Читать книгу It All Started With a Deli - M. Hirsh Goldberg - Страница 11

When Harry and Ida started their married life in 1918, Baltimore City was a tapestry of burgeoning ethnic communities, the third most populated city in the country. Baltimore was then such a prominent force in America that the current President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had been nominated for the presidency in Baltimore’s Fifth Regiment Armory, then the ninth presidential convention Baltimore had hosted. Only New York City and Philadelphia had more population. Baltimore’s prominence was due in large part to its being both a major East Coast shipping port and the hub for the B&O Railroad, America’s first railway system.

As a port city, it became America’s second leading entry point for the thousands of immigrants arriving by ship. The city’s processing center for new immigrants at Locust Point, situated near Fort McHenry, rivaled New York’s Ellis Island for size and significance. Many immigrants—non-Jews arriving from Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as Jews from Eastern and Western Europe—settled into the city’s burgeoning immigrant communities that preceded them. Another segment in the increasingly diverse ethnic populace was a small but growing black population as they moved away from oppressive Southern states, entered Maryland on their way north, and stayed. In fact, a contingent of black families lived in several narrow streets radiating from the Jewish area of Lombard Street.

However, Baltimore was also becoming one of the most segregated of American cities. Some of this was by personal preference, as Jews often chose to live among co-religionists, and Germans, Irish, Polish, Greek and Italians eagerly formed their own neighborhoods. Little Italy persists today as a reminder of that era. But African-Americans found themselves restricted to living in certain areas of the city, first by unwritten but openly known segregated ‘redlining’ directives and then by formally legislated codes. Jews, too, faced restrictive neighborhood covenants that prevented them from buying homes in various high-end communities, such as Roland Park and Guilford. The result of both informal and formal segregation was that the various blocks around Lombard Street in East Baltimore were, for practical reasons, associated with religious, ethnic or racial communities that grouped themselves together. By the 1950s, restrictive covenants were ruled unconstitutional, and Jews and blacks could more easily live throughout metropolitan Baltimore. Such changes helped speed up the move by Jews away from East Baltimore, such that Lombard Street was no longer a magnet for attracting shoppers to Jewish-owned stores.

Attman’s Delicatessen survived these population shifts. One explanation for its continued presence on Lombard Street is that Harry and Ida and later their family conducted their business in a way that reached out to everyone, not only to Jews but also to non-Jews, whites and blacks, those of high social status and the poor. As a result, many Baltimoreans still have fond memories of the couple and of Attman’s Delicatessen, and have remained friends and patrons. Among those is Maryland State Senator Nathanial McFadden, a leader of the state’s black legislators and now chairman of the Baltimore City Senate Delegation: the Attmans gave him his first job as a youngster working in the deli, an experience he tells others he has treasured; he also recounts how they also encouraged him to get a college education and pursue a career. In fact, the Attmans’ relationship with African Americans may have ensured the delicatessen’s survival. During the Baltimore riots in 1968 in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., blacks living in the neighborhood only let fire trucks into the area when flames threatened the Attman’s store so that it could escape the fires consuming many other shops along Lombard Street.

How did Harry and Ida build a small delicatessen into a Baltimore food icon that has survived and thrived for nearly a century? After all, few if any companies or organizations endure for 100 years. And the Attmans have accomplished this in the face of hard times, both on personal and national levels. They had to deal with the disruption of a world war, a major pandemic (the worldwide Spanish influenza of 1918 struck the city particularly hard, with Baltimore experiencing the fourth highest death rate among U.S. cities), the Great Depression (during which the delicatessen almost went bankrupt, numerous periodic economic downturns, a race riot, prolonged traffic obstructions, road closings, changing neighborhoods, family deaths, all while rearing three children: Edward (born May 31, 1920), Seymour (April 27, 1926), and Leonard (February 18, 1934).

They also attempted to join with two other partners intending to launch a chain of food markets with deli departments. The partners opened one of these stores on Garrison Boulevard near Belvedere Avenue. When that store was not successful, Harry and Ida bought the 1019 East Lombard Street location from the partner who owned the building.

Consider, too, that Harry and Ida suffered from the shady dealings of a partner they took into their business when they bought the store on Lombard Street. Harry renamed the business A & L Delicatessen to incorporate the initials of their two last names. When he eventually discovered that “L,” who opened the store in the morning, had been stealing cash from the register, Harry confronted him. Caught red-handed, a red-faced “L” immediately left and never returned.

So how did Harry and Ida accomplish so much and pass on to their children and grandchildren the lessons that led to the family’s continued successes?

The first instruction was an attention to the products they sold. They offered good quality food and the better cuts of meat prepared with spices and seasonings in a special recipe Harry and Ida developed. That recipe has remained a secret, known by only a few Attman family members and the current manager. Some of Ida’s recipes for baked goods are also still used. Harry purchased with an eye to keep costs down and to respond to changing tastes of customers. He would buy cucumbers at the height of the season in August and put them up as pickles in big barrels. The Attmans also put up their own tomatoes, storing them in cold storage until they were ready for sale. They imported herrings from Norway (for making pickled herring), Scotland (to make matjes herring), and Iceland (for schmaltz herring), and put them in cold storage for later sale, often selling several barrels of herring a day. They also sold, in bulk, dried lima beans, split peas, and a variety of grains.

In preparation for Passover, they featured 100-pound burlap bags of walnuts, hazel nuts, butternuts and almonds; barrels of kosher salamis and bolognas; and wooden cases of dried apricots, sweet and sour prunes, and various-size pears. To serve the Passover needs of Jewish customers in small towns, the Attmans distributed circulars throughout the South and shipped orders to them by American Railway Express. “I remember staying up at night after the store closed to fill these orders,” says Ed. He also remembers the matzohs then in demand: Wittenberg Matzoh (the least expensive at 10 cents a pound), Manischewitz (12 to 13 cents per pound), Streit’s, and Goodman’s.

Another reason for their growing success was undoubtedly the couple’s willingness to work together and work hard, adjusting always to the changing times and needs of their customers. The area around Lombard Street was initially filled with people struggling to integrate into American life. Jewish East Baltimore was crowded with the influx of thousands of destitute newcomers, many of whom spoke Yiddish and little or no English and had to contend with rearing children in a new world while the parents themselves emerged fitfully from the old. Jews tried to earn their livelihood as garment workers, seamstresses, tailors, laborers, hired hands, and tutors. Some of the more enterprising set up their own shops. Most families lived in crowded apartments with few amenities and limited sanitary conditions.

Innovations that made life easier came slowly over the next decades as Harry and Ida sought to bring up a family: the Attmans did not have an indoor bathroom with bathtub and hot water until 1927, when Edward was seven (until then, outhouses were common and communal bathhouses were the rule); instead of electric lights, dangerous gas jets illuminated homes at night; linoleum was yet to be introduced to cover bare floors; instead of refrigerators, insulated boxes were cooled with blocks of ice delivered by truck. In the summertime, to escape a hot, humid Baltimore night, the Attman children would take blankets and sleep in nearby Patterson Park. Still in the distant future were air conditioning, easy access to telephones, and affordable automobiles.

However, all these people, living in the same conditions and from the same religious and cultural backgrounds, found common ground and camaraderie. In the Jewish areas, the streets were alive with people of all ages, but especially young adults who had been the early arriving immigrants and the children of newly forming families. At one point, sixty synagogues dotted the area around Lombard Street. And seemingly at the center of it all was that crowded row of shops along several blocks of Lombard Street where patrons could find much of their needs for home: from live fish and chickens to two-cent chocolate sodas to clothing and hardware items.

Across the street from Attman’s store was Blank’s department store, which carried a variety of fabrics. Within the same block was Fayman’s and Ben’s, two stores which handled all kinds of clothing, from socks for children and bras for women to men’s pants and shirts, much of it in odd lots. There was Brotman’s kosher butcher shop, Yankelov’s chickens, and down the street Lazinsky’s fish store and Crystal’s Bakery. Next door to Attman’s was Holzman’s Bakery. In the 1100 block of Lombard Street was Stone’s Bakery, where patrons could buy hot rolls and bagels, baked fresh every hour. Among the other delis was Atlantic Import, operated by Harry’s parents, brother, and brother-in-law. That store lasted until the riots.

As an Italian woman who grew up in nearby Little Italy told me about her memories of her mother taking her there to shop, “Thanks to those Jewish merchants, Lombard Street then was our supermarket before there were supermarkets.”

For Jews living and working in the Lombard Street area, it was a competitive life combined with a closeness of family and community. This was especially true for Harry and Ida. Running a food-oriented business, and doing so in two locations—Baltimore Street and Lombard Street until 1946 when they sold the Baltimore street building—was challenging and demanding. They worked part or all of seven days a week, with their busiest days Thursday, Saturday night, and Sunday. “My father always said whenever he came into work it was too late, and whenever he left it was too early,” Edward remembers. “And he never would pull the blind down and say, ‘We’re closed.’ If a customer came and needed something, he opened up the store to take care of him. That was his nature to do that.”

Leonard, too, remembers how his mother would delay dinner until his father would come home, which could be late because his father often stayed open to serve late-arriving customers. “When are we going to eat?” Leonard would ask, and his mother would reply, “When your father comes. When there’s no more business, then he comes home.” Although the family would always wait, Leonard found to his surprise that nothing ever seemed to get burned, that “everything seemed to taste good no matter what time we ate.” Leonard also saw first-hand his father’s work ethic and concern for others. When he worked in the store alongside his father, he remembered the times when even though they had already turned off the lights to go home, his father might see a car coming down Lombard Street and say, ‘I can’t close it up. These people may be coming from somewhere and need to get food.’

“And many times we would reopen the store, turn on all the lights and take care of these people.”

That attention to customer service was a hallmark of Harry and Ida’s attitude about business, and they conveyed it to their children. Marc Attman, Seymour’s son, recalls Seymour relating to him the lessons he learned from his parents:

— “Always go out of your way to be a diplomat.”

— “Look into a person’s eyes when you talk to them.”

— “When you say something, mean it.”

As with many small family-owned businesses, the Attman children helped out in the store. Edward, being the oldest, was the first to help, working after school and on weekends. When he was old enough to reach the slicing machine, he cut deli on a hand-operated slicer before electric slicers were introduced. Even after he graduated high school and was attending University of Baltimore, Eddie would work every day after school because “things were very tough in those years” and he wanted to help pay for his college tuition (then costing $30 a month, an amount the Attmans strained to meet). He continued to help out for a while even after he returned from his army service following World War II. As they became older, Seymour and Leonard also worked in the store after school. It proved to be an important experience for their future business lives, as Leonard later acknowledged in an interview with the Jewish Museum of Maryland: “It gave me the ability, as well as my brothers, to get to meet people from all different ethnic backgrounds and be able to interact with anyone of any race, creed, color with a degree of ease, then as well as now.”

As a 10-year-old, Leonard would at times be assigned to work the cash register and give change. Since Harry knew five languages fluently, he imparted this awareness to his children as a way to enhance customer relations and sales. “My father wanted the customer always to feel at home. So he made me learn taking cash and counting change back to them in their language. If people came in and they could only speak Yiddish, I was to count the money back to them in Yiddish. If they were Russian, I was to count back in Russian. To this day, I can still count extremely rapidly from one to 100 in Russian. I can also say in Russian ‘hello,’ ‘you’re welcome,’ and ‘thank you.’”

The result was a customer who was both astonished and appreciative.

“I made that person feel at home coming into the store,” Leonard says. “And they would look forward to that. Here is this young kid who would be in their safety zone, so to speak, that somebody like that would be handling their money, giving them the cash. They didn’t even always look at the money. They just looked at me counting it to them in their own language.”

Seymour, too, learned some Yiddish, Russian and Italian as a way to further business, as he recounted in a 1982 oral history interview with the Jewish Historical Society of Maryland: “If you could speak the language, you could sell because a lot of people were immigrants, so you could suggest this or that to them, like a herring is a ‘shlutke,’ and butter is ‘matzlaw,’ which is Russian. In Jewish you would say ‘pitter’ or ‘putter.’ I had a lot of Russian people come in and this is the way I learned. They got a big kick out of this because they would think I was a foreigner. When they asked me where I was from and I would tell them I’m born in America, they would really crack up. It was a novelty for them. Just like it would be a novelty if you’d go to Europe and some child spoke English.”

Later, some of Harry and Ida’s grandchildren would come down to the store to help. Marc, Seymour’s son who now manages the delicatessen, started as an 8-year-old assisting in the store. Ed’s son, Ron, the oldest of the grandchildren and the first of his generation to work in the deli, would arrive on a Saturday night and work as cashier (“I could only make change in English,” he recalls). Here he saw the array of patrons who would come by: both the poor who had only 25 cents for a bag of deli shavings, as well as judges, policemen, politicians, and community leaders. Even then-Maryland State Comptroller Louis Goldstein would frequent Attman’s on Saturday nights. “I learned more about people those Saturday nights than I ever expected,” Ron says.

Another aspect of Harry and Ida Attman that left a life-long imprint on their children was their charitableness, with both food and money. During the Depression or when it was hard times, Harry would provide 6 ounce bags of food to any homeless individual who came to the store. Collectors for Jewish charities would also visit the store for donations, and Harry never turned them away without some contribution. Harry would also often offer collectors a chance to sit down and have a roll and coffee, and then converse with them about politics, religion or Torah. According to Leonard, if there were a sickness in the family or any other problem, his father would mention the problem to these collectors, many of whom were rabbis, and they would declare they would go back and say an extra special prayer. True to their word, a letter would come back to Harry attesting that the prayers had been made. Later, these contacts proved helpful when Seymour needed an operation in Milwaukee and a rabbi from Milwaukee who had periodically visited the store for years put the family up for the week that they were in the city while Seymour underwent his operation.

Ida, too, was charitable. She was an active sponsor of the ladies auxiliaries in behalf of religious schools and donated to charities by means of pushkes (charity boxes) that she kept in the house. The sons remember her standard practice every Friday afternoon or on the eve of a Jewish holiday. Before she lit candles, she would open a closet door and put pennies, nickels, dimes or quarters—in multiples of 18 or 36 (representing in numbers the Hebrew word for “life”)—into the 15 charity boxes that she had nailed to the back of the door. These charity boxes were from different schools, yeshivas or organizations located in Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, and other cities, as well as in Israel (then Palestine). Periodically, a collector would come by to collect the money and leave a receipt for the donations. Among those boxes was one from the synagogue in Milwaukee.

The Jewish religion and Jewish traditions were a central part of the Attman home and imbued Edward, Seymour and Leonard with meaningful and lasting impressions.

The Attmans kept a kosher home and observed all the Jewish holidays. On Friday night and Saturday after services, the family ate together, with Ida providing meals and desserts of her own recipes. Harry put on tefillin every weekday, and Ida prayed each morning from a prayer book especially geared for women. Called a Techina, the prayers were printed in Yiddish.

To Harry and Ida, the Jewish education of their children was, as Leonard says, “of prime importance.”

For their Jewish education, Ed, Seymour and Leonard were enrolled in the Hebrew Parochial School (later to be named the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore; founded in 1917, it was the first Hebrew day school in America outside New York City). In its beginning years, the school held Hebrew classes in the morning and secular classes in the afternoon for boys until the 6th grade, with Hebrew classes offered from 3:30 to 5:30 pm for children who went to public school. Ed and Seymour went until the 6th grade, and then went to public school while continuing their Hebrew education in the school’s afternoon classes. Being the youngest of the brothers, Leonard remained at the Talmudical Academy as the school eventually expanded its Hebrew and secular classes, adding a junior high and then a high school. At first, classes were taught in Yiddish since many of the teachers, themselves immigrants knowing little English, translated from the Hebrew into Yiddish. Later, instruction was in English and instructors of secular classes were both Jewish and non-Jewish, with many teachers experienced public school instructors. While Edward and Seymour went on to graduate from public high schools, Leonard graduated in one of Talmudical Academy’s earliest 12th grades.

Says Leonard about his Jewish education, “That gave me the values that I live with today and probably have been the most help to me in my business, my social life and attaining what success I have been able to achieve.”

The family belonged to Shomrei Mishmeres, an Orthodox synagogue now referred to as the Lloyd Street Shul, which was down the street from where the Jewish Museum of Maryland now stands. The building featured a balcony for the women worshippers and a downstairs mikvah, frequented at separate times by women and men. Before Passover, matzoh was baked on the basement level. All three Attman boys had their Bar Mitzvahs in this shul. Ida cooked and baked the food for the Bar Mitzvah kiddush held after Sabbath services in the synagogue’s reception hall, making her own honey cake, mandel bread and chickpeas mixture (called nahit). As with most Bar Mitzvahs of the day, no additional parties or festivities were held, but Ida arranged for that Sunday for the Jewish Education Alliance’s orchestra, in which Ed was a member, to entertain at the Levindale nursing home, along with serving ice cream and cake, all as a way to tie in a Bar Mitzvah celebration with an act of visiting the sick and elderly. Leonard’s was the last Bar Mitzvah to be celebrated in the Lloyd Street synagogue before it closed.

The memory that lingers for the Attman boys is how their parents took interest and pride in them. Every Friday night, at the Sabbath table, after Harry made Kiddush, he had each of the boys make Kiddush. During the meal, Harry would ask them what they had learned that week in Hebrew school and, recalls Leonard, “how we are supposed to act in a traditional way.” Following the benching (Grace After Meals), Harry and the children would sing zemiros, the songs associated with the Sabbath. Leonard still remembers fondly that on the walks to and from synagogue on Saturday morning, holding his father’s hand, his father would question him about that week’s Torah portion.

Ida was always the mother, advising them on ways to dress and act in public, helping them plan for their future, caring about their needs. One example stands out. After Ed was drafted into the army in 1941, the family worried about his safety. This concern increased when they did not receive any mail or hear from him for a month. One day, an individual came into the store and told Harry that he thought he saw Eddie on a newsreel being shown at a movie house on Lexington Street. It was a brief segment, he said, but it looked like Eddie was among a group of soldiers exercising on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean heading for North Africa. When she heard this, Ida immediately took a streetcar to see the newsreel.

“I went with her and recall it vividly,” Leonard recounted in a taped interview for the Jewish Americans series. “Whatever the movie was wasn’t important. We waited for the newsreel. And sure enough, when the newsreel came on, there were a group of guys standing on a ship, exercising in their shorts and shirts, and we saw my brother.”

Ida was enthralled, alternately cheerful and tearful. She stayed and waited through the repeat of the movie until the newsreel came on again. And she then stayed to see the newsreel a third time.

“My mother stayed and saw the newsreel until midnight, until after the movies closed,” said Leonard.

In coming days, Ida went back “day after day” until the newsreel showing Eddie was deleted from that part of the news.

By the end of World War II, Attman’s Delicatessen was a well-known fixture on Lombard Street. As the oldest of the Attman boys, Ed, on his return from military service, was looking to start a career and a family. Harry and Ida could now turn their attention to helping Ed—and later, Seymour and Leonard—launch the next phase of their lives. The Attman brothers would have a special foundation on which to start. Their parents had already set a memorable example, showing each of them how to build a successful business while raising a family with lasting, meaningful values.