my father.  Now on the weekends the Russ daughters were given dispensation where they did not have to work during the week when they had children.  That was their sort of exit plan out of the business.  But on the weekends they would still have to work when it was busier.  They would sort of rotate shifts and stuff.  So now on the weekends, I don’t have a father or mother.  We’re taken care of, myself and my two sisters—I have an older sister and a younger sister—by my grandmother, my father’s mother, who I told you about, who was five foot high and five foot wide, and had the mouth of a tugboat captain and chain-smoked Pall Mall and was the worst possible cook imaginable.  This is not your sweet cuddly grandmother image.  And would chase me around the house with a knife.  She was like awful, scary, was a scary woman.  So she raised us on the weekends.  And all my friends were, like, terrorized by her too.  She would say, “Go play on your own block.”  They all lived on the block.  Everybody was intimidated.
So we were different there, because that was our weekend, and the day off, my father’s day off, they worked six days a week, and at this point they were commuting from Far Rockaway into the Lower East Side, which would take an hour each way, at least.  My father had one day off. 

[Telephone interruption]

[Begin File 2]

Q:  Go ahead.  So, from PS 104.

Federman:  Right.  Benjamin Cardoza Junior High, which was the first experience being bused out of this little insular community of Far Rockaway, particularly Bayswater [phonetic], to this junior high school I think was newly built in the middle of the peninsula, so it got fed from the more affluent Jewish community of Belle Harbor and Neponset, and then the Far Rockaway community fed into this junior high school, but so did the not-so-nice neighborhoods, the Irish gangs from Rockaway Park and the Italian gangs from wherever they were, and the blacks.  All of a sudden there were blacks in the mix.  So junior high school is a weird period for people anyhow, I guess, for kids that age, of transition from whatever, pre-teen into teen, and then you throw us into the mix with all sorts of people we didn’t know about and it was suddenly scary, and then I got into fights.  It was not a great time.
	But I also was part of this program they called SP. New York had this program, they were allegedly giving a test and identifying kids a little more bright than the others, so that they could segregate them and skip a grade, so I skipped a grade.
Then I moved generally with this group of kids into high school, Far Rockaway High School.  I went to Far Rockaway High School, which was walking distance from the house, and I had my first girlfriend my senior year.  It was pretty good.  Looking back on it, I don’t recall now what particular emotions I had.  It seemed to me I was having a nice sort of childhood. 
What’s sort of significant was that we were required, from the time we were thirteen, “we” meaning myself, my sisters, my cousins, were required to go in and help out in the store on the weekends, so Saturday and Sunday, on a rotating basis.  So one would do it on Saturday and a Sunday, then another.  There were five of us to draw from, but by this point the middle sister and her kids were out.  So it was basically five of us to rotate, and nobody really wanted to work.  By this time I was thirteen, so my older cousin was twenty-one, married, and she was out.  So there were basically four of us.

Q:  Were you taught how to slice fish?

Federman:  No, no, no.  We were not allowed to work behind the fish counter, where there were sharp knives and it was all very active, hectic, and knives happening and fish happening, and you had to know what you were doing.  You could make or lose money, and nobody wanted to buy fish from a kid, which started to get a little more expensive.  We’re talking about in the 1950s.  So they didn’t want to see a kid behind a fish counter.  But there was a candy counter.  At some point my grandfather bought this building, the store.  I have pictures downstairs which show the original store here was half of its size, and the same address was shared by a little commission bakery to the left when my grandfather bought the building. Ultimately the people who had that Little Commission Bakery left and he was able to widen his store, so what was that little bakery store or stall is now our candy side.
	Now, why candy?  You know, I think about this.  I asked questions.  I have no idea why it became a candy side in an appetizing store.  You know, the theory is, we’re going to eat salty, fishy whatever, they needed candy, and it wasn’t just candy then.  The candies were primarily hard candies because every Jew of a certain age, usually older, always had hard candies in their pockets.  I don’t know if you grew up the same way.  My grandfather always had hard candies in his pockets, and usually one of several kinds.  There was a mint, I guess for the breath, or there was Hopjes.  I don’t know if you know Hopjes.  Hopjes, we still sell those.  It’s from actually Holland, made by Rademaker, and it’s a cube made out of coffee flavor.  It’s a coffee-flavored cube, and it was a favorite.  Then there was the honey sesame candies that were wrapped in cellophane.  The problem is they kept them in their pockets too long, they got sticky.  But always some kind of hard candy elderly Jews had, that they would eat themselves.  Maybe ate a lot of onions and garlic, maybe to kill that.  Or to give out to kids as treats.  The grandchildren always got some. 
	At any rate, most of the appetizing stores had candy being sold to them, so that other side became the candy side, had its own counter, its own scale.  I remember working there.  The scale was a balance scale, so you’d put the weights, which were quarter pound, half pound, one pound, two pound.  If you wanted five pounds, you’d have two two-pounds and one one-pound on one side, and the other side was this big sort of stainless steel scoopy thing where you put the candy, scoop it from a bin into there, and then there was this sort of needle that moved back and forth.  When it was directly in the middle, you had the right weight, because it balanced.  Then you would take that scoop and open a bag up.  Generally in those days it was a brown bag, and hopefully you’d get it all in the bag, and that was the sale.  Of course, the customers in those days would not accept right in the middle.  You had to give them an extra one so it was good weight.  When they said, “That’s good weight,” you knew you were going to be in trouble with your parents or aunts and uncles or something because you gave too much.
But we had to do that on the weekend.  We didn’t do it willingly.  They had insulated us, my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles.  They had insulated our generation.  Here’s how I see it.  The concept was not to groom us to come into this business.  They had to do it.  My grandparents did it as survival, right?  They came over here and this is what they were going to do.  My grandfather brought his three daughters into the business for survival.  He didn’t have any sons and he didn’t do well with hired help.  At various times he had a nephew working, had his brother who came over.  None of that worked out well.
So his daughters were expected to come in, not to go to college.  That wasn’t an issue.  There was no expectation they were going to school.  They would come in and help out, and when they got married, he had sort of the right of first refusal.  Whoever they were dating, they didn’t have to see a matchmaker, it wasn’t going to be an arranged marriage like what happened to him, but he would size them up and I guess he’d say to himself, “This one can schlep a herring barrel, can slice lox and look good behind the counter and add up a figure of numbers on a brown bag with a pencil.”  So their husbands came into the business, and it’s all during the Depression.  So to be able to work in a store was, you know, some sense of security.  
My aunt tells me that she and her husband were the first—she was the eldest daughter.  She worked, her husband worked with her, and they were paid by my grandfather and they started in 1935, I guess, in the store.  They were paid twenty-five dollars a week for both of them, for six days a week, eight-, ten-, twelve-hours a day, but that was it.  He gave them a place to live in their apartment in the Ageloff and gave them what food to eat.
But nobody questioned anything, and nobody would question my grandfather.  That became clear to me as I’m trying to figure this guy out.  I knew him because I was sixteen or seventeen when he died.  This was also not a warm and cuddly figure.  He was sort of a stern bearing, and if you asked him a question that he wanted to answer, he would say, in his heavy European accent, “Ask me.  I’ll ‘splain you.”  “Ask me.  I’ll ‘splain you.”  Well, that set up the whole dynamic.  He was going ‘splain things to you and he was going to tell you.  That was it.  And he also—I mean, I’m getting this as I’m asking people questions, including his daughters—he was arrogant.  “Arrogant” may be too lofty a term.  He thought he was better than most other people.
There’s a whole anecdote I won’t go into now, but Rose Yavarkovsky, the daughter-in-law of Yavarkovsky, the paper goods guy, whatever, Rose is sort of an interesting case, since she is the daughter of a pushcart peddler who had a pushcart in front of the store, our store.  She wound up marrying Sol, one of the sons of Joseph Yavarkovsky, the paper dealer who had this basically on Ludlow, so everybody was talking, hoo-haw, how the peddler’s daughter had married up.  [laughter]  Rose Yarvakovsky worked until recently way into her nineties.  My Aunt Hattie says, “Rose is older than I am, though she won’t admit it, and I’m going to be ninety-eight.”  So I know until a few years ago, Rose would work every day—recently in the winter she would go to Florida—standing out front of her door on Ludlow Street with a mink coat and a clipboard, checking in the stuff from the big trailers of paper goods that would be dropped off, and then checking out the little vans of the jobbers who would take it, standing out there in the cold and whatever, doing it.
Rose Yarvakovsky told the story—and some day I’ll tell it to you, but the story basically winds up with Joel Russ was shtolt.  That was the word they used, shtolt, meaning proud but a pride born of arrogance.  Joel Russ thought he was better.  Even his daughter, who said yes to everything, “Yes, Papa, yes, Papa,” Hattie, the eldest daughter, knew—I said, “Were you friendly with the people on the block, the other stores?”
“No, we kept to ourselves,” she said.
I said, “Why is that?”
“My father didn’t mingle.  He thought he was better than everybody else.”  So that was it.  And “what he said, what Papa said, that was it.  Nobody asked questions.”
Let me know if I’m too far afield, because one thing leads to another.  But I just want to say that in the store, if you go into the store, you will see around, above the shelves, this—maybe you call it a soffit or something, which is made out of smoked white glass and it has black hand-lettered writing on it, each section of it.  This was done when my grandfather renovated the store and the shelving, whatever.  Each section has a name with something that was sold in the store, so it will say Nova Scotia, it will say Caviar or something.  It’ll say Sturgeon, whatever.  The very first section, the soffit there, this section looks out into the street, so this is what people would see if they were walking by, the very first one says Smoked Eel.

Q:  Huh.

Federman:  Right.  Until somebody asked me, I didn’t know, and I’m working here since I’m a kid, right?  I didn’t know it said that, or didn’t register.  So somebody said, “Why?”
	I said, “I don’t know, but I’m going to ask my mother and aunt.”  This was some years ago.
So I went and asked them, “Why does it say Smoked Eel?”
“It says what?”  [laughter]
“It says Smoked Eel.”
“I don’t know.”
I said, “Did you ever sell smoked eel?”
And they said, “Yeah, but it was always in the back.  We never had it showcased,” and I know that because even when I came along, for Christmas and New Year’s the non-Jew Eastern European liked to eat smoked eel, and actually it’s quite good but it’s very ugly.  Jews don’t eat smoked eel not only because it’s not kosher, it’s because it’s ugly.  It’s like a snake.  They’re not going to eat it.  So we sold very little of it.  We sold only a few a year and only a certain time of year, and it was kept in the back.  So why then does the very first soffit, the one that everybody sees going by even out in the street, say Smoke Eel?  I asked my mother.  One, it just didn’t occur to them, and, two, if they knew it, they wouldn’t have asked their father. “ If Papa wanted it that way, he must have had his reasons.” “Shoyn, fartig” that’s it.

Q:  Was he still around working in the store when you started working here?

Federman:  I started working in—my bar mitzvah, so it was ’58.  He died in ’62.  He would come and go.  His retirement was putzing around with his garden in Far Rockaway, making some kind of wine out of raisins or cherries, sour cherries, making a syrup out of roses, and until my grandmother died in ’59, he was sort of shepherding her because she was sickly.  The move from Brooklyn back to the Lower East Side, once she got to Brooklyn in the two-family house with the big garden where she could plant things, she suddenly felt comfortable in America.  She was a poor peasant farmer.  When she had to move back, it broke her spirit and she never recovered from that.  So she was sickly after that.  I don’t know if he felt guilty, but he was more attentive in some respects, as attentive as he could be.
	So he wasn’t really in the store, but before I came in, and when he retired, which is basically around 1950 or so, and he had all his daughters and sons-in-law in place, he’d basically take this old cracked leather chair that he had in his little office in the back.  I don’t know if you saw the office that’s back there.  It’s like the size of a bathroom.  Take his chair out and put it near the candy side, and now he would dress up in fancy suits, he had a cane because he had a problem with his foot, with like a gold handle or silver handle, and he would sit out in front.  He had a portrait made of himself, which had hung in the store, and he would sit under this portrait and he would point with his cane, I understood this from my mother and aunt, point to something and say, “Nicht a zoi” meaning, “Not like that.”  This was not a guy for compliments.  He would just tell you what not to do.  “Nicht a zoi.” 
So he would come in by subway also from Far Rockaway, which is a major schlep, but to do that, to feel sort of busy or whatever.  So that’s it.

Q:  So when you graduated from high school, then what happened?

Federman:  Then the question was where to go to college.  Most of my friends were going locally to, like, Brooklyn or Queens or whatever it was, Brooklyn mostly in those days, and I decided I wanted to go out of town, and that may have been, now that I’m thinking about it, to escape the requirement of working in the store on the weekends and on holidays, which we were required to do.
In those days, what happened here is you had a guidance counselor in high school, and the guidance counselor would tell you three choices and those were the schools you applied to, unless you had a burning desire to go someplace you thought you’d get into.  So this guidance counselor I remember very well, Miss Kraft, who had a face like one of those apple people that gets all shriveled up.  It’s the only face I can remember from my teachers in high school.  Miss Kraft decided that the three choices for me were George Washington University, Alfred University upstate, and Grinnell College in Iowa.

Q:  Wow.

Federman:  And the only one I’d heard of is George Washington, but I decided I would make the rounds to see, so I went with my father.  He went with me to George Washington, and we went by plane.  It may have been the first time I was on a plane.  It was a bad, bumpy ride, so I ruled out George Washington.
I went by myself then to Grinnell.  I had skipped a grade, so at the time I was looking, I was going to be fifteen and a half, and I got on a plane and I flew to Des Moines, Iowa.  Then I got on a bus for two hours in the flattest, ugliest land you’d ever see, and I got to Grinnell and I didn’t know anything about this place.  Then they assign you to some kid, a student who’s going to show you around and be your mentor for the weekend, and this kid is busy telling me how the townies like to beat up on the freshmen.  [laughter]  Then the sky opens, which apparently is not unusual, and thirty inches of snow came out of nowhere and fell down, and I decided I had to get out of there.  So I didn’t wait.  This all happened within twenty-four hours.  So I hitched a ride in to the Des Moines Airport, waited for the sky to clear, and took off.  I never told anybody, and I don’t think anybody missed me.  I was out of there.
So the school I hadn’t seen, the one that was left, was Alfred, so I said, “I’m going there.”  They offered me some kind of scholarship.  So I went to Alfred, sight unseen, and spent four very happy years.  It was a lovely cloistered kind of community.  I guess things were going on then, like maybe a sexual revolution and a drug thing.  Somehow that passed me by.  I wanted it, but—

Q:  It didn’t get to Alfred.  [laughter]

Federman:  It certainly didn’t get to me in Alfred.  So I spent four years there.  What’s of some significance is that Alfred was a land-grant school, and so ROTC was required for the first two years for the men.  So the two years, instead of gym, you put on a uniform and you spit-shined your shoes and polished your brass and stood in some kind of formation and pretended you were playing whatever, just to march around, got a haircut.  But what’s interesting, and I’ve never been able to really put my finger on why I did this, I volunteered to continue the second two years, and this was totally voluntary, and just a few guys did it.  I would suspect it had something to do with this John Wayne syndrome of putting on a uniform, playing soldier, getting the girls or whatever.  There was nothing dangerous happening in the world really at that time.

Q:  Two years after college or an additional two years in college?

Federman:  In college.  So I did that, and as it turns out, on graduation we went through the regular graduation, cap and gown, my parents came up, and it was the first time they had seen the school.  They came up for it, and after the regular graduation, we took off the cap and gown, and I and several of my classmates had uniforms underneath and we got commissioned as second lieutenants in the United States Army.  The problem was then, this was 1966 and Vietnam was starting to heat up, and so it was too late.  There were no backsies on this thing then.  But what I did do is get a deferral to go to law school.

Q:  How did it happen that you were interested in law school?

Federman:  By default.  What does a Jewish boy do who’s relatively successful as a student, and what is expected of you?  It certainly was expected we would come in the fish business.  That’s why they were all working so hard, so that we wouldn’t have to work like that and sell fish and smell like fish.  So I was probably the most successful, in academics, of my cousins and sisters, and so the question is me going on to grad school, and there was some thought of me going on for an M.A./Ph.D. in political science.  I was offered some program that was nice, but for whatever reason I can’t tell you, I think what happens is Jewish boys who can’t become or don’t want to become doctors or dentists or whatever, law is the next best thing.
	So I picked law, and I got into Georgetown Law School and NYU [New York University], and I decided to pick Georgetown just because it was out of town.  Again, if you’re in town, you’re still part of the family, the Russ family, and you still have to work.  Remind me later to tell you what I’ve done to my kids to continue that tradition.  [laughs]

Q:  This kept you out of the army?

Federman:  No.  Deferred me.  So I was in law school for three years, from ’66 to ’69, living in Washington, D.C., in three different places in three different years.  I was there in 1968 when they burned down Washington during the riots.  You were there then, I presume, too, or you were out of town by then?

Q:  No, I was here, actually.

Federman:  Okay.  So we switched.  But I was there.  Because your family was there, I’m sure you’ve heard stories about that period.
	At any rate, I didn’t have anything to do with the military.  I didn’t have a uniform, I didn’t have anything.  I forgot about it.  Then you finish, graduated law school, Georgetown, and seemed to me within a few days I got a notice, “Report for duty.”  Then I went on a trip to Europe—I hadn’t been there—with some friends, gadding around Europe.  You could do Europe on five dollars a day.  You remember the book?  It was Frommer or somebody, and you could do it and have change.  So we did that.
Then I came and I just had no choice, because for me not to show up would have been desertion, right?  So I had done this thing to myself.  So the army had a plan.  I had a two-year obligation, and the army’s plan for me for the two years was the first year in Fort Polk, Louisiana.  Fort Polk, Louisiana, famous for large mosquitoes, large alligators, and larger rednecks.  None of those seemed exciting to me.  Then the second year they were going to send me to Vietnam.  By this point, we’re talking about 1969, it was quite hot.  It was right after ’68, the Tet [Offensive], Saigon was overrun.  So that was their plan for me, they told me, as if offering me, I don’t know, a Caribbean vacation.  “Here’s what we have planned for you.”
I said, “Now, wait a minute.  We must be able to do something else.  Let’s discuss this.”
They said, “Well, actually, there is something we can do.  If you extend your obligation by a year, make it three instead of two, you can go for the first eighteen months anyplace in the world you want to go where we have an opening, and the next eighteen months we’ll send you anyplace we want to send you.”  I assumed that was going to be Vietnam anyhow, so I would put it off.
So I picked that option.  I picked for the first eighteen months San Francisco because I had a cousin living there that I liked.  I don’t know.  I didn’t want to learn a foreign language or whatever.
So I got to San Francisco in ’69 and I was assigned to Oakland Army Terminal on the other side of the Oakland Bay Bridge, and at the moment I showed up—this is what Jews call bashert.--the moment I showed up, they had no vacancies in the quarters on the base for officers.  I was a first lieutenant at the time.  So they gave me a stipend to go find my own apartment, which I did, across the street from my cousin in San Francisco.  I bought a car, I had an apartment, and every day I’d put on a uniform, drive over the Bay Bridge to work.  I had got assigned to the JAG office because I was a lawyer at this time, the Judge Advocate General’s Office, so I was, in effect, practicing law.  I’d drive home and take off the uniform, go across the street to hang out with my cousin and smoke some pot.  It was okay, not bad.
Eighteen months came and I’m ready for the letter in the mail.  Didn’t happen.  Nineteen months, twenty months, twenty-one.  I’m saying, “Shit, they forgot about me.  Thank goodness I’m here in San Francisco.”  But twenty-four months, basically, they located me and gave me orders to Vietnam.
So there I am with orders to Vietnam and I really didn’t want to go.  Didn’t seem to be a great prospect.  Lots of people were dying.  So my father had a customer or I’m not quite sure the connection, some customer who knew somebody, or may have been the guy himself, who was the head of something in New York, and he was a colonel and whatever, and the idea was for me to go and see him, to get out of going to Vietnam.  So normally I rejected my father’s offers of help in these things, but we’re talking about Vietnam, so I went.  The guy—I remember it—was busy telling me what an honor it was to go to Vietnam, and I’m sitting there in some Kafkaesque scene.  I left there, like, nauseous—I’m getting nauseous thinking about it now—knowing there’s no escape for me.
I’m deaf in one ear, I was born deaf in one ear, and I thought maybe that would do something, so I tried to get out by virtue of that, and they said, “Oh, man, you’re a lawyer.  You’re going to be in Saigon.  You don’t have to hear anything.  Don’t worry about it.  Everything’ll be fine.”
So I took off in a plane with a bunch of other soldiers from McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, and this was in 1971, and flew to Anchorage, Alaska, to Yokota, Japan, to Bien Hoa Air Force Base outside of Saigon.  Okay.  You’re sort of adrenalized and it’s all different and whatever.  At this point I’m a captain, so I can’t start crying because I’m a captain, right?

Q:  A captain in JAG?

Federman:  No.  My assigned branch was AG, the Adjutant General, but I get assigned to JAG because I’m a lawyer.  They always need lawyers.
	So I show up wherever I’m supposed to show up, and hand my papers and say, “Okay, I’m ready for JAG assignment in Saigon,” and it looks like it might be interesting.  And they decided that they needed an adjutant general—I was an administrative officer—in an advisory team in the Mekong Delta.  The last one got blown up on his Jeep, you know, sort of like one of these IEDs today.  I said, “You don’t want to do this to me.  I’m a lawyer.”
	“We don’t need lawyers now.  We need an AG.”
	So the next thing I knew, they put me on a plane and our first stop was someplace called Cantho in the Mekong Delta, the headquarters of whatever army that was, 4th Army, whatever, in the Mekong Delta, and I was there for a while.  Now what I’m remembering is how terribly afraid I was.  Couldn’t believe I was in this scene.  This had never crossed my expectation radar.  And I was so vulnerable then.
	They also had, which is strange, like out of a Fellini movie, a bunch of people floating around that were Jews for Jesus, trying to convert.  There weren’t that many Jews around, but they were Jesus freaks and were trying to convert people.

Q:  In the army?

Federman:  Yes, because if you’re going to die, you might as well die believing in Jesus and then the Rapture and whatever.  But I was so screwed up and vulnerable then, that they sort of had me on the ropes, and I might have gone that way except that I got shipped out just before I was ready to say, “Okay, take me, Jesus.”
	Then they shipped me out to—they put me on this big supply plane, I don’t know what you call it, C-something, the back opens up and they drive tanks into it, but all they put on that plane was me and some mail, sitting in this thing.  I don’t know, maybe we flew an hour, and it lands and the thing opens up again, and I’m in the middle of a rice paddy with some single strip of corrugated metal that the plane landed on.  I get out and the mail gets thrown out, and the thing closes up and takes off.  And there I am, thinking to myself, “What’s a nice Jewish boy like me doing in a place like this?”
	Then a guy comes up in a Jeep, sort of a hippie-type guy, and he says—he doesn’t say anything.  I say, “Oh, you’re here to pick me up?”
	He said, “I’m here to pick up the mail.”
	I said, “Well, I’m assigned to the advisory team.”  That’s the only thing down there, so they took me there, and I was there just for a couple of months in the middle of nowhere.  Then they decided they needed a lawyer in Saigon, so they transferred me back for the remainder.  So that was the war.

Q:  After Saigon, then what happened?

Federman:  I came back to the States.  I was discharged from the army, and I’m sure you’ve heard the guys who came back, there were no bands playing for us.  Basically, took off the uniform, threw everything away.  You didn’t want to go around saying you just came back from Vietnam or even that you were in the army, because at that point you were recognized as something, a baby killer, not that I ever shot anybody, nobody ever shot at me, but it wasn’t a good scene.
	So then the question was for me to figure out what to do with my life, and I started to get a little frayed.

Q:  Where were you?

Federman:  I was living at home with my parents in Far Rockaway then, in their house.  I started to get a little not so lucid, so I decided I needed a job right away, so I got a job.  At this point I had taken the bar in New York and passed it before I even went into the army, and when I was stationed in San Francisco I took the bar in California and I passed that, so I had two places, but I had a girlfriend, a longstanding girlfriend at the time in New York, so I decided to stay here.  I got a job here right way with Legal Aid in Brooklyn.  That lasted about eight months.  It was Legal Aid Family Court.  I didn’t like it at all.
Then they opened up at that point a brand-new office, a prosecutorial office called the Office of the Special Prosecutor for the State of New York, and a guy who became somewhat famous/infamous, Maurice Nadjari.  The concept there, that whole office grew out of the Serpico—you know Serpico.

Q:  Yes.

Federman:  So Serpico had blown the whistle, and as a result, they had hearings before a federal judge, called the Knapp Commission hearings, and as a result of all that, then Governor Rockefeller set up a commission to investigation corruption in the criminal justice system in New York.  Nadjari was named the head of it, and he was putting together a team of young aggressive prosecutors.  I was a defense lawyer for Legal Aid, but somehow I got that job.  For five years I was with that office, and it was somewhat exciting.  We were doing what we thought was good work.
	Then I decided I had to make some money because I was married.  I went to a private firm, a litigating firm uptown, and I did that for two years.  At this point I had two children.
So the question always is, and it’s a question I ask myself, why did I leave law?  I was doing relatively well in it, making some money, was on the right track.  Why did I leave that and come back into the family business?  And I do not have a good answer for that.  I don’t.  What’s clear is that practicing law wasn’t pleasing me that much, and I’d come home with an armful of files that I had to ready for the next day to go in court, and you never knew which one was going to go to trial when the judge said you’re on trial with that case.  My wife would be home with the two babies, and she wanted to tell me what happened that day, this kid did this and he ate this and he got sick with that, and this baby this.  I’d be trying to be the dutiful husband, looking at her, but my mind was clearly in court the next day, trying to figure out how to do whatever I had to do to win.  So I wasn’t in a comfort zone doing this.  I was doing fine, but wasn’t—I mean, the only thing I can say, it didn’t feel great to me.  It was okay, could have kept doing it.

Q:  What was happening here?

Federman:  What was happening here—the right question—is that by 1975 and leading up to that were two sets of Russes, Aunt Hattie and Uncle Murray, last name Gold, and my mother and father, the Federmans, and they did the business during the week, rotating on weekend shifts and whatever, and that’s for a long time.  Since the 1950s, that’s how the store ran, these two sets.  But by 1976, Uncle Murray and Aunt Hattie were retired.  They were older.  Can’t tell you how old now.  But they were retired.
So my mother and father were left here.  My father had an increasingly debilitating heart condition, so they began to talk about—or he did—selling Russ & Daughters.  He had tried to bring in various members of the family at various times, to no avail.  The ones that probably wanted to come in, he didn’t want.  But he never asked me to come in, never.  I was a lawyer and I was the guy he could brag about, “My son the lawyer,” right?  I was the only one of my generation of Russes who became a professional, so he liked to brag, “My son the lawyer.”  I assume he bragged when I was in the army, “My son the captain.”  Whether he bragged or not I was in Vietnam, I’m not sure how he felt about that.  I suppose he felt uncomfortable about it.
At any rate, so that’s what was happening.  It now became my mother and father.  He was increasingly ill.  The neighborhood had been into a downward spiral and it was just precipitous in the late seventies.  It was awful.  The late sixties, it sort of started.  Actually, after World War II, the guys came back, wanted out of the Lower East Side.  But it gathered more momentum, but by the late seventies, this neighborhood was awful.  I don’t know if you ever passed through here in the seventies or eighties.  This neighborhood was the pits.  
Okay.  So business wasn’t doing well, he wasn’t doing well.  They were talking about selling it.  I suspect I wasn’t that happy doing what I was doing, so my bright idea, I came to him and said, “Look.  You want a partner?”  Not that he made me a partner.  [laughs]  “But I’ll work with you part-time and I’ll practice law part-time on my own.”  That was my plan.

Q:  You didn’t dread being here?

Federman:  No, I didn’t.  I’m surprised I didn’t, but I didn’t.  There was something always—as a kid coming in here, even though we came under protest, kicking and screaming, when the store was busy and all the stuff was happening, it was a show.  You see your mother and father and aunts and uncles dealing with these customers, and these customers, all this activity and vibrancy, and your parents and aunts and uncles are somebody special in there on their stage.  Then they would come over and I would say—my father’s Herbert—“Herbie, this your son?”  And they’d grab you by the cheeks.  “What a nice boychik.  Is he going to take over the business?’  And of course it’s the last thing that they wanted at that point.  But it was clear to me that my parents and aunts and uncles were somebody important in this store and were treated as such.
Occasionally I’d get to ride with my father in the truck as a kid, like Take Your Kid to Work Day.  He would occasionally take me with him into work, but the first stop would be one or several smokehouses, to pick up the fish and pick out the fish, and you see what’s going on there, them yelling and cursing at each other, and the smells and whatever.  It was like show biz.  It’s frightening, it stinks, but it’s show business, something going on that’s out of the realm of normal life.  Then he’d stop at Ratner’s and take me.  You know Ratner’s, the dairy restaurant, right?  So Ratner’s.  He’d go in the back room and all his cronies were sitting there, who had businesses down here or whatever.  “Hi, Herbie.”
Or even before that, coming over the bridge, there was a traffic cop at the end of the Williamsburg Bridge, so we’d come from Brooklyn smokehouses, from Far Rockaway, Queens, to the smokehouses in Brooklyn, over the bridge, and there’d be a traffic cop and they’d always wave to my father in the truck.  “Hey, Herbie!”  The cop is doing it.  In those days, cops were important.  So this was a cop paying homage to my father and saying hello, and if there was enough time to say, “Hey, you teachin’ your kid the business?”  
And then to Ratner’s and the same group every day would be sitting there, ordering the same thing, and the same schlumpy waiter would come with the stuff and knew exactly what to give each guy.  I’d sit there, “Herbie, you brought your kid in.”  They’d all be doing what they did.  There was some drama about this that stuck.  The smells, the sights, the sounds, it stuck.
So I did what I was supposed to do, become a lawyer, the only one in my generation of Russes to do that, and then I decided—in the beginning I wasn’t giving it up.  My plan was to help them in the business, keep Russ & Daughters in the family—I think I recognized this place was something important—and practice law.  Well, the first day I came in here was the last day I practiced law, because it turns out—and I didn’t know this—this business is like overwhelming in details, and if you’re not paying attention to the details, you’re going to lose money.  If you’re not watching every piece of fish and every customer and how everything is handled, or watch the register, make sure the money goes in the register, I mean, there were no credit cards in those days, right?  It was all cash business.  So it’s like immediately overwhelming, and the idea of practicing law—so I tried to keep my hand in it by doing some kind of hearings as a hearing officer for this or that, but, you know, I got caught doing that in terms of I wasn’t in here at some point, and there was a New York Times reporter in here, didn’t like what she got, gave it a bad review, and I said, “Forget this law stuff,” you know.  So this became an obsession.  I became obsessive about this, maybe because I have an obsessive personality.

Q:  What kind of obsession?

Federman:  The obsession is to make sure everything is perfect at all times, beyond reasonable expectation, so that if the store looks beautiful but there’s a smudge on that—you see the showcase is glass in the front?  Okay, people have a habit of taking their hands, like they want to reach in, and they’re putting their fingerprints all over that showcase.  Everything in the store can be perfect, but if I’m seeing fingerprints on the showcase, it’s not.  And my fear is that somebody’s going to come in, the wrong person, and write up, “Russ & Daughters is dirty.  What happened with this generation?  They don’t have the ethic,” whatever.  So that haunted me.
And whenever I thought about changing something, I was haunted by the notion, you know, what would my parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles think?  There was always a struggle.  So if I wanted to put coffee, sell coffee in the store, my mother would say, “We never sold coffee.  Who are you going to sell coffee to?”  Right?  “Why are you going to sell coffee?”  It was always a question.  “What do you want to do that for?”
	So every step that I took was problematic for me, and the neighborhood continued to go down and I sweated out each customer one by one, made sure that I waited on most of them myself so I could give them my personal charm, whatever that was, but they knew the owner and they want the owner to wait on them, right?  And I knew that every piece of fish that went out went out with my name on it.  I’m a Russ and on the door it says Russ.  So I had that.
This is all a weight and an anchor, you know, in both senses of the word.  The anchor is, I’m anchored to a family history of doing something on the Lower East Side, and some people really appreciate that.  Because the old-timers go, they disappear for a year or so, they show up again, they want the same piece of fish in the same place.  If it’s not there, what have you done?  And I knew the store was physically getting tired itself.  The neighborhood continued to spiral down, I think, until the nineties.  It always had some interesting thing going on.  The people that moved out of the neighborhood, all the Jews had moved out, the ones who became affluent, they would buy a quarter pound of lox in their neighborhood, but when their families were coming over, their son the lawyer was showing up or was bringing the future machatunim over, or was celebrating a graduation, some special occasion, the family together, they’d want to come to Russ & Daughters when they knew they were going to get quality.  So they kept coming.
Of course, you know, nobody lived around here, and the neighborhood had a bad reputation.  Your car’s going to be broken into, you’re going to get mugged.  Sometimes it was true.  Bad weather.  They weren’t coming here.  
For a while we still had the momentum of the Sunday Blue Laws, which in effect made the Lower East Side because the rest of the world had to shut down on Sundays, but there was some special dispensation where the retail shops could be open on the Lower East Side on Sundays, so that you would find big lines waiting to get into the brassiere store, the ladies’ schmatta thing, you know, the fancy clothes.  So there was still vibrancy until those laws were taken off and anybody could be open on a Sunday.  And then the malls came in, where people could drive from their suburban homes to their suburban malls and park their car and have all the shops there.
So that was all the death knell for the Lower East Side, and I just sort of—you know, people would say to me, “Mark, why don’t you move your store uptown where your customers are?”
And I said—it was a flip response—“Sooner or later, uptown is going to move downtown,” I said.  I don’t know if I really meant it or why.  We owned the building.  I couldn’t see working to pay a landlord.  That’s sort of another thing you don’t do in this family.  So I didn’t move, and people would come and we would maintain their business.  Little by little, we increased it.  The old Jews that I inherited from my family as customers, suddenly they were leaving.  They weren’t eating it anymore or the salt they weren’t eating, they moved down to Florida, or they went further south and they were in the cemetery.  But then people more my age, you know, that I had more simpatico with, they were coming in, and some of them turned out to be important people in the world, who knew then, you’re waiting on them, you like them, you talk to them, you schmooze.  I like people, basically, and you’ve got to do that to be in this business.  We schmooze.  I knew fish, I learned fish, so I knew good fish and what people’s tastes were.  That was happening.
So it was a struggle.  It was a real struggle.  It’s not like a lot of money was being made.  In 1995, we renovated the store, not meaning the whole thing, just the candy side had gotten tired and the floors and the ceilings and the lighting, so we did that.  So I lined up a business consultant and an architect and an engineer and whatever, and I said, “Look, we need this renovated, but you cannot make this look like uptown.  We are downtown, so we’ve got to maintain our old look.  We’ve got to do it in two weeks,” because we only close for two weeks in the summer.  “We’ve got to have it done.”
They said, “Of course.”  Of course they’re going to do it, but they charge you five times more.  But we did it, and we did it, I think, the right way, so we maintained the tile concept, the ceiling concept, and we didn’t make it look trendy uptown chic.  It looks like what it’s supposed to look like, what my grandparents want it to look like and my aunts and uncles, clean and neat, and it’s food and it’s going to be clean and fresh and full and filled in all the time.  I think we maintain that.
So part of me wanted to do something with the business.  The other part of me had this sense of tradition.  Would they have done it?  I always have to ask myself the question, would my grandparents, my parents have done it this way?  I don’t know.  Things just sort of happen.  People’s tastes change.  They’re going to eat less salty food, so instead of so much belly lox, they’re going to eat Nova Scotia, and suddenly it’s not just Nova Scotia available, it’s salmons from around the world, Scotch salmon, Irish salmon.  So you start bringing those in.  And cream cheese is not just cream cheese anymore; they want tofu cream cheese.  So you do that and you hope that they’re not rolling over in their graves, the Russ family.  But turns out it’s not so bad.

Q:  Why don’t we stop here and then pick it up again.

Federman:  I think I ran out of steam.

Q:  Well, one does.

Federman:  That’s a little monologue I was just in.

Q:  That’s good.

[End of interview]









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