East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (16 page)

 THE ENTREPRENEUR OF CROTONA PARK

i don’t know about your relatives, but there was only one Uncle Max in our family. One of a kind. And in the Thirties when the Depression killed the spirit, when everybody I knew was praying for a job, any job, a little something to be earned, something to buy the cheap food we ate, Uncle Max, he was different.

Somehow he was able to purchase (ah! That was the word, it denoted having enough money to spend for things other than the barest necessities of life), to purchase many things most of us could not afford. He was able to buy dresses for his wife, pants and suits and shoes for his two sons. While my family’s clothing hung sadly and lonely in our closets—one suit, perhaps a hand-me-down, one good dress years old for my older sister, and that mended one for my mother. My father had his one suit from those earlier times, the good times of the Twenties.

Uncle Max always dressed well. i remember when he wore spats, carried a wooden cane with a metal lion’s head handle, that was during the Twenties. Summers he wore a flat-topped straw hat, that was the fashion then. Later he gave up the cane because people thought that he had gone lame. Natty was the word for him then.

He lived in an apartment in the Bronx while the rest of the family, including us, lived in the tenements of the Lower East Side. He had a car, a Ford, he had bought it used, but it was the only car owned by anybody in the family.

How he did it, we didn’t know. But we knew, we really knew. He was a boss, not a worker. He had been a boss ever since those lost and missed days of the Twenties when he had quit his job as a cutter in the garment center and gone into the
schmateh
business with his two partners. Well, not the dress business, it was aprons that he made, also housecoats for women.

“Listen,” he said in his accented English, accented, yes, but he had accumulated a large English vocabulary, from where I don’t know. “The women, they will always need aprons. Sure, they like dresses, they want dresses. But aprons, housecoats, they got to have. When they clean, when they cook. And they wear out fast, faster than dresses. Why should they dirty their dresses when they clean, hah?”

“But aprons, they cost less than dresses so you charge less for them so you make less on them,” my mother, Max’s sister said.

“Sure. Sure,” he replied nodding. Now he spoke as teacher, “I know. But everybody’s in the dress business. A hundred, a thousand, more even. Who knows how many? Each one competing (he said the word slowly, enunciating clearly), each one cutting the price to get the business. You think S. Klein’s, Macy’s, the department stores, you think the dress stores, they buy just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “because you just come in and ask for a certain price?” He shook his head. “That’s not the way it is, believe me.”

“So why don’t they do it when you come to sell your aprons?” my father, a presser in a now defunct garment factory said.

“But there’s less com-petition than in the dress business,” Uncle Max said with a broad smile. “So department stores, the other stores, they play their game and you play your game. You know how much each piece costs you. You know how far down you can go. So you play.”

But that was before he found out that Belsky, one of his partners, had stolen him blind, had ruined the business. We didn’t see Uncle Max for over eight months, not even at the family get-togethers. Every time someone in the family spoke about him they would ask, What was he doing? Where was he? He seemed to have disappeared. Not a word from him, not even from his wife, my Aunt Mollie. They had become lost in the Bronx while we lived in

the tenements of the Lower East Side shadowed by the Williamsburgh Bridge. Even his two sons had been lost with him. “I worry about him,” my mother said to my father. Max was her youngest brother. “What happened to him?”

My father shrugged. “I don’t know.” But with a knowing nod, “Max is Max. We will see him someday. He’ll show up.”

My mother rocked her head sadly. “Like the earth swallowed him up.” Leaning towards my father, said, “Why don’t he come to see us?”

What was there to say?

Then one day he did show up, a broad smile on his face. Natty as ever. My mother, startled, said almost in a whisper, “Max, Max, you’re here.”

My father, my sister and myself, we stared at him, a ghost reap-peared. My father whispered,
“A gahst in shtetl,
A guest in town.”

Uncle Max didn’t hear my father’s whisper, he turned towards my mother as he said to her, “I’m here. And why not? This is the family, yes?”

“Yes, yes,” she replied. “Come. Sit down. I’ll make you a glass tea.” She placed the kettle on the stove, cut a slice of lemon while my sister set the table. My mother searched the shelves for the jar of strawberry jam. There was none. “I don’t have the jelly,” she said to Uncle Max. “I know you like tea with some jelly.”

“So does the world come to an end, you don’t have the jelly?” Uncle Max, now seated at the table, said, “Come, sit down.” “After the tea,” she replied. “And how is Mollie, the family?”

“Fine, fine.”

While we were having our tea my father asked, “And what are you doing, Max?”

“I’m in the soap business,” he said sitting back in his chair. “What?” my mother said, startled.

Uncle Max, grinning, nodded. “Soap. To wash, to clean. Soap for the wash.”

My mother, holding the fingertips of both of her hands to her mouth in wonderment, whispered, “The money. Where did he get the money?” while my father said to Uncle Max, “What do you know about the soap business? You know the
schmateh
business, the apron business. But, soap—?”

“I know how to sell, that’s what I know. You’re in the dress business, you sell dresses, you’re in the apron business, you sell aprons. If you can sell one thing, you can always sell another. You sell what you got to sell. It’s not such a big thing, I can tell you.”

“You work for somebody?” My mother asked.

“Me? I should work for somebody? What are you talking about? You think I want somebody telling me what to do? Never.”

“You make soap?” my mother said slowly in wonder. “Make it?
Takeh,
really?”

“Yeah,” Uncle Max said. “Businesses make things. I make soap.”

“Like Lux soap?” My mother asked. She loved Lux soap, its smell and its lather. She bought it whenever she had a few cents extra to spare.

“No. Not yet,” Uncle Max said. “Soap for the laundry, soap flakes, soap powder, things to clean.”

“You mean it?” my father said bewildered.

“Here,” Uncle Max said as he removed a card from his vest pocket and handed it to my father. “It says the Brite White Company, right? Right?”

My father reached for the card, stared hard at it, his glance darted to Uncle Max as he said, “I don’t understand.”

Uncle Max took a sip of tea, put the glass down on the table and said, “After that Belsky, that
goniff,
that thief, he should only get killed, the
momzer,
the bastard, he stole from me the apron business, I sat down and thought it all out.”

One sure thing, he told us, no more partners, that was rule number one. Partners steal. What did he, Uncle Max, want? A business where the investment was not as great as the dress, the
schmateh
business. So he began to look around, there were plenty of businesses for sale, wasn’t this the Depression? Too many businesses, not enough customers. And he found it, the soap business, it was going bankrupt this little place in the Bronx—

“In the Bronx, a factory?” my father said.

The only time I had been in the Bronx were those few times when my mother and father and my sister had attended those parties Uncle Max had had in his apartment opposite Crotona Park. We went to the Bronx as little as possible, the trip was too long. We had to walk to the 2nd Avenue El, take it to the interchange uptown with the 3rd Avenue El, take that train and get off somewhere in the 170’s in the Bronx. Then, later, we had to make that long trip back. It was all just too much.

“What do you think?” Uncle Max said to my father. “They don’t have factories in the Bronx? There’s factories. Plenty.” My mother shrugged her I-don’t-know shrug as Uncle Max went on with, “We sell to laundries, big laundries, other places that use a lot of soap. You would be surprised, there are lots of places like that and I’m getting in some of them. I picked up some good business.”

“You make Fels Naptha soap?” my mother asked. It was the bar of soap she used for her laundry.

“Yeah. Well, that too. I got a soap like that that’s better, believe me.” He took a slow sip of tea and said, “When I got the business I made up my mind I would be the outside man, I would do the selling. But I would still run the business, you understand?”

“What’s not to understand?” my father said. “But who makes the soap?”

“Somebody inside,” Uncle Max said with a satisfied grin.

“You got people working for you?” my mother asked with surprise.

“When you make things you have workers working for you. That’s the way it is. I got three working for me and the girl in the office. And sometimes when it gets too busy, I get two or three more. And sometimes my two boys come in to help out too. One man I keep all the time, he’s the one knows how to make the soap. He’s,” Uncle Max said with a laugh, “a chef of the soap. He worked before for the people I bought the business from and he was
takeh,
really, glad to have the job from me.”

We looked at each other, awed by what Uncle Max was saying. How was it possible that this had happened when businesses failed every day, when people had no jobs, when a multitude of people were on New York City’s Home Relief? How had Uncle Max done it?

“So why not a job for the family, Max? You got a good business, yeah?” my mother said. “You didn’t think of that?”

My father tensed at her words. He searched for work every day and occasionally he would find something for a short time, I knew that he had no desire to work for Uncle Max. Staring at Uncle Max my father muttered more to himself a caustic, yeah, yeah, oh sure.

“Because,” Uncle Max said placing his half-filled tea glass deliberately on the table, “nobody in the family knows how to make soap, how to be a good soap chef, yeah? How to make soap flakes, how to boil the things that go into my White-O, it’s a liq-uid,” he said the last word with a deliberateness as if he had just learned it. He turned to my father and said, “Can you do that?” My father said nothing and looked away from him. “Hah?” Uncle Max persisted. “Can anybody from this family do that? So what do I do? I get somebody who can.”

Silence. Slowly Uncle Max looked into our faces. Then, slowly, he picked up his unfinished glass and sipped more tea. My mother said, “What about the other ones who work for you?”

“A truck driver? He owns his own truck. You got a truck? He gets—I wouldn’t tell him this but I’ll tell you. A little secret. He gets
bupkiss,
almost nothing, but he’s glad he’s got a job, he’s satisfied. If he’s satisfied, so I’m satisfied. The same with the others. You know what they do? They mix, they pack, they
schlepp,
haul. Would you be able to do that?” he said to my father. My father said nothing.

Uncle Max sat there like a king. This was Uncle Max, whenever we saw him, he somehow established himself as the center of things. Even when earlier in his career, when he was still in the apron business. Especially in the earlier days whenever he needed the money, which was on a regular basis, he made the rounds of family members and friends, those who had small grocery or candy stores. Or those like my father who made a decent living before the Depression, Uncle Max gave them what he called ‘head checks’ dated ahead three or four days for which he received immediate cash.

He squeezed out fifty dollars here, one hundred dollars there, that way he had cash for those days before his checks cleared. He may have had others who exchanged cash for lesser or more amounts but we were not aware of them.

But even then, while writing his check, he was still the success, the boss, the someone. Even then. But that was in the early days of the apron business. His check exchange business stopped a few years later.

“So from this you’re making a living?” my mother asked him.

“Yeah. Sure,” he replied. “You make a living from selling anything, even shoelaces, if you sell enough of them. Come,” he said as he suddenly arose from the table. “Come downstairs. Come look at my new car.”

“A new car?” my father said in disbelief. “You got a new car?”

“Sure. Why not?” Uncle Max replied. “A Pontiac. Come see it.”

“A Pontiac?” I said in awe, thinking at the same time, What’s happened to the Ford?

We trooped down the dimly-lit stairs of the tenement following Uncle Max. And there outside, parked at the curb, was the new automobile shining and glimmering in the late afternoon sunlight. A bunch of kids had gathered around it and were peering into its windows, studying its interior.