Now in its 99th year, the Lower East Side appetizing store Russ & Daughters could be called a success story. It’s going strong decades after its once-numerous competitors sold their last schmaltz herring or quarter-pound of belly lox.
It’s also a story of failure, though — specifically, of Mark Russ Federman’s failure to do what was expected of the grandson of Jewish immigrant merchants. His grandfather may have built the business from a pushcart, and his parents, aunts and uncles may have slaved there, but he wasn’t supposed to do likewise.
“The whole point was that my generation didn’t have to do this,” he says. “They did this so we wouldn’t have to stand behind a counter 10 hours a day, six days a week.”
So when he left a successful law career to take over the shop 35 years ago, the word meshugena may have been muttered more than once. But the unorthodox career shift ensured the survival of the family business — the tale of which Federman, now 67, tells in a new book, “Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes From the House that Herring Built.”
That tale dates back to 1907, when Federman’s grandfather, Joel Russ, left the Polish town of Strzyzow. Like hordes of other Jewish immigrants, he wound up on the Lower East Side, where his first job was selling herring from a pushcart. He opened “J. Russ Cut Rate Appetizing” on Orchard Street in 1914.
Federman doesn’t romanticize the “dark, scary” Lower East Side of the tenement years, nor the family toil that went into keeping the business afloat in the decades that followed. Hours were long, the work was hard and everyone — Federman’s mother and two aunts (the “Daughters” in the store name), and later Federman and his sisters — pitched in.
The hard-nosed, Yiddish-haggling customers were tough, the suppliers tougher. When Federman joined his father on pre-dawn runs to Brooklyn’s smokehouses, his eyes were widened not only by the pungent smells and the “cavernous rooms with soot- and smoke-blackened walls,” but by a negotiating routine thick with curses, shouting and insults. To a 10-year-old, it sent a message, writes Federman: “Look, kid, every day is a battle.”
On top of the usual workaday headaches, the store’s fortunes were buffeted by various forces through the years: the Great Depression, the business-killing construction of the IND subway line, the exodus of the store’s Jewish customer base and the neighborhood’s decline in the 1970s.
By that time Joel Russ had retired and Federman’s parents were running the store. Their son was settling into a job as a litigator at a law firm.
It was in 1978, when his parents started talking retirement, that Federman moved from the courtroom back to the counter. He quickly found that arguing in court was an easy ride compared to the “constant petty annoyances, stresses and hardships of retail.” And it didn’t help that the neighborhood was at its nadir.
Customers often asked why he didn’t move, but Federman wanted to keep the store near its roots — and maybe more importantly, Joel Russ had bought the building years earlier, and its sale would have fetched bupkis.
Today, “everything’s changed,” says Federman, and he means not only the neighborhood, but the clientele, the computerization, the Internet orders and other things Grandpa Russ could never have imagined.
Speeding the change has been the arrival of the fourth generation of the family to work the store — Federman’s nephew Josh, a former engineer who came onboard in 2002, and his daughter Niki, a college grad who dabbled in several fields before signing on in 2006. In 2009, Federman sold the store to the pair and retired. (He also has a son, Noah, who is a doctor.)
Federman, who lives in Park Slope with his wife, says he wrote the book in part to maintain his connection to the store he loves, and also because he’d come to see the story of the iconic business as one worth telling.
He also hoped it might give him clarity on his long-ago decision to quit law for the family business — a goal that didn’t quite pan out.
“Guess what; I wrote the book, it took me three years — and I still don’t know,” he says.
Having said that, Federman — who hasn’t failed to notice the recent wave of disaffected professionals drawn to hands-on work, and food businesses in particular — goes on to offer a persuasive answer. It touches on the pleasures of doing things by hand, pride in a top-notch product, the “beautiful simplicity” of selling food and the rewards of connecting with satisfied customers.
“The law is an adversarial system, and for me there was something unsatisfying about that,” he says. “Here, we’re making people happy.”