Every Jewish business institution, someone has said, is merely the lengthened shadow of a woman—and why not, considering for how many generations Jews, at least those of East European origin, have lived under a matriarchal society. Sydney H. Kasper here illustrates this general truth with the particular example of his parents’ bakery in Chicago.

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When I saw Sam Stone in Chicago recently he asked me how my mother was, and when I told him she had died several months ago he stared at me for a moment and then said softly, “She was the sharpest businesswoman I ever met.”

Sam should know. I suppose that Ma gave him as hard a time as she did any salesman. In the days when our bakery was zooming along the heights of its greatest prosperity, it seemed as though every bakery commodity salesman in Chicago visited our store regularly. Most Jewish bakeries were risky enterprises; the proprietor was invariably a bread baker who had either ambition or an ambitious wife, who had scrimped together a few dollars so he could “go in for myself.” He labored eighteen hours a day, baking and selling, and with no business knowledge other than baking, went broke after a few months or a year, and then returned to working for some other baker. As soon as he accumulated a little capital he would begin casting around for another bakery and the cycle would recommence.

It seemed to me in those days that every Jewish baker in Chicago had employed and been employed by every other Jewish baker in the city. When we had the big bakery on 71st Street five of the six bakers had been my father’s employes at one time or another. Of the sixth, a young Polish boy, Ma would say, “Your Pa learned him out.”

Ma, who had been through the cycle several times, including one memorable bankruptcy in a small town (“in I’way State”), was in no mood to trifle with the opportunities presented by our lucky streak when we finally opened a real money-making bakery. Salesmen soon discovered that, although she had had only an elementary education in her native Poland, she had a most facile mind for gathering, winnowing, and retaining facts with amazing rapidity and selectivity.

When a spice salesman would quote her a price of three and a half cents for cinnamon, she would say, “But the wholesale market is only three cents.” Naturally, he would reply that the half-cent difference was his company’s profit, whereupon she would exclaim, “Profit—profit! You got a nerve to try to make a profit on me. That’s the trouble with you big companies, you suck the blood of little business people like me. For who am I working—for your company? I’m just a poor woman trying to raise three little children”—referring to my brother, thirty, my sister, twenty-three, and me, seventeen—“and my poor husband slaves night and day”—Father was probably relaxing at that moment in our new La Salle V-8—“and for what? So your company can make big profits from us. How much do you think we can get for a cinnamon coffee cake today? Do you think we charge gold for our cakes?”—Actually, of course, we were charging thirty cents for a cinnamon coffee cake when other bakers in the city were struggling to get twenty.—“Go back and tell your boss that we’re not working for him, and if he wants to sell us cinnamon for three cents, all right, but if he wants to profiteer on poor working people we don’t want to do business with him. Go!”—and this was always accompanied with a dramatic opening of the door.

Bewildered by this torrential flow of imprecations, threats, and irrelevancies, but always cognizant of our excellent credit rating, the salesman would invariably settle for three and a quarter.

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Sam Stone received especially rough treatment. Sam was short, round, young, eager. Sam’s mother had established a sturdy, steadily expanding egg noodle business, and Sam, desperate for distribution in a highly competitive market, knew that our bakery could be a high turnover outlet.

But Mother knew it, too. When Sam first approached her with his noodle proposition her reply was a blunt, cold, “No.”

“Why not?” Sam asked, crackling the cellophane package in his fingers. “Stone’s Noodle is the best on the market. You get a lot of traffic in here, and I’ll bet you could sell fifty dozen a week without any trouble.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” Ma repeated. “Ask the boss,” and she pointed to the shop, separated from the store by a partition, where my father could be found any time of the day between 4 A.M. and 2 P.M. “You want I should get into a fight with my husband? He doesn’t want me to take in noodles. He says this is a bakery, not a delicatessen. He says in the hell with noodles, ice cream, and candy. We don’t bother the delicatessens and we don’t want they should fight with us.”

“But look at all. the money you’ll make,” pleaded Sam. “No fuss, no wrapping, no selling even; we’ll put in a stand and the customers can help themselves. After all, what difference does it make how you make an honest profit?” This last he addressed to me; we had gone to high school together, but if Sam expected any sympathy from me he was wrong. I shrugged my shoulders. In business matters Ma was never wrong; I usually was.

“Listen to him!” Ma turned to me, and then back to Sam. “A profit!” she sneered. “How much can we make on a bag of noodles? And for this I have to give you space and a salesgirl and rent and light and heat and maybe we make a penny a bag.”

“A penny a bag!” Sam shouted. “We sell them to you for $1.92 a dozen and you sell ’em for twenty cents a bag and you call that a penny a bag profit!”

Ma laughed, but with no mirth.

“All right, so it’s four cents a bag. This you call a profit?”

Sam’s red face grew purple.

“That’s 25 per cent—how many businesses do you know that make 25 per cent on an item?”

“I don’t know what per cent is,” said Ma imperturbably. “Talk to my boy here about per cents, he went to college. All I know is four cents a bag is not enough. If I want to take a chance to make my husband mad and take in noodles I can handle Rogoff’s—he’ll give me eight cents a bag.”

“Rogoff’s!” Sam almost screamed. “Some noodle. How can you stand there and compare Rogoff’s Noodle with Stone’s Noodle? Rogoff’s Noodle is junk, dirt, fooey!”

“Don’t holler,” said Ma. “By me a noodle is a noodle. Stone, Shmone, Rogoff, Shmogoff, they’re all alike.” She herself never served any but Stone’s.

“All right, all right,” said Sam, “how much do you want off—twenty-four cents a dozen?”

“Ha!” Then, after waiting for the shaft to sink in, “Sixty cents.”

Sam staggered, his eyes rolling.

“Sixty cents! I can’t do it, I won’t—sixty cents! That’s what our cost is. How can you expect us to stay in business if we give everybody sixty cents off?”

“Don’t give it to everybody,” snapped Ma. “Give it to me because I’ll sell lots of noodles—maybe one hundred dozen a week.”

Sam finally gave in.

“All right, all right, sixty cents,” he said, mopping his forehead, and taking out his order pad. “How many do you want?”

“Twenty dozen medium and twenty dozen fine”—Sam was busily writing—”and eight dozen free.”

Plop went the order pad on the floor.

“Free? Free! What is this, a holdup?”

“Listen to me, young man,” said Ma sternly, “don’t call me a robber, a Capone. I’m an honest woman trying to make a living for her family, my three children, and I have to send my youngest boy to college and you call me a robber. Rogoff’s always gives me one dozen free for every two dozen I order. I’m not asking you for any favors.”

“But, how can you compare Rogoff’s—” and then Sam shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “All right, four free dozen.” But he didn’t mark his order pad until Ma said, “Six.” Six it was.

“Now,” said Sam breezily, “You’ll need a stand for the noodles. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll let you have our special ten-dollar display stand for five dollars.”

“Free,” said Ma.

“Wait a minute!” pleaded Sam. “Do you realize we have to pay for these stands? We have them made especially for us. We don’t turn them out like noodles, you know.”

“Free. Or take your noodles back.”

“Three-fifty?”

“Free.”

So we “took in” noodles. After the noodle stand had been installed and Sam was gone I said, “You gave Sam quite a beating.”

Ma smoothed a tiny wrinkle in her apron carefully and said, “In private you don’t need a mouth. I don’t want my neighbors should know what I am doing and I don’t want to know what they are doing. But in business you got to have a mouth what to talk. If you don’t the salesmen will give you sweet talk and rob you when you’re not looking. I got a mouth—but the trouble with you and your brother and your sister and your father is—you ain’t got a mouth what to talk.”

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It was true; no one but Ma had a mouth what to talk. We cringed inwardly at her methods, but accepted the fruits.

I remember the time the bakery on 51st Street was going under. Ma and Pa had sold our house on the West Side and bought the store on the South Side. Pa was going to try for the fourth or fifth time to “be for himself.”

Unfortunately the neighborhood they had selected was in transition, and within two years it changed from totally white to almost totally Negro. My father couldn’t bake the sweet-potato pies, soft white bread, and three-for-a-nickel sweet rolls the Negroes demanded, nor would the Negroes buy the caraway seed rye bread, egg twists, bagels, and streusel coffee cakes that had attracted our Jewish trade. A specialty business has to have a specialty clientele. One year after the transition was completed our fate was clear.

Pa and Ma discussed our gloomy prospects endlessly. Pa was all for selling out, with the sure knowledge that the purchase price would just about pay our debts, and going back to work for some other baker. Ma demurred.

“I don’t want to go back to living in private,” she said. “I want to be in business. Besides, what do you get working for someone else? You slave twelve, fourteen hours a day and the boss takes all the money.”

“So here I work twelve, fourteen hours a day, too, and what do I get?” said Pa wearily. “At least when you work for someone else you work, you get your pay regular, and you go home with a quiet mind, and he has the headaches.”

“Listen to me,” pleaded Ma. “It’s the worst thing—it’s a sin a person should let himself get discouraged. You want to be like Mr. Wolf—you know, his wife she always comes in for a yesterday’s rye bread it shouldn’t be cracked on the side? He went broke, too, and instead of starting up again he began selling for someone else. So what is with him? He can’t keep up the apartment building anymore. His wife cries plenty to me. Is that good?”

She paused for a moment while Pa shook his discouraged head. Then she began to speak eagerly but slowly, to be sure that her message registered.

“Look—every day the boy takes me for a ride on 71st Street, in South Shore. Every day I look at stores and I talk with people. Last week I saw a store that just fits us. It’s just next door to Kusnitsky’s butcher shop. Remember Kusnitsky, he used to have the best butcher shop on 51st Street, so when the neighborhood changed he moved out? So yesterday I had a long talk with Kusnitsky. He tells me there are plenty Jewish people in South Shore, and not a single Jewish bakery in the whole neighborhood!”

Pa lifted his head for a moment, then his eyes dulled again.

“What makes you think we could make a living there?”

“What makes me think—Kusnitsky says he was never so good off like he is now. There are lots of Jewish people, they pay the highest prices for kosher meat, and he has to have two helpers now. I’m telling you, Harry, we could make such a good living there, we could be independent—we could laugh from the world!”

Pa was still unconvinced.

“A new store costs money; you need ovens, flour, sugar, machinery, everything; we’ll be lucky to pay our bills from selling this store—where will you get the money?”

“I’ll get it somewhere,” said Ma. “We got lots of friends, relatives. . . . I might as well tell you, I already signed the lease on the store. Now I have to get the money.”

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So Ma and I started our expedition to get the money to outfit and open the new store. Our first stop that rainy November night was the home of Joe Levy, my father’s cousin, who was also in the bakery business.

“Rosie, what brings you out on a night like this?” was Joe’s first question as he opened the door. His second was, “Where’s Harry?”

“Joe,” said Ma, “one thing you must promise me—promise me before God you won’t tell Harry that I was here. He’ll kill me if he finds out I came to see you about this business.”

“What business?”

Ma described the evil days that had befallen our bakery, then described the new store she had rented.

“Now, Joe,” she said, “I want you should loan me one thousand dollars.”

“A thousand dollars!” exclaimed Joe. “Do you know how much money that is?”

“I don’t care how much money it is, you got to loan it to me. Joe, we’ll pay it back in a hurry—you’ll see—I know we can do good business in South Shore.”

“Rosie,” Joe looked perturbed, “don’t you know that tonight is Friday night—shabbos ? How do you come to dare to talk about money on shabbos?”

“That just goes to show how bad off we are.” Shabbos meant as little to Ma as she knew it meant to Joe. “Do you think I would dare to ask for money on shabbos if I was good off or if I wanted it for a fur coat? No, I’m asking you because we need it so bad. Joe, think—it’s for your own cousin, you were boys together in the old country, he trained you in to be a baker, his mother is your mother’s sister. You’ve got to do it.”

“I can’t—no—business has been very bad lately. All my money is tied up in buildings, I can’t lay my hands on cash.”

“Then borrow it.”

“Borrow it!” Now Joe was honestly aghast. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me to borrow money for you—and no collateral? Even if I wanted to borrow it, where would I get it?”

“That’s your business. I need it and you’re the last one I came to. Joe, no one else will loan us the money—the banks, the suppliers, the lenders—no one will loan us. We’re broke and Harry has no place to go, just to go back slaving for someone else. Joe, in God’s name, I beg you, give us the money.”

“For the last time, Rosie, no.”

“All right then,” Ma shoved her hands firmly into her muff, “then I’ll just sit here until you give me the money.” Joe turned to the window and began to study the wet streets. Suddenly her resolve melted and she began to cry softly.

“Go ahead, go ahead, throw me out—I’ll tell everybody how Joe Levy wouldn’t lend his own cousin, his flesh and blood, a stinking one thousand dollars and his wife comes in all this rain and mud and gets down on her knees and begs like a beggar and all the time her husband don’t know where she is from nothing, he’ll kill her if he finds out, and on shabbos yet, in the synagogue they tell you shabbos is the holiest day—”

“All right, enough! Don’t cry so much for me,” said Joe irritably, “so I’ll loan you five hundred dollars.”

“Nine.”

“Six.”

“What good is six hundred, what are we buying, poppy seed only? Seven-fifty.”

“All right.”

“You got to know how to cry,” said Ma as we got into the car. “That’s a hundred and fifty more than I expected to get from Joe. Now let’s see who we will beg from next. Maybe Bornstein the miser, he’ll charge me a good 20 per cent, but if we do business we can pay him back first Maybe Gollos, I’ll tell him we’ll buy his flour only, nobody else’s.”

By the end of the following week, Ma had collected her little pile, and we proceeded to liquidate the 51st Street store and open the 71st Street store. When Pa asked Ma where the money was coming from she would only reply, “We got—we got—don’t ask.” Bowed down with his many troubles, plus the problem of beginning his baking operations in the new store (we started with three bags of flour borrowed from another cousin in Gary), Pa asked no further.

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Business was good. So good, in fact, that within six months all of our debts had been discharged and Ma could laugh from the world. But she never did. Instead, the very success of the business stimulated her to greater and greater efforts. Now that she had a bakery she could be proud of, she hounded the salesgirls constantly: “Wash the showcases—clean the crumbs from the counter—wear a hairnet—don’t keep your hands in your pockets—the bagels you shouldn’t mix with the poppy seed rolls—take off the dirty apron.” She bore down on the male help, too: “Scrub the floors—put ammonia in the water, the windows should shine—wax the linoleum—wash your hands—why is the bread so soft like a sponge?”

Salesmen were met, joined in conflict, and vanquished determinedly, for as business expanded our credit rating increased in proportion and Ma’s terms stiffened accordingly. I often thought that Ma went far beyond necessity’s call.

One rainy afternoon, when trade was slow, and Ma and I took stock of our goods—”Look at all the lovely challehs and rolls and rye bread, we’ll be stuck with plenty”—I said, “Ma, why do you have to fight so much with everybody? It’s like a habit—you haggle with Shapiro when you buy my socks and shirts from him, you fight with Di Santos over the cleaning bills, you argue with Klein over fruit for the store. They have to make a living, too, you know.”

Ma rearranged the rye bread on the racks. She patted the last one into place, squeezed it a little to hear the crust crackle, and said, “Son, you’ll never be a businessman. You’re too soft. Why do you think I work so hard in this business? Why do you think Pa and I get up five o’clock in the morning and stay in the store until eleven at night? Don’t you think we like to go out sometimes, too?

“But do we ask for good times, for vacations, for card games? No. We work hard because we want our children should come to something. We want you should have a nice home so you won’t be ashamed from us to bring your friends home with you. That takes money. And money you don’t get by sleeping late in bed and being soft to people. When we had the bakery in I’way State and Pa ran everything he was soft to everybody and everybody stole from us. Pa worked and worked and worked and got so sick he had to go to the Mayo Brothers. Pa isn’t lazy, but his work was no good and you know why? Because it didn’t have no taste. It went for nothing and we went broke. Our worst enemies should have such troubles like we had in I’way State.

“At least here our work comes to something. Pa always was the best baker on rolls and bread in Chicago, but we never had a chance before. Look how we worked up ourselves. Now we have a good business and a good name. You can walk up and down 71st Street and everybody knows us and will give us credit. From this one little business—it’s like a cow and we all suck from one bag.

“And who made this business—Pa? Ay, ay, ay, a baker you can’t beat him, but without me he would still be just a baker getting played out working for someone else. He would come to nothing, I’m telling you. Who got the money to start the store? Who rented the store when everybody got discouraged and wanted to quit? Who knows how I didn’t sleep at night when I prayed to God we should be able to start up the new store? Who went to cousin Joe for money and who cried for Mr. Bornstein he should lend us money at 20 per cent? Who got Plotkin he should build the ovens and wait six months for his money? Nobody—only me.”

“All right!” I cried. “But that’s over now. Do you still have to argue with everybody, just to save a penny here and a penny there?”

Ma bent her head close to mine.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “Every good business has to have a mamzer in it—in this business, it’s me.”

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