Out of a smooth blend of Viennese charm, American merchandising, and Jewish Orthodoxy, have grown the Barton’s candy shops, which in twelve years have spread over the face of New York asking a single loaded (with calories and what else not) question: if it isn’t a box of Barton’s, is it right for a Jewish home? (This concept is Barton’s, and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editors of COMMENTARY or its sponsor, or the stockholders of Loft’s or Barricini’s.) Morris Freedman reports this new development on the American scene.
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“In America, candy was too serious,” Stephen Klein told me. “I figured a customer should get a pleasure from walking into my store—he should feel he’s getting a production as well as a pound of chocolate. He should feel good, like he’s in the air, like floating or dancing, like in a big Hollywood musical. So I had my first store designed in light-hearted Viennese style, joyful colors.”
By now Barton’s Bonbonniere, of which Mr. Klein is. president, has over fifty of those gay shops in the chartreuse and magenta that have become the firm’s trademark, shops that seem all show window, frivolously bedecked with tinsel and ribbon and scattered through the metropolis in a flirtatious assault on that sense of guilt which stands between the New Yorker and his insatiable hunger for sweets.
For all its gaiety of decor, however, there is one thing that Barton’s takes very seriously indeed—the precepts of Orthodox Judaism. Some bemused observers, impressed by the astonishing growth of the chain—an average of five new stores every year—think that Barton’s success may even indicate a changing attitude among its customers toward Judaism, at least when it comes properly packaged. Barton’s shops roll up their circus-striped awnings and close their doors promptly before sundown every Friday night, and do not reopen until after sundown on Saturday; all Jewish holidays, of course, are observed similarly. For the uninitiated, Barton’s posts announcements in its stores, and runs advertisements all through the year, giving its changing schedule of openings and closings.
“ At the beginning,” Mr. Klein says, “when our first few stores proved a success, we were tempted to open on Saturday. We were in midtown Manhattan, and the business on that day alone might have equaled all the business for the rest of the week. But instead of opening on Saturday, we decided to establish another store to make up what we were losing by not staying open. We kept facing this decision, and so we kept growing.”
Most of the stores are in midtown Manhattan, but there are several in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, one in Newark, New Jersey, and seven in Detroit, where one of Mr. Klein’s brothers settled after marriage (the Detroit stores get their candies in refrigerated trucks or by air express). Only a few of the stores are in specifically Jewish neighborhoods. The Barton’s executive offices, plant, mail-order department, and factory store occupy almost a full square block in downtown Brooklyn. The original building, an old and once begrimed warehouse used by a utilities company, was enlarged recently with an air-conditioned extension in the best modern style, with light-colored bricks outlining generous glass-bricked areas.
At one time the firm’s policy of closing on Saturdays created some difficulty about getting store locations where the rentals included a percentage of receipts; but Barton’s had already become so big and its policy of strict Sabbath observance so well known that the landlords eventually gave way—one of them observing that he wouldn’t want to be accused of tampering with religion for the sake of income. New York City’s Board of Transportation granted Barton’s the right to open a concession in the Grand Central subway arcade, a spot which might be expected to garner a good deal on a Saturday; and in the Paramount Building on Times Square, Barton’s is the only establishment closed on busy Friday nights and Saturdays. Barton’s is open on Sunday, however.
Barton’s does not force its Jewishness on customers. Patrons who have no occasion to go into a store on the Sabbath or on a Jewish holiday need never know of it. Announcements of the times of Friday night closing and Saturday night opening offer no explanation. The store sells chocolate Santa Clauses, Easter bunnies, Thanksgiving turkeys, and Continental and Parisian assortments, along with such specifically Jewish items as chocolate “matzoh” and parve candies that, unlike most chocolates, may be eaten with either dairy or meat meals by the Orthodox. (During Passover, the stores segregate kosher-for-Passover merchandise and assign special clerks who handle nothing else.) The youngster of Orthodox parents, or for that matter his grandfather, may during the Christmas season eat a chocolate Santa Claus without violating any dietary prescript: like all Barton’s candies, the Santa Clauses and Easter bunnies are strictly kosher. And if a customer doesn’t care to bring home to his child an “Aleph Bet” chocolate bar engraved with the Hebrew alphabet, he can have an “ABC” bar with the Roman letters.
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Klein is a short, balding man in his early forties, slimmer than one would expect after learning that he controls the taste of Barton’s candy by a continual sampling of batches off the assembly line. He has a ready if somewhat guarded smile, likes being described as “dynamic and stocky,” and speaks English with a soft Viennese accent. He is held in some awe by his associates, who tell respectful little anecdotes to illustrate his business acumen or his “human side” or his sense of humor. One typical story is of his rejecting a proposed advertisement with the comment, “Just as I want Barton’s candy to be thought of as the best, I want the ads to be the best; this layout is not the best.”
Klein himself is likely to discuss his career in the honorific terms of publicity releases. “I am a devoted and conscientious member of the Orthodox Jewish community,” he began a description of his extra-business life. He enjoys success stories. “I’ve made a careful study of the lives of self-made American business men,” he said. “What characterizes them? Foresight, drive, and hard work. There is no substitute for working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Now me, I’ve got all three qualities.” After reading the recent New Yorker profile of Richard Weil, until recently president of Macy’s, who left Yale before graduating, Klein remarked, “So I didn’t go to Yale not to graduate from college to be a success.”
His office, which opens off a shabby hallway, is severely modern. The outside wall is of opaque glass squares set in walnut frames. Beside the door is a mezuzeh (every door in the building has one). Inside, the walls are paneled in walnut, the floor is carpeted, the lighting is recessed fluorescent. Boxes of candy are scattered over various side tables. As I sat next to his huge desk, which had several repeatedly ringing telephones into which he spoke softly, sometimes in Yiddish, one or another head kept popping nervously through the door to address him with a mixture of familiarity and deference.
“When I came to this country in 1938,” Klein said to me, “I was surprised to see how candy was sold here, how little was sold, and what kind. First I saw that a better, tastier, a more different candy had to be made, then it had to be sold better.
“ A better candy was easy enough to make. I was a candy apprentice in Austria and by the time I came here, when I was thirty, I had also been a jobber, and I knew the candy tastes throughout Europe. I know what chocolates to blend, how to control taste, and so on. Also, I wanted to make each piece of candy attractive, so when you open a box, you don’t start looking around for the piece you like. All the pieces should look good—no chazerei. You should keep wanting to eat more and not get tired. That’s why it’s important a candy shouldn’t be too sweet or too bitter or anything that will tire your taste.”
Like many another Jewish immigrant before him, Klein began as a peddler. “I made candy at night in the kitchen of our apartment. During the day, I peddled it in the garment district, guaranteeing freshness and kashruth.”
When he went into mass production, Klein specialized in making geometrically shaped pieces of candy from molds on a mechanical assembly line, something of an innovation. The Barton’s plant today is probably the most highly mechanized of its kind in America. American candies are generally hand-dipped, that is, the center of nut, fruit, or caramel is immersed in melted chocolate, then taken out for the coating to dry. For this reason, relatively few American candies have liquid centers. One of Barton’s most striking novelties is a little pinch-bottle-shaped chocolate shell containing a liquid filling such as crême de cafe, eggnog, crime de cacao, and the like. The mold-made candies have sharply clean lines, can be made in various shapes, and have the advantage of being able to carry Barton’s trademark etched in the chocolate; one candy is molded in the shape of the trademark: two overlapping squares. Barton’s does produce a substantial quantity of hand-dipped chocolates, but the amount decreases from year to year.
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Candy connoisseurs have described Barton’s candies as on the sweet and smooth side; Barricini’s are somewhat tarter; and Loft’s and Fanny Farmer’s, the more traditionally “American” brands, are rather plainer. Differences are the results of blending; the ingredients of all these candies are more or less the same. Other manufacturers are now producing Continental-type chocolates in greater quantity, largely as a response to the success of Barton’s and other confectioners—Kopper’s, Gregor’s, Rosemarie de Paris, Airman and Kuhne, Perugina, et al.—brought here by the tides of politics and war during the past fifteen years. Among them, these confectioners have created a revolution in the tastes of New York’s candy consumer.
But Klein’s special success has been in the area of merchandising, long a rather unenterprising side of the American candy business. Americans are understood to eat more candy than is good for them, and the candy makers have therefore had to operate under a certain restraint in their advertising and publicity; lately the industry embarked on a campaign to sell “moderation” to its customers, much as liquor distillers preach “drinking like a gentleman.” Klein set out to bring the American appetite for sweets into the open, so to speak, transforming it from a rather shameful “self-indulgence” into a casual and slightly sophisticated gustatorial fling—to make it seem like the impulse to use perfume or drink exotic wine.
“ Klein has an uncanny American pitch,” one advertising expert commented. He has shown it again and again in everything from the design of single pieces of chocolate to the grand and gaudy “premieres” which usher in every new shop with free candy, cake, and ice cream, city officials in attendance^ and police to control the crowds. When the fiftieth store opened near Herald Square in February—designed in what might be called modern bizarre by a California architect and showing the mingled influences of Calder, Arp, and Mondrian—chorus girls rode around the neighboring streets in a stage coach with huge signs. Couples who proved they were married fifty years were given valentine boxes of candy and the rather confusing title “Golden Wedding Romeos” if they showed up on opening day. As a result of this kind of hoopla, the candy buyer in New York has lost his hang-dog look, and all over the city office workers keep tabs on Barton’s Friday closing hours so as not to arrive too late to pick up the weekend allotment of sweets.
Barton’s tries to cater to many special needs. The Times Square shop has a little box called “Theater Assortment” containing just enough candy to last through a play or a movie. Selections are made up for shipment to Korea, and coupons may be sent to Israel redeemable for the specified candies at Barton’s depots there. Candies are made for children that will appeal first to their parents: one notable success is the “lolly-cone,” a small solid cone of chocolate on a stick, designed to overcome the nervous parent’s fear of unidentifiable sweets. To take up the summer slack in candy production, Barton’s last year put out a Continental ice cream. It has even been offering its chocolates during the summer in insulated bags to keep them from dissolving on the way home. Barton’s also maintains a “Sweet of the Month Club,” which provides the incurable addict with a different assortment every month except July and August; there are 5,000 members so far, some of them as far away as Germany and Hawaii.
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Babton’s placards and ads are predominantly in the style of the modern French and Italian posters shown at the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions, and the radio advertising goes out daily over WQXR, the “highbrow” New York station that specializes in classical music. Although the newspaper advertising is dignified as a rule, the staid New York Times refused one ad on the ground that it was “blatant.” It was a three-quarter-page photograph of a startled and handsome young boss, his face smeared with lipstick; silhouetted against him were three smaller figures of girls at typewriters, and the caption read, “All I did was give them Barton’s candy.” Other newspapers published the ad.
Another important feature is Barton’s distinctive candy box. “We wanted our boxes to be recognized at once as our candy,” Klein explains. “They also had to give the same impression as the stores: high class and suggesting pleasure. So we developed the busy over-all candy design on a black background for most of the boxes. Now you can see at once, just from the box, that it’s Barton’s candy. Some day we want everybody to think of Barton’s when they think of candy, like they think of Ivory for soap.”
As for the name: “We chose the name Barton’s because it’s easy to remember. When we began business, President Roosevelt was campaigning against Martin, Barton, and Fish, and everybody knew the name Barton.” Another version has somebody at the firm opening the telephone book and going down a page until he found a two-syllable name easy to remember.
With its sophisticated “American” sense of the business value of “front,” Barton’s sometimes mixes a “European” reticence as to the specific details of its operation and personnel, something most American companies are learning to take for granted as public knowledge. The firm is a closed family corporation, with only a small portion of the stock owned by an outsider (Herbert Tenzer, a lawyer specializing in candy-industry problems, who met Klein in his peddling days and helped provide some of the initial financing for the business), and it was until recently quite difficult to get any estimates of its volume of sales. At a trade meeting of the four big candy retailers—Loft’s, Barricini’s, Barton’s, and Fanny Farmer’s—a Barton’s representative demurred about making a financial contribution equal with the others to a promotion project, on the ground that his firm was the youngest. When one of the other participants happily assented and suggested a contribution based on sales volume instead, Barton’s quickly dropped the matter. More recently, however, Barton’s has been willing to admit to “about $8,000,000” in annual volume.
Klein also strongly exhibits the “European” businessman’s need to keep a finger in every pie. His five younger brothers, the youngest in his twenties, fill various subordinate administrative positions, but when I asked about the division of responsibility in the firm, Klein replied quickly, “I’m in charge of everything,” in a flat tone more suggestive of secretiveness than bravado. He is closely involved in production, from testing samples to experimenting with new items. He calls executives any time, day or night (except, of course, on the Sabbath), with any stray idea he may suddenly get that falls within their province. He is his own advertising manager and has been described by advertising experts as a genius in that field. Often his rejection of an ad, while couched in non-technical terms, will hit upon some “classical” advertising shortcoming, such as the lack of a focal point or too little black. But while he will instantly approve a full-page ad for the Sunday issue of a newspaper (the most expensive kind), he is not above calling the advertising agency shortly before the deadline to insist that a coupon be included in the hope that direct mail orders from out-of-towners who read the metropolitan Sunday papers will help recoup the cost. Once as a result of this kind of last-minute inspiration, the coupon required forty cents’ postage for delivery of a fifty-nine-cent item; very few out-of-town readers availed themselves of the opportunity.
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Barton’s employs a great many Orthodox Jews, but exercises no restrictions in hiring. About fifty of the more than a thousand workers in the firm were helped by Klein to come to America. All of the ten-year employees, listed on a plaque in the factory lunchroom, happen to have Italian names. A visitor to the factory itself can see a young Jew with beard, earlocks, and yarmelke working on the assembly line alongside Italians, Negroes, and Puerto Ricans, some wearing crucifixes. There seems to be no dissatisfaction among Barton’s non-Orthodox workers with the firm’s Orthodox practices. Factory help is paid time and a half for Saturday night work, double time for Sunday; retail clerks work Saturday nights as part of their forty hours but get time and a half for Sunday. The firm has never had a strike.
The factory, which is reached unexpectedly and suddenly through doors carved in the office walls of the original building, occupies three floors and is broken up into areas of noise and quiet, machinery and crowds of girls. Monstrous revolving vats mixing hot chocolate or lighter-colored fillings, or spraying a glazed chocolate coating on nuts, are tended by one or two men. In the refrigerated dipping room, separated by glass walls, sit perhaps twenty middle-aged and elderly and somehow very grandmotherly women, their hands smeared with chocolate, inserting various centers into great pots of liquid chocolate, then quickly withdrawing them, skilfully twisting each piece so that the chocolate drips off to leave a level coating. On one of the rumbling assembly lines, which extends perhaps half a block, a square metal mold moves slowly along on rollers, first through a heating room, then under an array of little spigots that squirt chocolate into each of the small hollows, through a freezing room which hardens only the shell, leaving the inside to be poured off when the mold is turned upside down, under another series of spigots which squirt the fillings into the shells with military exactness, and finally under some more spigots for the final chocolate cover. The completed refrigerator-hardened candies are knocked out of the upside-down molds by a crew of women with big wooden sticks, an operation no amount of ingenuity has been able to replace with a machine process. On another assembly line, hand-dipped cherries are simulated by having the centers march slowly under a lazy chocolate shower which envelops them, then into a freezing room. The various candies are packaged by long lines of white-smocked young girls, standing elbow to elbow, who fill up the moving boxes in front of them from three tiers above the boxes. Rube Goldberg machines wrap paper around the boxes, tie strings, package bars, or enclose certain candies in tin foil. The workers are permitted to eat as much candy as they wish, and are under especially strict instructions to maintain personal cleanliness.
During the year, a rabbi, who is a family connection of the Kleins, journeys down regularly from Albany and checks to see, among other things, that ingredients for parve candies are not mixed in containers which at one time contained milk. He also ascertains that the suppliers, who have already been investigated as to their maintenance of kashruth, are the same and have not changed their practices, and that no non-kosher products have slipped into the plant. During the two-week Passover cleaning, when the factory is thoroughly scrubbed and scoured, half the workers being laid off, the Albany rabbi, or an assistant of his, is on twenty-four-hour-a-day supervisory duty.
The observance of kashruth sometimes creates serious manufacturing problems. Thus, until recently the firm was unable to make any marshmallow candies since the gelatin necessary was not certifiable as strictly kosher. But this industrial bottleneck has at last been broken. “Science,” a young lady at Barton’s announced recently, “has now produced a perfectly acceptable vegetable gelatin and we have gone into mass marshmallow production.”
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Some skeptical competitors have not been above suggesting that Klein’s Jewish Orthodoxy is a pose maintained for purposes of publicity; the cynics claim that his observance of the Sabbath and holidays, far from losing business, increases it. To this Klein replies: “If that is so, it is a fortunate accident. I am not sure it is so. We would close down regardless.” And the fact is that during its first four years, the firm closed on the Sabbath without publicizing the fact—perhaps even fearing that publicity on this point would harm its business. That was during the war, and Barton’s did nothing to dispel a supposition that the Saturday closing was the result of the sugar shortage.
During the month of Tishri in the Hebrew calendar, which falls around September or October, the great concentration of Jewish holidays has compelled Barton’s to stay closed for as many as ten days. And it has also had to forego whatever benefit it might derive from the institution of “Sweetest Day”—a press agent’s holiday designed to promote the “buying of gifts for one’s sweetie”—since Sweetest Day falls on a Saturday, even though Herbert Tenzer, the chairman of Barton’s board of directors, is chairman also of “Sweetest Day.” Barton’s advertisements have occasionally appeared in the Sunday press without necessary last-minute corrections because Klein will not answer the phone on the Sabbath.
The firm maintains what may be called a department for doing mitzvehs (“ good works”). “We fill all requests from charitable and community organizations,” the young lady in charge explained. “All we ask is that Barton’s be mentioned.” There are more than six hundred regular names on the list of beneficiaries. Barton’s also has what Klein calls an “office of immigration” which attends to various technical details for bringing over Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Some fifteen hundred persons have come to America through Klein’s aid; he himself once visited Europe under UNRRA auspices to help screen prospective immigrants. He is a staunch and generous supporter of Orthodox educational institutions and is a member of the Jewish Education Committee of New York and executive chairman of the Brooklyn Division of Yeshiva University; his oldest son attends the Manhattan Division. Young Israel honored Klein in March with a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria for his contribution to the promotion of Sabbath observance in America.
There is no clear-cut division between Klein’s business and philanthropic activities. Barton’s office walls are covered with plaques testifying to Klein’s aid to some Orthodox Jewish enterprise, and he often arranges business meetings at the offices of the Jewish organizations with which he is connected. His oldest daughter, a dark, very pretty girl, was recently graduated from the Central Yeshiva High School for Girls, an institution Mr. Klein helped found when she reached high school level. His two youngest children go to Yeshiva day schools.
To some of his associates, the whole Jewish aspect of the business is a standing puzzle. “I can’t make it out,” one of them mused. “I’m sure he must lose money with his Jewish projects. How can he make anything with all those leaflets, all those special packages, all that highly specialized promotion—how can he make anything? And I’m sure he throws away a fortune by closing on Saturdays and Jewish holidays; just stand in front of the Barricini’s on 34th Street, which is next door to a Barton’s, on a Saturday, and you’ll see what I mean. It must be some kind of unconscious drive, like wanting rabbis to think well of him.”
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No one has calculated exactly the financial loss or gain resulting from Barton’s Orthodoxy, but it has observably affected the candy retail trade. Barricini’s, for example, now opens on Sundays in some neighborhoods to compete with Barton’s and its advertising has lately been carrying the seal of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, something Barton’s does not have. Because Barricini’s has never closed on a Saturday, in those locations where it is open on Sunday it must pay for a seven-day labor week as against Barton’s six. (Klein has remarked that it is not enough merely to observe kashruth; the Sabbath also must be observed. And he has strongly hinted that no good Orthodox Jew would buy his candy from a firm that observes merely one and not the other.) In many neighborhoods, Saturday night has become the habitual time to stock up on candies after the Sabbath denial, and lines actually form in front of Barton’s waiting for the evening sun to go down and the doors to open.
At least one expert believes that Barton’s discovered a gold mine in the Jewish customers throughout America. “The competitors are just sitting around kicking themselves for having overlooked it,” he commented, “And now it may be too late for them to get into the act, since rabbis all over the country recommend Barton’s, practically from the pulpit. For many Jews, there is no other candy to buy.” It is perhaps not inconceivable that a “Jewish” taste, which had to satisfy itself until recently with such things as kosher delicatessen, has now found an additional source of satiety in Continental candies. Some hint of Klein’s own estimate of the sales value of his Jewish approach may be gleaned perhaps from the fact that he is wary of branching out where Jews do not form so large a proportion of the population as in New York.
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Though the “Jewish items” in Barton’s business are few in comparison with the “non-sectarian items,” their volume and variety are still greater than any competitor’s. Barton’s pioneered with chocolate “matzoh,” an item that is likely to become an American Jewish tradition at Passover, to judge from the widespread imitations. It also introduced chocolate-covered “matzoh balls” (not really intended for immersion in soup; the filling is of cocoanut or marzipan), chocolate-covered “hamantashen,” and, most recently, chocolate-covered “lotkes” for Chanukah, which are simply little discs with the usual candy fillings.
Officially, Barton’s denies all knowledge of what proportion of its customers are Jewish, and certainly would not like to think that anyone buys Barton’s chocolates merely because they are kosher, and not also because they are the best chocolates. But with a little prodding one can find out, for example, that one-third of the members of the Sweet of the Month Club have recognizably Jewish names, or that the store in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, once the stamping ground of the German-American Bund, has a “predominantly Gentile” clientele which does not fail, however, to consume a certain quota of chocolate “matzoh” or cocoanut “hamantashen”—whether out of intergroup cordiality or a mere indiscriminate sweet tooth, we need not venture to guess. On the other side of Central Park and in the Bronx, of course, the customers are “predominantly Jewish” and the consumption of Barton’s Jewish specialties does take on an undoubted element of actual conviction; there a box of Barton’s chocolates has become one of the habitual choices for the ritual gift picked up on the way to dinner at a friend’s home, or for one’s weekend suburban hostess, or for the weekly gathering of the mishpocha. A child may be supplied with a box to present to grandpa because it is kosher chocolate; grandpa, for his part, may bring a box to grandson because it is kosher chocolate. In business districts, or the downtown shopping and amusement districts, the “Jewish element” of the business may be of less direct importance, but gift-buying is of course a large factor there as elsewhere, and it is likely that the non-Jewish businessman sending out holiday gifts to his Jewish customers might choose Barton’s chocolates as a mark of special consideration or to play safe. Mail-order business, which might be assumed to come very largely from customers who want “Jewish” candy, accounts for about 10 per cent of Barton’s gross sales, and “Jewish specialties” constitute perhaps 15 per cent of the candy manufactured. But in any case, Barton’s annual business cycle is not markedly different from the normal cycle of the candy industry: there is a significant increase around Passover (partly attributable to Easter, of course), but Christmas sales lead all the rest, whether or not Christmas happens to fall close to Chanukah. Barton’s is not so naive as to assume that its Christmas customers are not Jewish; indeed, it has been suggested that these kosher chocolates provide a catch-all solution for the troubling problem of what the good Jew can give his friends, Jewish and non-Jewish, for Christmas.
One may speculate on other possible factors: in the post-Hitlerian era American Jews no longer shy away from “things Jewish,” and traditional foods, especially those associated with the holidays, have been a chief mode of Jewish identification. Also, as has been noted, increased substance and status has found expression, among the Orthodox, as often in elegance of cuisine and dining ritual as in the greater modishness of matters pertaining to the synagogue. In any case, if Barton’s Yiddishkeit has seemed an added factor of appeal for Jews of whatever variety, it has not, by all the signs, been any deterrent to the Gentile trade—perhaps the contrary.
One fact is, however, undeniable: for hosts of Barton’s Jewish customers, the chocolates are merely sugar coating for a new Jewish education. A regular mail-order customer from Montana complained by letter: “Your candy box arrived fine. But where is the leaflet you promised about Chanukah? I’m educating my youngsters (and myself) with your little pamphlets.” And no doubt many another fond Jewish parent finds himself looking with a new tolerance on his child’s demand for sweets, since with every morsel there comes a little portion of learning. (In this connection, one cannot resist offering Barton’s a suggestion that might turn out to have enormous sales potential: why not a Jewish bubble gum?—it is well known that that particular form of confection is selected mainly on the basis of the literature in which it is wrapped.)
In the holiday season of 1950, Barton’s enclosed its “Story of Chanukah” with the Chanukah candy boxes. The leaflet carries a comic-strip account of the history of the holiday and instructions for three games called “Barton’s Chanukah Word Puzzle,” “Barton’s Checkerboard Puzzle,” and “Barton’s Race Dredel.” Their most recent leaflet, a very handsome one, shows on one side a photograph of the scale model of the Holy Temple in New York’s Jewish Museum together with a fully itemized description of each detail, and a short, dignified account of the history of the temple. On the other side is imprinted an elaborate layout for a game similar to Monopoly that requires a dredel (a plastic dredel is included with certain Chanukah candy assortments); the contest is based on details of Jewish history, and the playing area shows a map of Israel and small insets of the Israeli flag, a menorah, and Barton’s trademark. The first leaflet, issued back in 1949, was the simplest, with “A Happy Chanukah” in pastel letters on the cover. The following excerpts from it give a fair sample of Barton’s educational enterprise:
Every Jewish boy and girl thrills to the heroic story of the Maccabees and the rededication of the Temple defiled by the ancient Syrians. We light the candles every night during the eight nights of Chanukah, recite the blessings, sing the songs, play chess, go to parties, and dance the Hora.
Many of us will spin the Dredel, a little 4-sided spin-top, carrying on each side the Hebrew letters Nun, Gimel, Hay or Shin. They are the first letters of the four words “Nes Gadol Hayah Sham,” which means “A great miracle happened there.” The miracle referred to was the miracle of the little pitcher of oil found in the Temple when the enemy’s soldiers left and which lasted for eight days instead of the expected one day. . . .
When Antiochus, the wicked, told the Jews that they could no longer study the Torah or meet in the Synagogue, the Jews used to gather in small groups and study the Torah by heart. . . .
The scholars and teachers would gather secretly in the woods. A woman would act as a lookout and would warn them when a soldier was approaching. These study groups always carried with them the 4-sided Dredel, a favorite game of chance among the soldiers of Antiochus. When the scholars were warned that the soldiers were coming, they took out the Dredel and began spinning it. . . . To this day we, too, spin the Dredel at Chanukah time.
It is interesting that in Israel today the Dredel no longer carries the letters Nun, Gimel, Hay, Shin, but Nun, Gimel, Hay, Pay which stands for “Nes Gadol Hayah Poh,” “A great miracle happened here.” Happily we can now say here, not there. HAPPY CHANUKAH TO ALL!
Other holidays are similarly treated. “The Story of Purim” is a folder with six cartoon panels and narrative captions; instructions for making cutout masks of Mordecai, Esther, Ahasuerus, and Haman; an illustrated glossary defining “megillat Esther,” “mishloach manot,” “Haman tashen,” “Grager,” and “Masquerades”; a Barton’s Purim Crossword Puzzle (sample question: “———was the Jewess who became Queen and saved the Jews from destruction”); and, finally, a full listing of all Barton’s stores (something every leaflet carries). Last Rosh Hashanah, Barton’s distributed paper flags bearing on one side the Israeli flag, and on the other, along with the advertising, vividly and authentically imagined miniature banners of the Twelve Tribes and brief descriptions of each under a scholarly introduction: “Drawing upon the colors of the stones of the high priest’s breastplate and the characterizations of the tribes in the blessings of Jacob (Gen. 49) and Moses (Deut. 33) and other allusions, the Midrash assigns these banners to each of the tribes.” Barton’s puts up a Passover assortment in a metal box, the cover of which is a reproduction of an old Seder plate from the Jewish Museum’s collection. Purim candy for children comes in a box resembling a grager (a noise-maker), and some collections include a musical grager with a flag of Israel on its sides that plays “Hatikvah” when swung around.
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The educational material is prepared under the supervision of Barton’s publicity department. Although some of the leaflets are clearly designed for children and others for adults, the texts are so entertainingly, informally, and unsentimentally prepared that adults who have to can learn from the cartoons, and children can easily follow the written matter. The matter is all got up with a maximum of American skill and a professional understanding of what attracts people. The paper is good, and the art work and typography imitate the sophisticated “quality” magazines. One generously made pamphlet devoted to “Tishri the month of holidays” has on its cover a series of lovely cut-outs showing the Zodiac and carrying Hebrew inscriptions; the inside has short, generalized and therefore vaguely poetic descriptions of October’s Jewish holidays; and the final effect is one of delicate exoticism.
One objection frequently raised against Barton’s leaflets is that they reduce Judaism largely to Jewish nationalism; but in this Barton’s is hardly alone. There are also, to be sure, frequent lapses of taste, as in the banal box with a fake window showing a sentimentalized family scene—this contains a Chanukah assortment. As a rule, however, the leaflets are on a high level, and their success has been enormous: Barton’s prints and distributes about a million leaflets a year, of which only about half go into boxes of candy.
Another Barton’s enterprise that seems to have only a remote connection with the business of selling candy is its contests. Periodically it gives prizes for creative writing in Yeshivahs and Jewish day schools. Once it awarded three scholarships in home economics at Hunter College to high school girls who demonstrated culinary achievements. Frequently, it sponsors contests for original Jewish recipes associated with its products; last Chanukah, for example, it challenged housewives to submit recipes for lotkees (potato, cheese, blueberry) that would be as original as Barton’s new chocolate ones. Judges have been newspaper food editors, college home economics teachers, and Jewish cook book writers. Prizes generally are savings bonds in the lower denominations and boxes of candy.
It is hardly surprising, of course, that the Orthodox Jewish community has embraced Mr. Klein and Barton’s. Leaders urge patronage, and the Orthodox press, both Yiddish and English, has published a stream of news stories, feature articles, and editorials on Barton’s, all playing variations on the theme: “See, it can be done in modern America.” During the debate in the Israeli parliament on the legally enforced observance of kashruth and the Sabbath, the Religious Bloc cited Barton’s as evidence to show how modern business can be conducted without violating ancient precepts. Barton’s example has even spread beyond the Jewish community, and engendered, apparently, at least one not altogether accurate notion about American Jews: a Catholic priest, in a Brooklyn neighborhood where Barton’s has a store, is understood to have urged his parishioners to observe their Sabbath as religiously as Jews, on the evidence of Barton’s, observe theirs.
Whether a Judaism of chocolate will ever replace a Judaism of lox and bagels—especially in view of the high index of diabetes among Jews—is too early to say. From personal experience, however, this writer can testify that the candy is good candy, and the chocolate hamantashen taste quite as good as the chocolate Easter bunnies.
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