The Matzo Ball Heiress Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Okeydoke. I’ll be by at eleven.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I met him at a work-related party I forced myself to attend. During a group conversation about disturbing baby trends, Daniel held the floor with his description of a baby girl he’d seen at an adult Halloween party. The infant had been dressed as a sexy cat; she had on lipstick, furry ears and baby fishnets.

  Later I was feeling tipsy on an empty stomach and searched out the Pringles. Daniel had the same idea. My confidence boosted by two vodka sours, I told him about how every time I see someone with great curls I think of one of my favorite kid’s books, Ramona the Pest.

  “I don’t think I remember that one,” he said after a munch.

  “A girlie book. Ramona Quimby got in big trouble from her kindergarten teacher for pulling a classmate’s perfect curl.”

  Daniel smiled seductively, bobbed his head toward me and said, “Go ahead and pull it.”

  Daniel was thrilled that he was dating a Greenblotz—his grandmother would be ecstatic! He pushed me to get together with him as often as possible. On the fifth date in two weeks he handed me a syrupy poem (written in scarily robotic handwriting) comparing the seder family tradition to a garden of orchids, each vibrant bloom representing a cherished family member. I was so grateful to have someone in my life during the month of March that I let the bad poetry go and tried to follow Daniel’s tortured analogy. “My family would be more like a garden of moss,” I said, and then went out on a limb and admitted that there is little love in my clan. When I added that the Greenblotz family has not held a seder since I was a small child, he chose not to believe me.

  “You’re so deadpan,” he laughed.

  It was as if I said the House of Windsor doesn’t really drink tea. He laughed harder when I repeated my confession. I held his elbow hard and said, “Daniel, please take this seriously. This is so hard for me to tell anyone.”

  During our awkward foreplay that night, Daniel maneuvered over my body with the subtlety of a moon rover. I had mentally broken up with him even before the condom tip made an accidental, ludicrous shadow puppet on his wall. It looked like a mini court jester was about to enter me.

  “It’s over,” I said the next morning from a bright yellow wooden stool in his blinding-white kitchen. Of course it dawned on me that I would be alone on Passover, which started the very next night, while one of New York’s very available single ladies would undoubtedly snap him up in a flash. I don’t think this “catch” had ever been broken up with. His lips opened, and then shut with considerable effort. He grinned awkwardly and gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  The bonehead called a week later to see if I had calmed down. “I know what started this. Was it because I didn’t want you to wear my 501’s so you wouldn’t get lady smells in my crotch? I wasn’t singling you out. Every girl I’ve ever dated has stunk up my crotch.”

  Yes, I am dateless this year, not that Passover is my Valentine’s Day. But it would be nice to have someone special in my life to get me through this awkward month. I’ve never made it past six months with anyone though. If I don’t get dumped, I usually do the dumping just before the seder season. I can’t trust just anyone else to understand my fractured family. I’d rather be alone than with a man who thinks I’m being histrionic.

  At least I have my documentary producing in full gear to distract me. I don’t work because I have to, I work because I need to or I’d go crazy like Aunt Shara or my grandmothers. Idle money breeds dementia; look at history. Has there ever been a well-adjusted prince? It’s hard to be normal when your first jar of Gerber apple sauce is served off priceless porcelain. Documentary-making forces me to leave my world of privilege and squeeze myself into someone else’s Payless shoes.

  The new film I’m working on, a biographical look at pioneer women in the sex field, is the lucky recipient of a $30,000 Guggenheim fellowship as well as major HBO funding.

  My producing partner and closest friend, Vondra Adams, is a grant application genius. She was the one who wanted us to team up after we separately produced a number of segments that got considerable attention from the top of the PBS ladder. Vondra was convinced that, cynical as it sounds, a production company helmed by two women, one black, one Jewish, would be magnets for funding. I was worried that they would look at my personal finances. If so, we wouldn’t have qualified. But they didn’t, and she was right on the money: we’ve received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Women Make Movies, Sisters in Film and B’nai Brith.

  Since our entire production company is an office of two, we’re lucky our sense of humor is almost identical. Our only roadblock so far was the initial tension we had on who gets first billing on our films. From Vondra’s tone of voice, it was going to get ugly. Because of my hatred of family bickering, I’ve never really been able to stomach conflict. So before it could turn into any kind of meaningful fight, I bit the bullet and suggested listing ourselves alphabetically, so I always come last. The deal was sealed in the Parthenon Coffee Shop, still our favorite Flatiron-district coffee shop. (Nikos and Mike, two of the twelve waiters from last year’s Neo-Gods of Greek Diners calendar, work there.) In a buoyant mood after the credit order was settled, Vondra insisted that we flip our names every other film if our newly christened company, Two Dames Productions, took off. That hasn’t happened. She’s obviously forgotten or regrets her promise. I don’t want any ugliness to reemerge, so I’ve let it slide. Just as well. Since that salvaged afternoon in the Parthenon, we’ve only had one other fight: who first came up with our running joke imagining tofu “haggis” showing up in natural-food stores next to textured “chicken” and “pork.” Why would this be so important to her? Yet Vondra went ballistic when I said that was my idea.
I have a great memory and was able to pinpoint the exact moment I first made the crack, but she wouldn’t let it go at that. I finally said “Fine. Let’s agree to disagree.” (But it really was my joke.)

  On the whole, though, I admire and adore Vondra, even if at times I’m jealous of her magnetism to pretty much the entire male population, and even more resentful of her fantastic relationship with her family. I’m grateful we have gone into a most productive partnership. My career is the one thing that’s right in my life. Another three shoots on our current documentary and I’d say we’re ready to edit. Then, it should be an easy trot to the production finish line, as The Grand Ladies of Sex is already prebought by Cecelia Neville, vice president for documentaries over at HBO. Cecelia is the most important person in the nonfiction-film industry. She knows her demographic: once she’s contracted enough films about environmental treachery, triumph over disease and inspiring disadvantaged youth for her award quota, she’ll buy anything with the word sex in it, even if it’s about a bunch of elegant old women saying the words gonorrhea and erectile difficulty.

  Despite our solid working relationship and close friendship, I haven’t let on to Vondra what I’m worth. I’m amazed that Vondra has no idea what I’m worth. After all, there’s a lot of media coverage of the factory, and Vondra’s not dumb. But she thinks my family factory houses a nice-size cottage industry, and I prefer it that way. What Izzy Greenblotz didn’t count on while visualizing an affluent future for his descendants is that no one really likes anyone with serious dough. So I just never mention my finances to anyone except my accountant.

  Vondra’s family, Southern Baptist Alabamans, branched out to the predominantly black neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. And as Grandma Lainie used to say, “How is she supposed to know from matzo?”

  I would love to have scheduled a Passover shoot to speed up our documentary, but I have to be available to keep up appearances for the media on the matzo beat. For the next two weeks, my surname comes first, and I must put in time at the factory store. Jake’s request, of course, because this gets lots of media coverage for the company. A prominent story on CNN or MSNBC about the family still baking and selling the matzo is worth more than a year’s worth of advertising. I cab it down to the Lower East Side Greenblotz factory every other day and will get behind the counter and sell sell sell with the cameras clicking; or I will lead curious folk on a factory tour, the way my father did before he’d had enough. Some families come back year after year with their children and grandchildren. The veteran shoppers pinch my cheek like I’m a favorite niece.