Interviewee:  Mark Federman							      Session #2

Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					           New York City

Date:  January 31, 2011

Q:  This is Judith Weinraub.  It is January 31, 2011, and I’m with Mark Federman upstairs and next door from Russ & Daughters.
	Good morning.

Federman:  Good morning.

Q:  We got as far as your leaving the law and coming to the store the first time we spoke.  We spoke a little bit about that.  What did you see when you got here?  When you walked into the store and thought about—well, you didn’t think about whether or not you were going to hang in there at first.  Tell me what you saw when you walked in.  I don’t mean visually.

Federman:  Well, I’m not sure I can remember exactly what I saw, but I think an impression was, if not the first day, shortly after that, this wasn’t really what I had in mind.  I’m not sure what I had in mind.  It might have been a more romantic notion of just greeting the customers and being Mr. Russ in front of the store and having everybody happy.  I don’t know, while I lived with this all my life and watched my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles do this on a daily basis, I don’t know if it ever struck me or I ever understood how difficult this was, and here I was doing it alone.  As soon as I came in, my father exited, for the most part, because he had a bad heart condition.  That was the purpose of this transfer.  My mother was not all that much help.  She was tending to my father.  I think they took off for Pritikin, where they were trying to, I don’t know, turn things around for him.  My aunt and uncle had retired and they had moved to Florida.
So I was pretty much alone, although I inherited a staff from them of employees who were not particularly enthusiastic about my arrival on the scene.  One fellow in particular, Sidney, who I describe as a farbisner. 
Q:  What a farbisner?

Federman:  Somebody that’s just dried up and angry.  I suspect that it was his impression that he would take over the business.  He had been there since leaving the army right out of World War II.  He’d come and had been the store manager for some years and I think often he’d let the customers believe that he was a member of the Russ family.  But anyhow, when I showed up, it was probably a surprise to him.  He knew me almost since I’m born, I guess, and he watched as I was probably the most academically successful of the Russ grandchildren, and then I became a lawyer and I was in the army and I practiced law, I had a good position.  So it must have been a shock to him that I showed up and was introduced as the heir apparent to Russ & Daughters.  So he was not going to make my life easy.  It wasn’t his style to make it easy for anybody, not for the fellow employees who he would beat up on verbally.  There was always some issue to his integrity.  The old concept in retail, keep your eyes on the register, is not without justification.

Q:  What does that mean?

Federman:  Keep your eyes on the register?

Q:  Yes.

Federman:  Well, you know, because your help is going to take money from the register.  It’s a cash business.  There were no credit cards in those days that were being used in normal transactions.  So it was a cash business and you had to watch.  Some line I heard from a woman whose father owned a bakery—the woman was eighty-seven; I spoke to her recently—her father owned a bakery two doors to the right, was that her father had a conversation with my grandfather, and she claims that my grandfather had two young guys working for him who had pegged pants.  I said, “What are pegged pants?”  Apparently they were fashionable in that day, 1920 whatever, right?  And her father said to my grandfather, “Russ—.”  They all pronounced Russ as “Roose.”  “Russ, you gotta get rid of those boys.  They’re not going to let you make a living.”  And she claims the story went on, so she obviously heard this from her father, that he also told my grandfather, “Why don’t you bring your daughters into the business,” and my grandfather said to him, “Never.”
Well, I mentioned this story recently to my mother and my aunt, my aunt being ninety-eight years old, my mother being ninety, and they said that can’t have happened.  First of all, they didn’t know about the kids with the pegged pants, and number two is, it was clear to them that it was expected of them to come into the business from a very early age, so my aunt, the eldest aunt, came in when maybe she was eleven, and maybe her sister came in when she was twelve, started coming on weekends.  They had to go to school.  And my mother says, “And I was lucky, I didn’t have to come in and help out on the weekends till I was fourteen.”
My eldest aunt did not finish high school.  At age sixteen she quit, and it was 1929, so the market had crashed.  She went out and had some jobs, but ultimately came back to help her father, and all the daughters came in.
I don’t know how I got to this point in this monologue.

Q:  That’s okay.  You were talking about Sidney.

Federman:  Me coming into the business.  So the primary characters were Sidney and Louie.  Louie was there to be Sidney’s whipping boy.  I think they hired Louie so that Sidney wouldn’t beat up too much on the customers.  He had a nasty—I mean, when you hear stories of nasty counter men and waiters and the Ratner’s thing, Sidney was like the paradigm for all of this.  He was just nasty.  So when I came in, this nastiness really had a focus.  He would stick a knife in your back, and I wasn’t sure I didn’t have to fear that literally.  There were knives, you know.
So Sidney made me miserable and would never really teach me the business, what was going on.  Sidney did everything fast, moves, whatever.  He had that issue.  Fortunately, he had that part of the Russ mantra where you keep everything clean, so there was always a rag and cleaning, whatever.  He made himself look busy and like he knew what he was doing, and wouldn’t share in the secrets like this salad, how was it made, or, you know, anything about the fish.  So I was left with this.

Q:  Who was making the salads?

Federman:  The kitchen crew in the back.  There weren’t that many fancy salads being made.  It was coleslaw, potato salad, chopping herring, whitefish salad.  There wasn’t a lot going on, but whatever it was, it was going to be a mystery that Sidney wasn’t going to let me know about so that, one, he kept his position as being indispensable, the manger of the store, and, two—

[Begin File 2]

Federman:  Where are we?  Are we going in the right direction?

Q:  Yes.  What year was that when you put José and Herman on the—

Federman:  I don’t remember.  It was, I don’t know, four or five years after I came here.  I don’t really remember when that happened, but I never looked back.  They’re fabulous.  They’re really fabulous.  I tell them, “You may have been born a Reyes [phonetic] and a Vargas [phonetic] and [unclear], but you’re Russes.”  Their passion, their ability to work hard, their dedication, their honesty, I’ve never seen anything like those two guys.
Herman has got the personality, which is just so spectacular, and he also has the ability to double-talk, so that when a customer complains about something, who knows what, Herman is able to just turn that around into a pretzel and they don’t know what happened.  [laughter]  I see them, their eyes glazing over.  “What the hell was the response there?”  But it works, and they keep coming back.  His motivation, both of them, were to please customers, which is essential.  I don’t know if that was the feeling in the generations before, whether it was about pleasing customers.  Certainly you had to please the customer, but these guys would bend over backwards to do it.

Q:  What about your father? 

Federman:  My father was like totally charming, totally charming to the customers.  It was a whole other can of worms at home.  And I resented that, because I would see him here, he would spend hours in his little office.  You still haven’t seen the size of that office back there.  He would spend hours there with some customer or other, BS’ing, or a supplier, talking, laughing, smoking cigars, joking around, and I was jealous of the attention, because by the time he got home, he didn’t even want to talk.  He wanted to sit in front of the television, have his dinner served.  He was spent.  So I resented it.
When it came to the kids, he was very volatile.  This is like a shrink session here I’m having with you.  He was very volatile.  But I got this, relating it back to Russ & Daughters, I got this only after I worked here and I understood how you were “on” and had to be “on” here all the time for the suppliers, for the customers, for the staff, so that by the end of the day, you didn’t have anything more to give, so if you went home and your wife wanted to say—or my mother got it, you know.  But, you know, there was trouble with this, the pipe burst, the kids did this.  There was no patience for that.  He had no patience.  And I was constantly on guard in my own life, but when you get tired and stuff, sometimes you slip, but that was the thing that I found distressing.
My father was so charming.  Everybody loved my father, Herbie.  Then I got here and I found out its origin.  Well, I mean, there were other origins in his own family.

Q:  What about the product?  Did you change it at all?  Did you keep it the same?

Federman:  Me personally?

Q:  Yes.  How extensive was the product when you came in?

Federman:  There were fewer products, and as more products became available—

Q:  Like what?

Federman:  Okay.  Salmon, for instance.  Salmon was basically belly lox salt-cured salmon, not smoked, real old-fashioned stuff that I still adore at times.  And then the smoked salmon was, by and large, Nova Scotia from the Atlantic Ocean, and then Nova, to distinguish it from the Pacific Ocean, both smokes salmons, both mild cured smoked salmons.

Q:  Which was Pacific?

Federman:  Pacific was the Nova.  But, you know, every appetizing store had a way of calling whatever they had in it.  Some of them called lox anything.  Anything in the store would be called lox.
Interestingly, it has nothing to do with you, but my daughter Niki had a surprise interview appearance on WNYC just a few days ago.  Do you know this?

Q:  No.

Federman:  Brian Lehrer Show.  You know?

Q:  Yes.

Federman:  So he had as a guest a guy named Ben Zimmer, who took over for William Safire for the “On Language,” the wordsmith guy.  So the segment was about parsing the president’s State of the Union message, he said this and this meant that, blah, blah, blah.  And Brian Lehrer said, “Well, you know, if you ask people, one of the words that sticks in most people’s mind from the speech was ‘salmon.’”  I don’t know if you saw the president’s State of the Union.

Q:  Yes.

Federman:  He attempted some joke about regulation.  We have regulation when salmon’s out at sea, we have other regulations when the salmon’s up the river, and imagine the regulations when the salmon gets smoked.

Q:  A very Washington kind of joke, but go ahead.  [laughs]  A regulation joke.

Federman:  So Brian Lehrer, taking off on that some days before this particular interview—we’re counting this—he said—and I had said on the air that this is a first, the first time that lox have made its way into the State of the Union message, and then he got a nasty email from one or more of his listeners, who said lox is not smoked salmon.  And he said, “My surprise today—.”  This just happened on Friday.  “I have a surprise.  We’re going to get this straightened out by an expert, Niki from Russ & Daughters in New York.”
So he gets Niki on the phone.  Niki apparently had a forty-five-minutes heads-up on this.  “Niki, this is Brian Lehrer.”
“Hi, Brian.”  Well, anyhow, she was great and relaxed and whatever, and describing the difference between lox as pure salt-cured unsmoked salmon and smoked salmon. 

Q:  Let me ask you something.  At that point when you came, was any salmon farmed?

Federman:  No, it wasn’t.  We weren’t selling farmed salmon in those days.  It was wild salmon.

Q:  Certainly on the West Coast and on the East Coast.

Federman:  From both oceans.  It was beginning to get depleted, but still enough of it.  Maybe it was $16 a pound, $4 a quarter, 3.99 a quarter.

Q:  That’s very funny, because my memory from that moment, too, is $4 for a quarter of a pound.

Federman:  Right.  Wild salmon, right?

Q:  I didn’t know it was wild.

Federman:  Farmed salmon really hadn’t entered, or at least we weren’t dealing with farmed salmon for as long as possible.  We didn’t deal with farmed caviar as long as possible, believing that we were the place that was supposed to sell wild fish and fish eggs.  So the salmons were free, basically, and then there was baked salmon also.  Baked salmon is a hot smoked salmon, different processes, too much to go into now.  But that was it.  I mean, the typical smoked fish.  So you had sturgeon, always, and whitefish and chubbs.  Chubbs are disappearing.

Q:  Why don’t you, for the record, explain what chubbs are.

Federman:  Chubbs look like small whitefish.  These are all lake fish, mostly Great Lake fish, and the whitefish roughly two to three pounds.  Sometimes they get up to nine or ten pounds, but basically that’s it.  You serve it at a party, take out the bone, you fillet it, and it’s a whitefish.  It’s a white-flesh meat and fat and rich and quite delicious.
	The chubb is a sort of smaller version of it.  It’s a different species, but people think it’s a baby whitefish, and it’s not.  It’s its own species, but, again, it comes from the same waters, although chubbs, I believe, swim at a different depth than whitefish.  But half the world had, in the past, half the world will claim that chubbs are better to eat and half will claim that whitefish are better, for the same reasons, it’s fatter, sweeter, whatever.  Then the half who are eating whitefish claim it tastes better by the head, the other half by the tail, some by the middle.  You know, we’re Russ & Daughters.  We sell tail, head, chubbs, whitefish, you know.
We have a sign—you’ll see it—behind the counter.  It says De Gustibus Non Est Disputandam.  Somebody gave me that sign.  Latin, “Of Taste There is No Dispute.”  Basically, if you like it, it’s the best.  So there’s different tastes for everything.
But some of these fish disappeared.  Wild salmon, you know, wild Atlantic salmon has been fished out, and that’s a shame.  We sell Gaspe salmon now.  It’s basically the same Atlantic species with a big fat Nova Scotia, what was called Nova Scotia salmon, Atlantic salmon, came from Nova Scotia, and the best of it came from the Gaspe Peninsula, and that’s what we sold.  So now we have a farm version of the same thing, which tastes very much the same, the Gaspe salmon.

Q:  Then you would have gotten it from somebody who supplied Gaspe salmon, when you came?

Federman:  When I came, the wild fish were bought by the smokers.  Huge amounts was bought by the smokers, and we bought it from the various smokers that we were dealing with.  
Dealing with the smokers is a huge other education I got, was not prepared for when I came in.  I don’t know what I thought when I came in.  I thought it was all going to be easy and romantic and I would be the king of the walk, and I would be doing something meaningful.  
So the question is, why did I give up law and come in here?  And I’ve never satisfactorily answered that myself, but I suppose--because I was thinking about this this morning--I suppose I wasn’t that happy practicing law.  I suppose that it wasn’t meaningful for me.  I didn’t find any meaning, although I had various jobs practicing law.  I was in the army doing JAG work, then I was doing that also in Vietnam and stateside.  Then I came back and I worked for Legal Aid Family Court for a period of time, and the concept there was to give kids a fair shake and see if you could help them before they go through the criminal justice system.  It was something fairly new, Juvenile Rights Division.  That turned out to be a disaster, as far as I could tell.  We weren’t really practicing law and weren’t helping any of these kids.  It was an animal show.
Then they formed something just about that time called the Office of the Special Prosecutor.  I probably told you this.  That was about anti-corruption work that came out of Serpico and the Knapp Commission, and that sounded romantic.  I did that for about five years, and that sort of seemed, after a while, to be fruitless and the romance wore off.
Then I went to a private firm because now I had a kid and I needed to make some money, so I went to a firm and I wanted to be a litigator and try cases.  But working for a law firm and being on trial all the time wears thin, so when you come home, your head is not really at home.  So anyhow, there may be meaning in law, and I’m sure some lawyers find meaning there, but it didn’t attach itself to me.
Then I wanted to have an exposure to the world, and it seemed to me law wasn’t doing that.  It really is insular, a lot like medicine.  You’re not really engaged with that much of the world.  In a place like Russ & Daughters, it turns out, more and more so as time goes on, the world comes to you, all of the world, all these different people from all over the world come in and are happy to talk to you and share their stories and find out—you know?
So I had those notions in mind that I would fall into this, walk around, strut around the store, be Mr. Russ, and then I realized, you know, you got to get the fish in the store, taken care of, handled, please the customers, keep the help in line, doing the right thing and motivated.  Every moment you had to match up a piece of fish and a counter man and a customer, and you had to get it right because your name, Russ, was on the door.  And then you didn’t have a lot of—at least this is what I felt—didn’t have a lot of room to experiment, because I was dealing with a business that had been here already in ’78, the business, put aside the pushcart phase of this business, officially established in 1914, so this is sixty-four years later.  Is that right?  Yes, we’re moving towards a hundred years.
So this is sixty-four years later, history of the way it ran, and then I inherited a staff who knew how it had run and were not interested in changing anything, and a customer base who had largely moved out of the neighborhood, but when they came back, they wanted to make sure that everything was the same as the last time they came, whether it was six days ago or six months ago, whatever.  If you moved the chopped herring from this side of the showcase, they’re like, “What’d you do here?  What’s this kid doing to this store?”  So I inherited that.
So what was my view?  I think my view was rather from the beginning.  Okay, then this is placed inside a neighborhood which is in total free-fall.  The Lower East Side was the pits.  The street life was inhabited by pimps and prostitutes and junkies and criminals.  It was like, yeah, it was terrible.  The city had given up services.  It was awful down here.  So whatever romantic notion I had or notions I had were sort of dispelled quickly.
I wanted to pick up a thread.

Q:  Did you think of moving away from the Lower East Side?

Federman:  Sure.  That was a constant.  My thoughts were existential.  Are we going to continue to exist?  Occasionally I find pieces of paper I put in various places in my house.  I’m big on scribbling things down.  Now with a computer I don’t have paper, but occasionally the computer breaks down and I lose my—so at least with a scratch piece of paper, you know it may be someplace.  You may not uncover it for twenty years.  But I found some scratchy notes, with me.  Question: how long can I keep this going?  Am I the generation that will preside over the failure of Russ & Daughters?  And that was a horrible thought.  So I just was trying not to take over the world with this, but trying to sort of negotiate the icebergs, the shoals and all the stuff I was dealing with.
So moving uptown, in fact, customers would come in often and say, “Hey, Mark, why don’t you move your business uptown where your customers are?”  Which made sense.  But the concept, because we owned the business and, in effect, I was paying myself rent, of moving and paying a landlord rent was not one that the Russ family, we weren’t big on that.  And, two, I always had the sense that we were in our historically correct location.  Even if the world changed around us, this is where people know us.  So if they were a Jew from Argentina or France or whatever, any place in the world, California, Chicago, and they wanted to come back to the Lower East Side, they wanted to make sure Russ & Daughters was still here, whether they heard about it or they shopped here once or their parents or grandparents shopped here.  So this was a location for us, and I didn’t know if it would work outside of our current location.

Q:  Who did you see as your competition, if anybody?  What state was Zabar’s in at that point?

Federman:  Zabar’s is great.  Zabar’s is the only one I paid attention to, because Zabar’s represented what had become a huge business, big family, huge business, and I don’t do envy very often, but Zabar’s I was envious of, past tense.  I was envious of.  The reason it’s past tense—oh, and part of what I was doing also is trying to negotiate and exist, I felt very strongly that I spend time with my family.  By now I had two young kids, and I didn’t have enough of my parents’ attention.  My mother worked on weekends, left us with a terrible grandmother, my father’s mother.  So, you know, we all try to learn from the mistakes we think our parents made.  Then we make our own new mistakes.  Some of theirs and our own, we create our own.
So where was I now?

Q:  Zabar’s.

Federman:  Oh, yes, Zabar’s.  Okay.  That was the one thing I was envious of because I would hear about Zabar’s buying this much fish, was taking this much money, and I always figure I’m as smart as anybody else, not necessarily smarter, but as smart, so I felt somewhat envious of that.  From time to time I would run into one of the Zabars in the smokehouses.  I would be picking out fish.  Then I was running into, more often than the others, David Zabar, who’s the son of one of the brothers, Stanley or Saul. David was new in the business, was somewhat younger than I, and we would talk.  I would tell him whatever we would talk about, I was going here with my family, going on a ski trip, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
	So, some years later there was an article in maybe the New York Magazine about Zabar’s and how it was explosive and the family was fighting, and David would say, while they were interviewing him, and he was pissed off that his family wanted him to work a hundred hours a week and he wasn’t going to take it, blah, blah, blah, typical next-generation, “Why I have to work this hard?”  And he said, “And I have this friend and we meet each other in the smokehouses, and he runs this kind of business and he’s with his family and he’s not working a hundred hours.”  [laughs]  So the irony is that here’s this guy who I envied with the volume of his business, and it turns out he’s envying me for my lifestyle.  So that was the last time I think I envied anybody for anything.  You know, it took me a while to realize we run very different kinds of businesses.
When I came in, also the food world was changing.  The concept of the little Mom and Pop, Edsel, Pedsel and Company business, foods, specialty foods business, was going by the boards.  I mean, in every community you’d see it.  First of all, the communities were changing.  The Italian community little or no longer existed.  So the little bakeries and little [unclear] and whatever, and the Jewish neighborhood of the Lower East Side, you know, that had disappeared, so the delis were going.  The appetizing stores, I think there was maybe two or three or four left here when I first got here, or five, when I first got here, when there were twenty or thirty of them, you know, in its heyday here.  Now we’re the only one that exists here, and maybe one of the few—you can count them on one hand—that exist in the city at all.
So the concept of this specialty food business, Mom and Pop family thing was disappearing, and food was going to one-stop shopping and it was getting fancy, so you had not only Zabar’s, you had Balducci’s.  Even the supermarket world was trying to get fancy, with the Food Emporiums.  Then sometimes they got places that got too fancy.  Dino De Laurentiis—I forget which year that was—decided to make some extravaganza on the Upper West Side with whatever he called it, Food Halls.  I forget what he called it.  Food Works, something.  And that didn’t last.  But nonetheless, it was about big one-stop shopping.  That was going on.  There was no economy of scale in doing what we did.  It didn’t make sense as a business model anymore.  The neighborhood was changing.

Q:  Did you deliver?

Federman:  No, we didn’t.  I tried delivering for a while.  It turned out to be a disaster, because you had to send two people to get around the city.  You sent one, you got a ticket.  Then you lost them for hours.  You didn’t know if they truly got stuck in traffic.  There were no cell phones in those days where you could check on a guy.  And it just didn’t really make any sense.
Of course, if it was a big order, we’d wind up delivering it ourselves.  I remember some guy showed up, one of the first Christmases.  It was some kind of actor, some kind of famous actor.  I don’t remember his name, or semi famous.  He wanted to give little one-pound boxes of chocolate candies to I don’t know how many people, fifty, a hundred, whatever, and he wanted them delivered during Christmas.  So my wife took one of the guys from the kitchen, and we packed them in little stupid white boxes, tried to wrap them.  I mean, we learned, by doing it ourselves, so many things.  We learned the hard way.  Mostly my parents, we inherited what they did, so I suppose here and there they made things a little better, and I think here and there we made some things better and easier.

Q:  So if you didn’t deliver, that means people had to come here.

Federman:  People had to come here.  That’s right.  Shipping is another issue.  Shipping is a big part of our business.  Didn’t exist then.  Here’s what I inherited.  My father and uncle, particularly my uncle was very conservative about this, my father was more trusting and wanted to build up the business, my uncle was very conservative, so if somebody, for instance, an important person from Hollywood wanted five pounds of sturgeon for a party, here’s how it went.  He would say, “Send me a check.  Here’s how much it’ll cost you.  Send me a check.  When it clears, I’ll send you the merchandise.”  [laughter]  
There were no credit cards in those days, and there wasn’t really overnight shipping, so they’d have to pack it in dry ice.  To pack something in dry ice, you had to get a delivery of a big thing.  We didn’t use dry ice particularly.  So you’d get this big thing of ice, you’d chip it away, you’d put it in there with the smoke going over, and then you had to make out paperwork for the airlines.  They weren’t happy to have this thing change the cabin pressure and stuff.  It was a nightmare, so we really didn’t do it.  We discouraged it from happening.  That was shipping.
	Then credit cards came in, so I beefed up the shipping business, because now you had a credit card.  Then you had overnight shipping, FedEx.  So it’s not like I was brilliant.  I mean, things changed in the world.  The food world changed, the shipping portion of it changed, the way business is done has changed.
So in 2000, my daughter Niki, who you know, 2000, 2001, she graduated college in ’99.  I forget when.  She graduated Amherst College, hot shot, very smart, lovely girl, and decided she was going to go West to San Francisco.  That seemed to be the pattern of the kids that graduated college.  If you graduated on the East Coast, you go and get a job on the West Coast, vice versa.  So Niki decided she was going to go West, and so, you know, the Jewish father, “What are you going there for?  Where are you going to stay?”  Whatever. 
As it turns out, I met a customer in the store, a friend of Calvin Trillin’s.  He brought her in once and then she came in herself, and it turns out she’s from San Francisco, she heard Niki was going out there.  She offered her house to Niki so Niki could stay and get situated.  That’s what happens in Russ & Daughters, you know.
Niki went there and became an assistant to the director or the assistant to the director of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, David somebody, whose name I don’t remember.  I think it took her about a year and a half to figure out that she wasn’t going to be the director, you know.  She was just an assistant.  But Niki’s an ambitious kid from New York.
So anyhow, she decided she was going to come back East, much to my delight, but she was going to come back East to work for a not-for-profit.  You notice the way I said that.  Not for profit.  I said, “Niki, we’re the Russ family.  We do for-profit only.”  Of course, my saying that was like the kiss of death on my own fantasy.  So Niki heard that from me, she was going to do this job for sure.  It was some, at that point, some creation, combination of the U.N. and Cisco Systems, the big computer—and they were going to solve all of the world’s problems on the computer.  They were going to get donations [unclear].  Niki was all fired up about this.  It lasted for her about five months.  She realized she was sitting in front of a computer screen, and that wasn’t very intriguing to her, and maybe for the same reasons that being a lawyer wasn’t all that intriguing to me.  Somehow it didn’t work.
So she left there, and we had given her an apartment here in the building.  It wasn’t this size; it was a studio.  So she was trying to figure out her next move, when 9/11 happened.  Actually, on 9/11, if you walk to the top of this building, we had then a spectacular view of the back of the building this way, on the top, of the World Trade Center towers.  It was like right in your face.  So when we understood what was going on, Niki and I went up to the top and watched the towers burn and smoke and fall down.  At some point, Niki said to me, “Dad, I think people are jumping out of the windows.” 
And I said, “No, Niki, it must be debris.”  But it turns out people were jumping out of the windows.

Q:  Because it was early in the morning, so she still would have been here.  She probably wouldn’t have gone to work yet.

Federman:  She was here living in the building, right.  But I guess the point I wanted to make was not that, but 9/11 changed the dynamic.  Certainly in a moment’s notice there were no jobs available, and she hadn’t figured out her next move.  I thought 9/11, for all its horrors, in a sense worked for me because now Niki would be here, realize that she was the heir apparent of Russ & Daughters.  My son always wanted to be a doctor and became a doctor, you know, and is happy being a doctor and is good at it and is doing good work.

Q:  Where is he?

Federman:  He’s at UCLA and he does pediatric oncology, so he’s not in it for the money, but he’s got a reputation for being a good doctor, which is terrific.  I often say I’m the only Jewish father who didn’t want a son to be a doctor.  I wanted him to be here.  Part of the irony we can get back to is now that I’m here, I want my kids to do this because I think this is good work.
	At any rate, so Niki and her mother decided that Niki would be here till she figured it out, doing special projects.  I maybe mentioned this to you?

Q:  No.

Federman:  Here’s where we’re not on the same page.  I’m seeing Niki as the heir apparent, so I’m going to teach her the way the Russes learned to run this business.  You stand on the counter six days a week, ten hours a day.  That’s just on the counter.  You go home, you do the books, whatever, and you go to the smokehouse several times a week and you buy the fish, then you slice fish, you handle the fish, you tell people what to do.  First you learn how to do it right, blah, blah, blah.  So that’s my vision of this thing.
	Niki’s vision and her mother’s vision, my wife, is that Niki will be doing special projects.  I’m saying, “What’s a special project?  This is Russ & Daughters.  What could a special project do?”  A special project, to me, is somebody calls up a restaurant, says, “I need a hundred schmaltz herrings filleted in an hour.”  That’s a special project.  But they’re talking about the Internet, and I don’t know from this stuff.  I do have a computer in the store at this point.

Q:  This point being about when?

Federman:  2001.  Actually, I think I also have closed-circuit TV so I could see from the office to the front, what’s happening.  I have it focused on the register and on the customer thing.  So that’s how I got high tech.  That was about it.  But this Internet business, I’m clear it’s a business, but I don’t know about it.  You want to place an order, you’re in the store or you’re calling me and I know your voice.  Then I let you place an order.
But they’re determined, special projects, and my wife comes from a different culture.  She’s from South America society there, and shopkeepers are not held in high repute.  So she doesn’t want this for her daughter.  Plus she knows—now, my wife has been doing—when the kids were old enough and went to school and she had some free time, I started sort of getting my wife involved here, so she would do the books, she would do some of the candy buying, she would run around, do the yeoman’s work.  She tried to stay off the counter, where she never felt comfortable dealing with the public.  But, you know, there was always that sense that this place didn’t comport with her background, that she didn’t see her daughter, who is lovely, delightful, smart, doing this.  Our daughter should be president of the world, not running a little smoked fish outfit.

Q:  Did she have issues with your coming back here, Maria?

Federman:  No, she didn’t, or if she did, she didn’t say so.  I don’t know how much thought we gave to it.  We may have talked about it.  I suspect we did.  We may have had the same romantic notion that it’ll be easier than what I was doing, because I was on trial a lot of the time, and that means constantly your head is someplace else.  It’s an adversarial system in law, and your job is to basically beat the guy in court the next day.
So that wasn’t making me happy and I wasn’t able to pay attention to her.  Little did I know that I would come home thinking about whether whitefish are going to be available for Mrs. Goldberg and if it would be filleted right by José the next day.  But, you know, if you’re a worrier, you’re going to worry.  But I think what we both sort of felt was that what I was doing was not making me happy, therefore it wasn’t going to make her happy, and maybe I would have more time to play with the family and be home, whatever notions we had that turned out not to be true.
So at any rate, she was going to save her daughter from this, so now my wife is here and she sees how hard this is.  There are no storekeepers in her background.  There are judges and lawyers and senators and governors, right?  This is not like fish salesmen.  So God forbid her daughter does it.  So she’s going to protect her daughter.
And I’m busy downstairs, happy, “Hey, everybody, meet my daughter Niki.  See how pretty she is, how smart she is?  She’s going to take over.”  Niki didn’t want to be my daughter.  She didn’t want to be anybody’s daughter.  She wanted to be her own person.  So I think I mentioned that she exited here after a few years, and my nephew came in.
Getting back now, jumping around, getting back, you know, the neighborhood spiraled down and the issue was moving uptown, where the customers were, because, you know, they didn’t really want to come down here.  At some point a few years after I got here, really the stores that were draws down here stopped being draws because the malls were developed in the suburbs.

Q:  You mean the Lower East Side stores, clothing stores, that kind of thing?

Federman:  Yes.  I remember in the sixties and into the seventies, you walked down Orchard Street and there were some stores that always had lines.  I saw people waiting to get in to buy the schmattas that were designer or whatever they were.  They weren’t even dressing rooms.  Women were dropping their clothes and trying on these things.  Friedlich’s was one. I forget.

Q:  You know what I used to do occasionally?  I would come down to the fancy fabric stores.  There were places that sold Italian fabric or something, so if you wanted a yard to make a miniskirt, you could do that.  [laughter]

Federman:  That’s right.  Lots of fabric stores and things, woolens and stuff.  Then there were leathergoods stores and there were fur places, schmatta places and whatever.  But that started to disappear quickly also as the malls developed, as the department stores started to offer sales and they could compete with the Lower East Side, as it became more of a hassle to come down here, no place to park, it’s dirty, they’re going to break into your car.  The Sunday Blue Laws were a big part of keeping the economy going down here, because you couldn’t shop anyplace on a Sunday other than Lower East Side.  So people came in.  While they were doing here buying a schmatta or whatever, they’d come to Russ & Daughters while having their pillow stuffed.

Q:  You never worried about having enough people coming here?

Federman:  Always.  To this day.  Not really to this day, because the neighborhood has changed.  Yes, that was the existential worry.  Are there going to be people?  What happens on those days when I have more help than I do customers?  And some of the customers come in and they want an eighth of a pound and a long conversation with the owner.  That’s me.  I mean, it was dreadful.  And others came in and they were doing you a favor.  They came from uptown.  They’re used to having your mother or father or aunt and uncle wait on you, and here you were.  If they were older, they saw me as a kid.  They’re like one step out of the Lower East Side, but all of a sudden, you know, their noses were in the air.  Their husbands had made it in the schmatta business or something.  Then they come back, so they’re doing you a favor and they’d let you know that.  It was awful.
Why did I keep doing it?  Because I didn’t want to be the Russ to take it down the drain.  When people knew Russ & Daughters, they knew it and they smiled.  “Oh, yeah, Russ & Daughters ,” blah, blah, blah.  I just didn’t want to preside over the death of Russ & Daughters.

Q:  Did you ever think of enlarging the product line?

Federman:  And I did.

Q:  How did you do that?

Federman:  With a great deal of slowness and trepidation.  There was still my mother in the background.  My father had died two years after I came in.  They’d been in the background.  So we decided, so what do you do when you’re worried about you don’t have enough customers, and is anybody really interested in your product anymore, because your natural customer base is an older affluent Jew, because stuff is starting to get more expensive, older affluent Jewish person who was going to serve it—it’s not a daily thing you’re going to eat.  Maybe you’ll have a bagel and lox or when the family comes home and the son, who’s the doctor, is going to come back with the machatunim to show, you want to have it, but otherwise, they weren’t eating it regularly.  They were going low on salt or they moved to Florida or they were dead or whatever.  So who’s interested?  Was I selling the right things?  What do you do here?

Q:  So what did you do?

Federman:  Well, you know, you start changing some things.  You listen to the customers and what is it that they want.  What is it that they don’t want?  What is a natural thing to do?  One of the big things was for me to grow the caviar business, because it was a natural.  We had the connections for it.  We always sold some caviar, only not a large amount.  And so for some reason, perhaps ego, and I’m looking around seeing the other people selling caviar in this town, I figure—you know.  It took years because you have to develop a palette and be in a position to buy it, and who to buy what from, because in those days, it was like the Wild West in caviar.  Especially after the Soviet Union fell, everything went crazy.

Q:  What about the olive oils and jams and things like that?

Federman:  We always had that stuff, and we still have it.

Q:  Some of it or a little?

Federman:  We always had some.  My grandfather had the store and then his daughters, in the beginning.  There’s a picture there.  The ceilings were higher.  Ultimately the ceilings were dropped.  They were higher and they were floor-to-ceiling shelving with canned goods, sardines, salmon, tuna, sprats, that kind of stuff, and there was a market for it, particularly during World War II when the stuff was rationed.  Then Russ & Daughters seemed to be doing well because they figured out how to get a supply of this stuff, and they had a little warehouse on Ludlow Street, so during the war, people would come and they would be directed, hush-hush, in their cars over to Ludlow Street, and the trunks would be open and the cases would be put in the trunk.
So I think that’s when Russ & Daughters finally got to do some business and do better.  But it was canned goods, and people ate canned goods in those days.  Who eats canned goods anymore?  A can of salmon.  Nobody eats a can of salmon.  Now I have special salmon, you buy a little can of salmon, it’s like ten dollars.  It’s delicious, but it’s ten dollars.  And I don’t know if you remember the oval cans of salmon, oval shape.  You’re too young.  Oval-shaped salmon.  It was called a steak salmon.  The spring catch was considered better, and various producers.  Quite delicious.  I was able to get that myself, the last of it, from a producer in Oregon, and I sort of controlled the East Coast market.  It was expensive.
I’m just remembering an anecdote.  A few days after 9/11, I got a call from one of our customers, Sam LeFrak.  He had built Battery Park City and a lot of other things.  Sam was an old customer at this point, in his eighties.  So he called.  Maybe this is not even a week after 9/11.  “Mark, I need my salmon.”  He was buying these by the case.  It was only the old Jews who were buying this stuff.  “I need my salmon.”
“I don’t have it, Sam.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have it?”  He started to yell at me, screaming.
I said, “What are you yelling at me for?  Do you know what just happened?”
He said, “Do I know what happened.  You know, I just lost everything I have in Battery Park City.  Who else can I yell at?”  He felt comfortable yelling at me because I couldn’t get his salmon.
But the old Jews would eat canned goods.  The old Jews would suck on hard candies.  I mean, who does that stuff anymore?  We were selling canned goods and hard candies.  So that had to change, but there was a reluctance on my part, fearing that if I changed something, like move the chopped herring from one side of the showcase to the other, the customers would abandon me.  They would say, “What is this upstart doing here?”  You know?  The business ran for so many years, you know.  “What’s he changing what his parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents did?”  So that was that fear that I always carried around about change.
So one of the things we did was bring in coffee.  See, my wife was a bit motivating in this, because she didn’t have—

[Begin File 3]

Federman:  Where was I?

Q:  Coffee.

Federman:  Coffee.  My wife.  I’m blessed that my wife, for whatever she thought about this place, she did the work.  She absolutely did the yeoman’s work, never wanted any part of the spotlight of this thing because she’s not really a people person, but also she wasn’t emotionally attached to it like I was.  She didn’t have these ancestors calling out from the grave, “Don’t touch that.  Don’t move that,” whatever.  “What are you doing?”  Right?  So she was always, “We have to renovate.  We have to do something.”
	So for some reason we decided to bring in coffee barrels.  We put in the coffee and we grind coffee.  We never sold coffee in this store.  We made coffee for the help to drink and the Russ family drank coffee.  So we brought in a line of coffee and it was fine.  People bought it.  It didn’t take over the world, but I think the most important thing about bringing coffee was that we had a sense that, okay, maybe lightning wouldn’t strike us.
So then little by little, there were things that had to be changed.  Enough people started to ask for the cream cheese substitute.  “Why don’t you bring in this tofu cream cheese they have?”  And I’m thinking my grandfather—there’s a big portrait of my grandfather handing over the candies.  I said, “That’s going to fall down if I do it.”  But, you know, enough people ask and you bring it in, and then more and more people are buying it.

Q:  What does it taste like?

Federman:  It’s not bad, actually.  It’s not bad at all.  If you’re lactose-intolerant or you don’t want to eat real cream cheese, sometimes I do, you know?  Especially if you mix it with vegetables or scallion or something.
So from that, you start changing a little bit here, a little bit there.  At some point, in 1995, at my wife’s prodding, we renovated at least the candy side of the store, the candy side and the floors and the ceiling, whatever.  By this point I had put in a new showcase because the old one had died.

Q:  Was old, yes.  [laughs]

Federman:  Really old and had died.  I was worried about when I ripped that out, what I was going to find underneath, whether I’d have to put in a new sub-floor and floor, whatever, but it turns out my grandfather’s concept was, you do it once, you do it right.  So there’s like four inches of concrete under there.  So we put in a showcase.  That was early on.

Q:  It is a lot more candy than it used to be?

Federman:  We had the window, and the window is still pretty much the way it was, where we had dried fruits.  Dried fruits, I don’t know where this came from, but dried fruits is a favorite for Jews, if nothing else, it keep them regular with the prunes, whatever.

Q:  It’s delicious.

Federman:  Also a favorite dessert is fruit compote.  They stew it up and they have dessert, and everybody likes that.  So the store had this nice display of maybe five different dried fruits, prunes, two different kinds, big prunes, too, the sweet big California prune.  My finger’s like three inches, right?  And then there was a big fat sour prune from Oregon.  Some people preferred the sour—I did—that tart taste.
Then there were apricots.  In those days, the apricots were this Turkish apricot, that was this California Blenheim, also big and tart and soft and fabulous, and pears and peaches and apples.  That was pretty much it, five or six different items in long trays in the window, and people would walk by and look in, say, “Oh, yeah, I need some dried fruit.”  It would be a draw.
Over the dried fruit we had hanging down strings of Polish mushroom.  It seems rather arcane, but in the turn of the last century and going forward, it was very much a staple for Eastern Europeans to have dried mushrooms.  As I understand it, the reason was ,you couldn’t afford to buy meat.  This is such an earthy, deep rich taste, that it substituted for meat in soups or in sauce or whatever.  So my grandfather, rather early on, billed himself as an importer of these dried Polish mushrooms.  I don’t think he imported them himself, but he bought them from another importer here.  But I saw a reverse directory in 1929, so it was on the t0p billing, two different listings.  The top billing was J. Russ Imported Mushrooms and the next one was J. Russ Appetizers.  So he fancied himself a mushroom guy, and a mushroom was a staple.  Now a pound of mushrooms is someplace between $150 and $175 a pound.  They’re hard to get and not that many people eat them or know what to do with them, but they’re fabulous, sort of that rich deep mother-earth truffle-y thing going on.
So the candy side had that and it had these mushroom things hanging down, and then against the back wall it had these candy bins.  Maybe there were twenty of them.  Each one had individual wrapped hard candy, which was common, but less and less were people buying hard candies.  You know anybody who has hard candies in their pocket anymore?  No, but every first-generation Jew always had a hard candy or several hard candies in their pockets.  They would eat it themselves or they would give it out as gifts, hand out hard candies to their grandchildren, nieces, whatever.  It’s a treat.  But that stopped happening, so that had to go.
In the front of the counter, I’m picturing this again.  Off to the side we had these glace fruits, really sticky.  I’m not quite sure why people bought them.  They were pretty to put out, serve, but it was sticky.  Then we had other things that we don’t have anymore, like candied kumquats, also sticky, and ginger.
Then we had two showcases in the front, candy showcases.  One had a lot of nuts, individual nut things, but they were wood and they were open, and that meant in the summertime you’d get these bug-y things going on.

Q:  There’s a lot of chocolate now.

Federman:  Well, we had chocolate then, not when I was a kid.  When I was a kid working in the store, from age thirteen you had to come in on the weekend on a rotating basis.  That was part of the deal of being a Russ.  You didn’t want to, but they needed help.  It was only the candy side, and they paid you very well.  It was like a dollar an hour or 1.10 an hour.  So a ten-hour day, you made like eleven dollars.  You were rich.  That’s a lot of baseball cards, whatever you’re going to buy, right?  In those days, a movie was 25 cents, a slice of pizza was 10, 25 cents.  I forget what it was, or a hot dog.
	So they had chocolates.  When I was a kid working there, the chocolates were basically twists, the chocolate-covered marshmallow twists, but the twists were different in those days because they would freeze.  So you’d put them in the freezer and then you’d have this frozen chocolate-covered marshmallow thing which they thought was a treat.

Q:  It sounds fabulous.

Federman:  It was okay.  Then they had little squares of chocolate-covered halvah. They’re not made anymore. Now they’re wrapped.  Those were little, better.  Then there were these marmalade bars that were two colors.  They were like red and orange and either had sugar and then like a white layer in between, and had either crystallized sugar on the outside or sprinkles, chocolate sprinkles.  I mean, to this day people show up every six months and will say, “Where’s the marmalade bar?”  Or they’re on a mission for themselves or for some aged parent or grandparent, you know.  You want to be remembered in the will, find me this thing I used to get at Russ & Daughters.  And they’d show up and ask for it.  So that’s when I was a kid.
	Then also I remember big barrels.  One was of peanuts in a big stainless-steel barrel, and they had these peanuts there, fresh roasted peanuts.  The problem is, the customers would just take them while they were waiting, and it’d be all over the floor.  The other one was a big barrel full of buxa.  You know what buxa is?

Q:  No.

Federman:  Buxa is dried carob, and I don’t know how the Jews got into buxa.  They love buxa.  Also buxa turns out to be one of nature’s great natural laxatives.  But you bite this thing, it was really hard, and you’d make sure not to eat the little seedy thing in there, and it had that carob-y taste, which became something of a chocolate substitute when you sweetened it.  But it had a very weird sort of funky taste to it, but then there were the classic customers who just had to have it.  So that’s what I’m remembering.
	In chocolates, maybe we had also rum cordials, coffee beans.  I think that was pretty much it.  Someplace along the line, they found a line of hand-dipped chocolates, which were truly hand-dipped from a little lady [Sheila Kaye] in Brooklyn who was doing it, and she was making wonderful hand-dipped chocolates.  So then they had a display of chocolate-covered pineapple cores and prune and apricot and orange peel and chocolate-covered ginger, and then marshmallows of different kind.  The best was like a maple marshmallow chocolate-covered hand-dipped with a line of caramel.

Q:  Oh, my.

Federman:  Right.  Exactly.  So there was this whole line, and then there was this one I didn’t like but a lot of people did, honeycomb.  What is that stuff?  Honeycomb, chocolate covered.  It was awful, but people liked it.  So they had this line of hand-dipped chocolates.  So we got in the chocolate business.
	Well, someplace along the line, Nassau Candy took over the business, the lady sold out, she got older, sold out to some big candy company, who then commercialized it, and that wasn’t so good anymore.  But now my daughter and nephew have discovered some small companies making sort of artisanal little chocolates that are quite wonderful, much more expensive, but quite wonderful.  So they like to buy things that are small family-company artisanal stuff and try to sell that.

Q:  All of this is way fattening.  That hasn’t affected the people who want to buy it?

Federman:  When you’re in this store, you’re not going to be wanting to think about fattening or salt.  There’s no reason to be in the store, Russ & Daughters, if that’s what your thinking is.  It’s just the way it is.  I tried at one point, when I realized that, to dabble in different products, so every year we’d go to Fancy Foods Show.  You’ve been in the Fancy Food Center, right?

Q:  Yes.

Federman:  You know what that’s—

Q:  Yes.

Federman:  As a kid, I would occasionally get taken by my father to the Fancy Foods Show, which was then the Candy and Confection Show in the Columbus Circle, whatever was there at the time.  I’m talking about a long time ago.  That was very exciting for a kid, and then you could have samples of stuff, and the suppliers would recognize my father as Russ & Daughters, and they would schmooze him up and give me candies and pencils with the name on it.  So it’s part of the romantic notion I carried forward.
	Now we go to the Fancy Foods Show, International Fancy Foods Show in the Javits Center, it’s like that on steroids.  It’s extraordinary.  But it’s always with an eye towards finding new products.  Most often, you know, it’s finding the same products repackaged, so it gets a little old, but still I walk around and say hello to the vendors, and people, “Oh, Russ & Daughters,” blah, blah, blah, you know.
	I remember once finding a sugar-free halvah, and I decided that this may be an oxymoron, but I had to try it.  The Jews were then realizing they were all diabetic.  Remind me, the story about my recollection about James Beard.  At any rate, so I tried to bring this stuff in, and no Jew was going to buy that.  It was awful, dry, straw-y tasting, like whatever.
The James Beard this is, I didn’t know James Beard.  I think my parents had dealt with him several times in the store, or often, but by the time I came in here, I was dealing with Clay, who was his houseman, assistant, whatever, sort of a heavyset guy.  Clay would come in and buy for James Beard.  Sturgeon he loved, and chocolates.  It turns out that he was not allowed to eat, by his doctors, either salt products or sweets, but he kept the candies, I understood from Clay, under the bed, and the sturgeon he just ate right away.
I remember after he died, Clay was floating around.  I would see him floating around on the Lower East Side, never came in after that.  That was the James Beard story.

Q:  So he never came in, actually?

Federman:  James Beard?  He did, but before my time.  Not when I was there.  They had their share of foodies.  Mimi Sheraton would come in, still does.  Calvin Trillin still does.  People come in and they get a sort of proprietary interest in Russ & Daughters, and it becomes something more than a commercial transaction.  You always have to give them the good product.  That’s without a doubt.  But they have a special attachment to it.

Q:  When did you online business start to grow?

Federman:  Well, so Niki, over my objection, developed this website, and she got her friends to do the—I don’t know even what they call it.  I mean, I just like opted out of this.

Q:  Why was it over your objections?

Federman:  Because we had never done business like that.  It was like too sort of futuristic for me.  I didn’t understand it.  My head wasn’t wrapping around it very well.

Q:  This was how long ago?

Federman:  2001.  I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to deal with it.  I didn’t know if it would take off.  I didn’t know if it would crash everything around, we’d send a bad piece of something to somebody and it would bring down everything.  I just didn’t understand it, didn’t know it, didn’t want it, didn’t want the headache of it.  But it turns out by now to be a substantial portion of our business.

Q:  How substantial?

Federman:  I don’t know what the figures are, but I would imagine 20 percent of our business is online.

Q:  And somebody packs it from here?

Federman:  It’s all done here.  We built a whole new shipping department down in the basement, but that was largely because I got a contract for—I don’t know if it was a year or two, maybe it was one year, yes, one year and I gave it up, with Neiman-Marcus.  They wanted a package from us, a bagels and lox package.  I agreed to do it, but I realized I couldn’t deal with the volume, so I built a whole shipping, packing department in the basement.  Of course, we had a lot of product going out, but it was stupid.  We made no money.  I don’t know if we lost money on that thing.  They weren’t going to buy for a lot of money.  They were going to sell it for a lot of money, but they weren’t going to buy it for a lot of money.  So they billed it in their catalog, Russ & Daughters, the famous New York emporium, the best smoked fish, blah, blah, blah, with lox and [unclear], and it was just a lot of work.  We hand-sliced everything.  It was stupid.
	But anyhow, as a result of that, the good thing that happened is that I built out this portion and another walk-in, so now we’re able to fulfill—everything is done here.  Again, this is not the kind of business you would choose, because you have to slice salmon a certain way, you have to pack it, it’s perishable, it costs us a lot of money.  It’s not your favorite kind of business.

Q:  You said the best smoked-fish business.  That’s a major reputation to live up to.  How did you do that?

Federman:  I’m not following the question.

Q:  There are other people that sell smoked fish.  How do you keep this the best?

Federman:  First of all, you have to be fearful.

Q:  I see.  [laughter]

Federman:  And you have to be egotistical.  You’re asking me questions I haven’t thought about.

Q:  Do you remember I went with you to a smoked—whatever you call it, smokeree or whatever, smokehouse at one point, and I remember the floor was wet, but they obviously save you the good stuff, get you the good stuff?  How does that work?  You buy the good stuff, I guess.

Federman:  Yes, we have to know what the good stuff is.  Part of it is learning a good piece of fish from a bad piece of fish, and that’s a process.  So, I mean, the story is that I asked my father, one of the first days I came in, I’m all puffed up, I’m a lawyer, I’m more educated than any member of my family before me—

Q:  What you really need is boots to go to the smokehouse.  [laughter]

Federman:  Who knew, right?  Okay.  I figure I’m going to learn it with one lesson.  “Teach me a good piece of fish from a bad piece of fish.”
	He said, “We’ll go to the smokehouse and we’ll look at this and we’ll taste this and we’ll do this and we’ll bring it back to the store and we’ll—,” da-da-da-da.  And a whole litany of things.  And he said, “Okay.”
	I said, “That’s it?”
	He said, “Yeah.  And then maybe after ten years you’ll know a good piece of fish from a bad piece of fish.”  So it’s this constant handling and whatever.  I figure I’m smarter than the rest of the Russes.  It took me maybe five years, and maybe it took me a little less to teach my nephew and my daughter that kind of thing.
But it basically is handling the product and tasting and whatever.  You can’t taste everything, so some of it you’ve got to know by feel.  You have to engage a lot of senses in doing this.  So that’s what we consider a bit of the art form of this thing, knowing good from bad.  You can’t decimate a good piece of fish because you want too—you can’t break it open and eat it, because the smoker’s not going to let you do it.

Q:  But you also have to have the cooperation of the smoker, yes, to either save you the good things—

Federman:  To get that.  Right.  To get that, you need to know what you’re doing, because if they sense that you don’t, they’ll—you know.  So you need to know what you’re doing, hopefully.  You need to buy in large volume.  They’re not going to mess around with a guy—everybody’s got a piece of lox in their showcase, but you’ve got to be buying hundreds of pieces of lox at a time.  And you’ve got to pay your bills.  They’re all from the old school, you know, they’ve inherited the same thing we did, so we pay their bills right away.  Hopefully after a while I knew what I was doing, and we sell a lot of fish, enough so that we could buy from lots of different places.  You don’t want to bury yourself with one smoker.  So this guy doesn’t have it today, maybe the other guy has it, and whatever.  Maybe his [unclear] are not so good, whatever, or the other guy burnt his whitefish and this guy didn’t today or tomorrow, whatever.
So it’s a lot of headaches and it’s all very expensive stuff, and you’ve got to remember, the smokers are buying huge quantities of fish.  They’re not buying a box of fish here.  They buy thousands of pounds of fish and smoking up hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds at a time, and not all of that is great fish, and yet they all look alike.

Q:  So how do you learn?

Federman:  So then you learn, right?  How do you distinguish, when you’re looking at two pieces of salmon that look pretty much the same, how do you determine which is the salmon that you want to sell in the store because the person who’s going to buy it is going to serve it to her whoever.  Her rabbi’s coming over for dinner or something, right?  So it’s about the buying, the knowing, the connections, whatever.
	But this point, the fourth generation, my daughter and nephew, are dealing with some of the smokehouses of four generations also, so by this point there’s a connection and we are big-volume users of fish, so they want to please us.  Still, we’re very finicky because that’s what you inherit from my grandfather, is this demand for quality and cleanliness and whatever, you know.

Q:  If you were to go into Zabar’s or somewhere else, can you tell the difference between what they’re selling and what you’re selling, or is there much difference or less volume?

Federman:  No, no, no, no.  He’s got big volume and he has good fish.  You know, I wouldn’t downplay some of these places.  They have the ability to buy good fish.  There’s only a certain number of places that sell it, so hopefully if he’s on top of his game and he knows what he’s doing, he’s buying the right fish from that big batch of fish, and I’m buying the right piece of fish.  I like to say this is our specialty.  We’re not diffused by pots and pans or whatever.  But that’s not to say that you can’t get good fish other places.  Hopefully you can get the best fish here consistently, hopefully.  This is what we do.  Not every piece of fish tastes the same.  Not every fish is the same, not every portion of the fish is the same.  Again, it’s one of those businesses you wouldn’t choose.  If you have a genetic attachment to it, it’s okay.

Q:  Is there a difference between smoked farmed fish and smoked wild fish?

Federman:  Sure.  By now, most of the people that are the generation below me know pretty much only farmed fish and they don’t know about wild fish.  So that’s their model of, let’s say, salmon, the primary farm fish, should taste like.  Wild fish in its best, there’s nothing like it, you know.  But wild fish, because it’s wild, is subject to so many variables, so that one day it tastes like this, the next day it tastes like that, or it’s leaner or it’s fatter or it’s whatever, so you have all of these things.  Wild fish, also the texture if firmer in wild fish because it’s out there swimming in the wild, and the taste can change based upon what it’s feeding on.  It’s just a lot of variables, so it doesn’t necessarily taste the same today, next week, or whatever.

Q:  When did it become impossible or at least wildly expensive to get—

Federman:  Well, we still have wild fish.  We have wild Pacific king salmon that’s line-caught down there, but, number one, it’s more expensive.  Where the other salmon’s maybe thirty-something dollars a pound, that’s like forty-eight dollars a pound because it’s wild, and that’s being decimated, that Pacific king salmon thing.

Q:  Who buys that?

Federman:  Well, you know, some people like the taste of the wild salmon.  It’s stronger, more assertive, less fatty.  Some people like that.  Some people like the idea of buying wild salmon, so they’ll buy that because they just want to buy wild.  But there’s a market for it, but much less than the other salmons.  What happens in the farming business is that things get better because it’s a business and you have to improve the taste and texture and whatever, and now the concentration is on making sure the stuff you’re feeding these salmon are better, are organic or whatever, they’re not going to pollute the environment.  People are becoming more aware of that.

Q:  Do you remember when you had to make the change to mostly—

Federman:  I don’t know the year.

Q:  Do you remember the feeling?

Federman:  Well, the feeling is like they kept coming in, they want to buy this, whatever, and, you know, I would say no, but then the point is, okay, if you’re going to buy this salmon, you know, it’s based on the catch.  When it’s wild, it’s based on the catch.  Oh, we’re not catching it, so it’s not available, and if you want to buy it, it’s going to cost you five times as much, so you bring it in, but the customers don’t want to pay five times as much.  They’re going to put it on a bagel and cream cheese, you know.  And it looks the same to them.  That’s a portion of the public.  Another portion wants the wild salmon.  So you’re at the point where you’re changing over and a point where the wild salmon no longer makes sense for the smoker to handle because he’s able to—

Q:  I see.  That’s where the difference would take place, at the smokehouse.

Federman:  Yes, not at my level.  At the smokehouse.  He no longer wants to handle it or he can’t buy it because commercial fishing of Atlantic salmon just dies.  Maybe they put an embargo on the fishing of it for a while to see if it regenerates, and it never does.  I’m talking about Atlantic salmon.  It’s a different species.  Pacifica salmon, they’re always catching some some years or worse.  I don’t know of any years that’s better, so they’re always constantly going down.  Then they build the dams and the fish can’t go upstream, and they have oil leaks in the Alaskan bays.

Q:  What about the changeover from lox to smoked salmon?  When did that happen?

Federman:  I don’t know.  I’ve been rooting around, trying to figure this out.  My aunt and my mother are no help.  My father and uncles are dead.  The question is, when did that happen?  I think that it may have been that lox and smoked lox were sold initially, because they were smokers.  It was a German business smoking here, as far as I could tell, and then the Jews in the 1920s began to take over the smokehouses from the Germans.  They were smoking whitefish and carp, the available fish.  Then some sturgeon was plentiful then; it was being smoked.  Mackerel was being smoked and salmon was being smoked.  So salmon was being sold smoked.  Smoked lox and lox, unsmoked lox.

Q:  What does smoked lox taste like?

Federman:  It was salty.  It was still salty.  In the twenties and thirties, the salmon was largely coming from the Pacific.  It wasn’t Nova Scotia in those days.  What they were doing is huge amounts of salmon, so it was cheap.  In the thirties, I think my aunt remembers the price being like 9 cents a quarter of a pound.

Q:  Wow.

Federman:  Right?  So maybe it was a sale, 35 cents a pound.  Most of it was coming from the Pacific, with huge amounts of salmon, and from Alaska on down to California, and they were catching the salmon and they were dumping it into heavy salt brine, because there was no refrigerated rail at that point, and then what they called tierces, big wooden caskets that took like nine hundred pounds of salmon in brine.  So now we have the salmons that were split, gutted, and sitting in this very heavy salt brine as a preservative, because there’s no refrigeration, being shipped by rail to New York ports for transshipment to Europe and some of it staying here, and some of the smokers, who were German and then Jewish, smoked it with their other fish.  It was heavy smoked.  They’d just take it out of the tierce of salt and smoke it.  It was salty.  Then you had the salmon that wasn’t smoked, and people bought one or the other, but it was all salt product.  But still the Jew and the Eastern European had the taste for salt.  They were used to that saltiness.  Now people don’t want things salty.  So that’s what happened.
	Then I think it was not until the late thirties or forties that we had refrigerated railcars, we had now the ability to bring—not we, but the smokers, from Nova Scotia large amounts of salmon from that area down quickly.  You didn’t have to put it in heavy salt brine; you could bring it here and fresh-smoke it here without that strong salt, make it down here in a day.  I don’t know what they did.  But it was called a mild cure salmon, and they didn’t have to heavily salt it, and they could smoke it.  They would brine it here, add sugar to it.  They had what’s called a wet cure, be cured that way.

Q:  At some point people referred to Nova, and it seemed to me that what they were talking about was the difference between smoked fish and cured fish, lox and smoked fish.  Is that what Nova meant at that point?

Federman:  Nova meant different things to different people, just like lox does, so it’s all sort of conflated and confused.  They’re all cured.  Smoked fish is all cured, meaning it’s in a salt.  What happens, this allows for smoking the fish to take up the flavor and it’s a preservative.  It’s an osmotic process, osmosis.  So it all has to be salt-cured.  The amount of salt used is regulated now by the government.  You can’t use less of a certain amount as a preservative of these things.  So it’s all cured.  The question is how heavy the salt is.  You can’t be less than a minimum, but how heavy the salt curing is, when the sugar is put in, and then most of it gets smoked, whether it’s whitefish, sturgeon, [unclear].  Then the processes are cold-smoked, which the oven has been—and that’s what happened when you’re buying what you call Nova, smoked salmon, it’s all cold-smoked.  It’s cured and then smoked at maybe 75 degrees maximum, and the smoke is generated outside.  The room is blown in over the salmon, sort of been cured already for a period of time.
	Or hot-smoking with whitefish and sturgeon and most of the other fish and baked salmon, what we call [unclear] salmon, are hot-smoked, which means they’re cured again, but they’re put in ovens and the temperature goes to maybe 160, 170 degrees, so it’s actual oven cooking process and you get a different texture.  You get a flaky texture.

Q:  But just plain lox?

Federman:  Just plain lox was just salt-cured, not smoked, and mostly referred to—lox, the word, is anglicized from the German lachs, meaning salmon, so the initial lox, that word anglicized, was about the specific salmons early on that were just caught, dressed, meaning filleted—well, not really filleted.  The bones were in.  But gutted, split, and dumped in these heavy salt brine things, and then either sold, not smoked or smoked, so lox unsmoked or smoked lox, which was smoked.  Then you get these smoked salmons coming in, the Nova Scotia salmon or Pacific salmon, and then salmons from around the world.

Q:  Nobody ever asks for gravlax here?

Federman:  Plenty of gravlax.  Yes, gravlax is just cured and dill and sugar and salt.

Q:  So you sell that here too?

Federman:  Yes.  Now we’re into selling lots of—there’s probably ten different kinds of smoked salmon in the store now, so where we started this conversation was about three, lox, unsmoked, just cured salted salmon, and Nova Scotia Atlantic salmon and Nova Pacifica salmon, that was it.  So now there’s like salmons from all over the world, and most of it is farmed, but we have wild Pacific salmon, still, and some of the salmons from Ireland, from Scotland, from Denmark, they have some general distinguishing characteristics to it, but that changes also.

Q:  Can you taste the difference or can anybody?

Federman:  I can because I have a palette for the stuff.  It’s my business.  If you’re going to put it on a bagel, particularly the bagels that exist today, these big roll-y things, and a lot of cream cheese, you know, it doesn’t really matter, but if you’re going to pay attention to what you’re eating, then some fish you can.  I have downstairs—I gave you a taste the other day—this Danish salmon which is double smoked and a different color, smoked in Denmark with a richer maybe peat or something that gives a different flavor to it.  It’s just wonderful salmon.

Q:  It’s delicate.

Federman:  There’s no point in putting that on a bagel with cream cheese, to me.  Just like what’s the point?  But just to eat it on a cracker with a little fresh pepper on it or just with nothing, it’s spectacular.

Q:  When people in catering order platters, what kind of—

Federman:  Depends on the platter.  We give them a choice of what they want, and then we make a platter of just different kinds of smoked salmon, so they have a platter of five or six different kinds of salmon, or in the standard platter that we make, it’s usually Gaspe salmon, which is the traditional.  It’s basically the same kind as the traditional Nova Scotia that most people like to taste.  It’s mild, it’s delicate, it’s rich.

Q:  Why don’t you tell me about deciding to, as it were, retire.

Federman:  Well, it’s clearly something I never thought about.  Why did I decide to retire?  I was getting to the point where I’d ridden this wave that was crashing.  I came in when the business was really going down.  Business was going down, the neighborhood was going down, and I spent a lot of energy keeping every customer we had and trying to make new customers.  That was my energy.  It was very, as I said, existential.
Then we just got lucky with the wave that had changed the food world and the neighborhood.  In the food world, people were starting to appreciate.  As the food world got more homogenized and glitzy and big-box-store-y and whatever, then there was that portion that was growing of people who appreciated these little jewel-y kind of places.  They wanted the experience of shopping here, and for most of them, they recognized that we were going to give them a superior product.  So they were going to get not only the product, but they were going to get an experience of what happens when you’re in a store like this and you’re having a communication with the guy who’s selling it to you and you’re watching his hands slice that salmon, as opposed to buying a packaged something.  So you have that, and then in the location where the store pretty much looks like always did in a neighborhood where it always existed.  So that’s a whole other kind of experience.  As the world got away from this, people appreciated it.
Then the neighborhood started to change in the late eighties, I would say, and then it wasn’t just the druggies and prostitutes and criminals, but always with that there was also the artists and the musicians who lived down here because it was cheap rent.  They would float in and out of here and buy a bagel or whatever.

Q:  It was cheap.

Federman:  Yes.  And people started to recognize this is sort of a cool place.  Then it started to transform itself.  It usually does.  Then people started to move in to be close to this energy that was happening down here.  Some of it was the energy of freefall and some of it was this artistic energy.  So then people wanted to be close to it, particularly young people, and as they moved in, prices went up, the buildings got renovated and the artists couldn’t live here anymore.  But it’s typical of the gentrification, if you want to call it that.
	What line am I on here?  What am I talking about?

Q:  Retirement.  But I must say, as you’re talking about this, I’m also thinking about Whole Foods up the street.  But anyway, go ahead.

Federman:  Whole Foods up the street, that’s interesting also.

Q:  When did first your nephew, is that right—

Federman:  First Niki, and then Niki left and there was no sense of her coming back.  She was going to get an MBA at Yale and she was going to do something.  At that point I didn’t know I lost her.  I said, “What do you need to go there?  I’ll teach you whatever you want to know right here,” but she didn’t want me to teach her, and there was no sense of her coming back.  She wanted to cut the tie once and for all and go off in the world.
	When that happened, my nephew, Josh, who had been from time to time, “Hey, Uncle Mark, want me to come in the business?”  He was an engineer on [unclear] working for some big companies.  I don’t even know.  I keep asking him what kind of engineer.  I didn’t know there were more than one kinds.  He was chemical or civil or something, I have no idea, doing something with chips.  It’s a world I know nothing about.  But it seems that he was similarly not happy, not unhappy, but not feeling—“fulfilled” is sort of a trite word.  He was feeling something missing from his life and he wanted to reconnect through the family, because he had sort of a weird family upbringing.  He was brought up on an ashram, because my sisters, in the sixties, you know, everybody in the sixties were all looking for something.

Q:  Remind me who his parents are.

Federman:  There’s three of us.  His mother is my eldest sister, Tara.  She’s two years older than me.  My younger sister is Hope. She’s three and a half years younger.  My oldest, Tara, is two years older than me, my younger sister is three and a half years younger than me.  I’m in the middle.  
So Tara, in the sixties, his mother, she was artsy-fartsy and whatever, and she suddenly found herself in the communal world of an ashram.  It was upstate, they moved to California with the guru, and then my younger sister followed that lifestyle, and I was in college in law school and then in the army.  I was following whatever path I thought I was supposed to follow at the moment.
	So my nephew Josh—and he has two sisters—was raised on an ashram, in a communal environment, and his parents were, you know, that spirit.  They had nothing to do with the business here.  They lived upstate, it was a different kind of lifestyle.  They would come into the store once a year, whatever.  My sister would bring them down.  They would run behind the candy counter and take some candy, and that was their experience.  So for him to call me now, when he was an engineer working on the West Coast, and say, “Hey, Uncle Mark, what about me coming into the business?”  And I would constantly say, “Josh, I mean, what do you want?  This is hard.  You don’t know anything about it.”
	But when Niki left and I had had this notion that, okay, I would retire, I would work with Niki for a while and ease out, I had this really romantic notion of working with my daughter, easing out, and by this point, you know, business had gotten better.  The neighborhood got better.  We were getting more famous, you know, and I didn’t have the energy to do it anymore.  This turns out to be tough.  It’s wearing physically because you’re standing on the counter, emotionally, dealing with all the little problems.  I used to look at all these other businesses and they’d multiply.  I’d say, “How do they do this?  How do they run these big businesses?”  I couldn’t get it.  For me it was about watching each sale, each piece of fish, each customer.  I don’t know why I trapped myself like that.  On the other hand, on reflection, it seems it wasn’t such a trap; it’s what I wanted.  I didn’t have grand goals of taking over the world.  I wanted to do the best I could in my corner of the world, the little fish corner of the world in the Lower East Side.
	Anyhow, so when I thought I had Niki here and then it became apparent that there would be a succession and then I would have an exit plan, I got very happy, and then Niki left sort of precipitously and I got very unhappy, and I couldn’t muster the energy to think about continuing each day opening the store in the morning, bringing the fish in, facing the same customers.  I was just getting too old for that.  This business will wear you down.  And that’s about when Josh called and said, “Hey, Uncle Mark.  What do you think?”
	And at this point I said, “Josh, come on in.  I have no idea.  We’ll see what you can do.”  And Josh came in here, and I was very hesitant with Josh because he had no experience in this and he had a different sort of mentality, more corporate, and then I didn’t think he could do it alone.  I tried to make a shidduch.  You know what a shidduch is?  A marriage between Josh and Herman, who was my manager for years now, and that took a lot of sort of energy in trying to figure out how to make that work.  One way was to take myself out of the profit scheme of things, pick myself a minimal salary and turn my profit over to them so they could divide it, to understand if they made money, it was based on their efforts.  So I did that.

Q:  When was that?

Federman:  That was 2003, ’04, ’05, I don’t know.  I did that, and still something missing.  I wasn’t quite comfortable that the two of them could continue it on.  They had the passion, they had the ability, but I wasn’t quite sure of the dynamic.  And then someplace along the line, Niki said, “Hey, Dad, I want to come back in the business.”  She’d been out now in the world, trying various things for three years or so.
	I said, “Niki.”  I immediately got protective of my bodily functions, my heart mostly, and said, “Niki, this no longer has anything to do with me.  I will not make a judgment on this.  You need to clear it through Josh and Herman.  They’re running the business.”
	So she did.  They said okay.  She came in a trial period before they cut her in equally.

Q:  This was?

Federman:  This was around 2006, maybe, ’07.  You can’t ask me dates.  
Then the three of them, and then Maria, who kept on—I made Maria an equal partner of the business someplace along the time, because it seemed to me that she was doing the yeoman’s work and she ought to be invested in it, so she had held on.  Even when I gave up my portion of the profit, she had kept hers, and then when her daughter came in here, she gave hers up so there would be more of a pie for the three of them to divide up.  So then we just became salaried whatever.
Then Niki came in, then the three of them had been sort of working out their dynamic, and I think largely it works very well.  Niki and Josh, the dynamic there, they complement each other because Niki is this big, expansive person now.  She’ll walk into a room and light up a room.  Everybody I see, “Oh, Niki, your daughter, is the best.”  She’s this, she’s that.  She cares about people.  She shows she cares.  She cares about Russ & Daughters.  She’s carrying on the legacy.  Josh is an engineer, he’s more withdrawn and quiet and less verbal and vocal, but Josh, I love Josh.  Maybe I admire him too.  He can get from Point A to Point B in a straight line.  He’s an engineer, and you need that in business too.  So the two of them are able to do that.  When I came to criticize something, they immediately circled their two wagons and I didn’t get it.  I was the boogey man.  I was from the old school.  I was the dinosaur.
And Herman, I had to teach him the things, a good fish from a bad fish, even a good customer from a bad customer, but my presence is a critical presence.  Didn’t work so well particularly with my daughter, because there’s all that family kind of baggage.  But Herman had been trained by me, so he was there in the mix to present the way that we had done business.  
So it seems to me that it has, for the most part, worked out spectacularly well.  I’m very confident now that they’re running the business actually better than I ever have.  The numbers are better.  I come in, the customers are happy, the press is happy, the suppliers are happy, and I come in, and the most important thing to me is I come in and I eat what I want and I taste.  That’s part of the deal in the transfer.  You don’t have to pay me a lot of money, but let me eat what I want.  But the importance of that is, I taste.  I pick up the sturgeon, I feel it, I taste it, and the salmon, and the fish is as good, if not better, so they’re able to stay on top of the product, which is ultimately, no matter how great a schmoozer you are or how famous your business is, you’ve got to deliver consistently good product to the customer.  And they’re doing that.  So, you know, I kvel. 

Q:  This is terrific.  Thank you very much.

[End of interview]