Being a doctor — that’s nice. A lawyer? That’s OK, too.
But there was a time when the ultimate American Jewish aspiration was to live in a flat above the family deli so you could run downstairs and sell herring at 3 a.m. in a gastronomic emergency.
During the days of college quotas and overt anti-Semitism, the average Jew’s road to the American Dream was far more likely to involve shlepping a rag cart than reading a blood chart. Jackie Mason put it best: “My father lost everything in the Great Depression — a stockbroker fell on his pushcart.”
But the economic reality of today’s America has led to the near-extinction of the mom ‘n’ pop shop in favor of the chain store.
Statistics bear this out. In her book “The Hometown Advantage,” researcher Stacy Mitchell notes that the United States lost 5,000 independent hardware stores from the late 1980s to 2000; from 1990 to 2000 it lost more than 10,000 independent pharmacies; and more than 2,000 independent booksellers closed in the 1990s.
What’s more, the upward mobility of successive generations of American Jews has led young people to forego working 18-hour days in the family dry-cleaning business and instead opt for other jobs — any other jobs.
And yet the Bay Area is still home to a handful of anachronistic Jewish shopkeepers, many of them first-generation immigrants from the former Soviet Union, putting in long hours with less-than-lucrative compensation; day after day, week after week, year after year.
Faina Avrutin smiles, but it’s an effort. She’s been at the store since 6 a.m., it’s a sticky hot June day and several customers are lining up. She banters with them in a couple of languages, neither of which is English.
“This is very hard job,” she admits during a rare break in the action. “I don’t have life.”
Liza Avrutin knows that feeling — for 25 years it was hers, as was the store, Israel Strictly Kosher Market on San Francisco’s Geary Boulevard. She passed the family shop to Faina — the wife of her late husband’s nephew — when Liza’s husband, Isaac Avrutin, died three years ago. Virtually everyone in the store answers to the name Avrutin, with the exception of Faina’s elderly mother, Sima Lipkin, a diminutive woman with Little Orphan Annie hair who beseeches passers-by in Russian to sample stuffed red peppers, strudel or meat pastries of extraordinary size.
It’s not in every store that one can purchase goods from the great aunt of the cashier. But like every small Jewish shopkeeper, the Avrutins know they are a vulnerable and dying breed. And while the Orthodox couple shouting in Hebrew into respective cell phones while fanning a large (and broken-in) baby stroller are obviously the sort of customers the Avrutins can count on, most people, Jews and otherwise, can’t be relied upon to make the trip out to Geary and 21st for every last purchase.
A few years back, when Costco decided to get into the Passover matzah business, the mammoth retailer sold at bulk levels Israel’s Strictly Kosher could never hope to match, and the small-time deli’s unleavened business crumbled overnight.
However, the Ukranian-born Liza Avrutin, 77, is quick to differentiate her store from Costco, Safeway or any other establishment where employees wear aprons with nametags and drag goods over an electronic scanner.
“This is a really Jewish store. It is not like a business. It’s a family. Here, I’ll show you,” she says before purposefully striding up to a tall teenaged girl wearing a Che Guevara-style beret, exchanging a few words in Russian and sharing a hug.
“See?” spouts Avrutin. “I know her since she’s this tall.”
She quickly repeats much the same encounter with numerous people in the store, while the proprietor of a San Francisco kosher restaurant works his way in-between to make a meat order.
But despite the bonhomie displayed within the store, neither Faina nor Liza Avrutin figure they can run their business on good will alone. The out-the-door lines that used to be a regular Shabbat mainstay are a memory; young kosher-conscious consumers now bulk-order their goods from Los Angeles; and the older clientele are dying off. When asked how they will out-duel the apron- and scanner-equipped competition, the Avrutins reply simultaneously in English and Russian.
Here’s the English: “With God,” says Liza.
Adds Faina, after a beat, “Who knows?”
Even with three generations of family working under the same roof, the staff at Israel Strictly Kosher isn’t sure who’ll be running the store in the future — or even if there’ll be a store to run. And in this they share the worries of nearly every other small Jewish family shop j. found.
Itzhak Volansky would understand. He was born in Israel, moved to America at age 10 and never, never wanted to run his father’s bookstore. But then his father died and made him the reluctant heir.
That was 27 years ago, and Volansky still never wanted to run his father’s bookstore. He works hard and he’s kept the place afloat in a Tenderloin neighborhood where the preferred literature comes equipped with a centerfold pullout. But his satisfaction is tempered by the fact that this isn’t the career path he’d have blazed for himself.
And that in itself is something of an anachronism: Volansky’s discontent is the same so many elder Jewish brothers or only sons of yore felt after their dreams took second place to propping up the family business. In the past, however, Jewish families had young scions to foist the business off on, and Volansky and other shopkeepers j. contacted do not. He does have a 35-year-old stepson working as a security guard, but the discussion has not yet come up.
A large sandwich board in Volansky’s store reads, “A Dirty, Poorly Lit Place for Books,” a takeoff on the Ernest Hemingway short story and the nearby San Francisco bookstore “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books.” Volansky feels his depreciatory phrase is “truth in advertising,” but muses that the sign itself is now dirty and needs to be cleaned.
Just as the Avrutin family argues that Costco cannot provide kosher consumers with proper stuffed peppers, Volansky says he can get you the things Barnes & Noble can’t. That includes antiquated books ranging from the valuable to the virtually useless (“Windows 95 for Dummies”), the self-professed largest collection of National Geographic magazines in the West, any copy of Life magazine ever written, and even old TV Guides (“for people with old TVs,” he jokes).
He sold a 1985 phone book to scavenger hunters for 80 bucks. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola tiptoe around the Tenderloin transients to come into his place and scour the old magazines for style studies. And, yes, he sells old Playboys to the locals. A small shopkeeper’s got to earn a living!
Though Volansky isn’t about to go hugging his clientele like some of his fellow Jewish shopkeepers, the homeless men sleeping near his store are sometimes more discerning literary critics than one might presume. One man wandered in early on a June morning and asked for change; the register was locked but Volansky’s wife made it out of her own pocket.
The man offered his thanks and then noted that his preferred author is Robert Ludlum — “He’s got some raw books! He’s hella rawer than your boy Tom Clancy!”
Volansky apparently can count on moving a few Ludlum thrillers to the locals or tourists who obliviously wander into the neighborhood, but in order to make a go at staying in business, he’s embraced the force that has crushed countless independent booksellers: the Internet.
While online services such as Amazon.com keep readers in front of a computer screen and out of Volansky’s store, the next secondhand book you order might currently be sitting on a shelf at 48 Turk St.
Shouting emanates from beyond Volansky’s door and, for not nearly the first time during the interview, he shrugs his shoulders and notes, “It’s hard to get people into this neighborhood.”
Bob Jaffe has the best of both worlds. Like so many small shopkeepers he can (and must) put in 17-hour days — but he can also take off two hours and go to his son’s Little League game. What’s not to like?
Firing up the Volkswagen bus-sized ovens at Oakland’s Grand Bakery at 5 a.m. — three hours after turning them off — can be grueling. But Jaffe is a former traveling salesman, so at least he’s sleeping in the same bed as his wife and home with his children after marathon days, instead of working similar hours and flopping in a Reno motel.
Many in the observant East Bay community describe Jaffe’s bakery as a local hub. And while he didn’t get into the business for altruistic reasons, it’s one of the things that keeps him there.
“People enjoy the challah,” he says. “It feels good when people say ‘thank you’ every Shabbos.”
Across the Bay, Larry Weber can’t sell you a challah, but can set you up with a nice carabiner. Along with his two brothers, he runs the Redwood Trading Post, a camping and outdoor store founded by his parents, Joseph and Tessie. His Austrian-born father recently retired, but Berlin-born Tessie still comes in once a week to help with the books.
Internet purchases have taken a bite out of the business, but Weber seems to take the same pleasure out of dealing with tent-seeking customers that Jaffee does handing a kid a black-and-white cookie. It’s that kind of person-to-person interaction that keeps small shops going, whether selling books or borekas.
Weber quite literally grew up in the store his parents founded 53 years ago in the same Redwood City location where it stands today. As a youngster he remembers at least four other Jewish-owned surplus and camping stores in Redwood City alone. “The wholesalers and re-salers were all Jewish,” he says. “The sales reps who called on us, most of them were Jewish. It’s in the blood.”
But only the Webers’ shop remains.
Part of that is economics; many customers are off to REI, North Face or are surfing the Net. And if the general demise of the small shopkeeper isn’t enough, not every Jewish family had three willing sons to snatch the reins like Joseph and Tessie did.
Even though the Webers enjoy their work, they face the same dilemma confronting every other shopkeeper j. contacted, the same one thousands of other shopkeepers faced in previous generations: When they get old, who’s going to watch the store?
The Weber brothers have grown children, with their own careers. Volansky has his aforementioned problems. The younger generation of Avrutins are probably hoping to avoid a career path that calls for 90-hour weeks (and still may not be financially viable), and Jaffe’s 10-year-old son has ambitiously announced his intention to matriculate to Stanford University.
Benjamin Kaliko’s children don’t seem motivated to take over his family business, either. And he could not care less.
“I see so many unhappy faces. Lawyers, engineers who don’t want to be there. And I know, because I cut their hair,” says Kaliko, the owner of A Businessman’s Haircut in San Francisco’s Montgomery BART station.
“I have a very negative view of people who try to make their kids do more than they accomplished themselves. You can abuse a kid with education,” he says between haircutting appointments.
“You end up in an environment where you’re not the best in the crowd. It’s like abuse. You’re surrounded by people who are more gifted.”
Kaliko’s parents never pushed him one way or the other, and he found a job in which he could thrive — despite his career almost ending before it started. As a young Red Army barber, he absolutely butchered an officer’s haircut to the point where the officer’s wife threatened to throw her husband out of the house.
Like all the shopkeepers in this story, Kaliko has worked like a dog over the years. However, unlike the others, he says he doesn’t worry about losing business to chains or handing off the shop to his heirs. But perhaps after KGB men muscle their way into your Ukraine barbershop and ask you to inform on your clients — and you say no — everyday travails don’t seem so worrisome.
Within seven months of that KGB visit, Kaliko was on a plane to San Francisco. A Jewish friend who’d emigrated three months earlier picked him up in a battered old Cadillac.
“He had been here three months and it was a Cadillac! It was old, but it was a Cadillac!”
Driving to Oakland on the Bay Bridge, the friend told him to look back at downtown San Francisco and noted, “That is where the most money is made.”
Well, thought Kaliko, then that’s where I’m going to open my shop. It was the early 1980s and the only words of English he knew how to speak cannot be reprinted here.
Coming from the Soviet Union, Kaliko had no idea how to relate to advertising. He didn’t even know to look in the newspaper for a job, and instead walked from door to door of the most impressive-looking Financial District buildings. This was the early ’80s, however, and most of the men sitting in the barbershop chairs were idle barbers, stung by a recession.
When one barber asked Kaliko to prove his skill, the Ukranian Jew used his 50 words of non-profane English he’d picked up to convince a makeshift hair model to walk in off the street. (“I didn’t even know what the word ‘free’ meant. I had to say ‘no money.'”)
Handing out coupons for half-off for a first-time customer, Kaliko built up a clientele. Many of his clients have been visiting him for more than 20 years.
Kaliko, incidentally, isn’t the only Jewish hairdresser to get ahead via innovative promotions.
Mara Burmenko, the 29-year-old Ukranian-born proprietor of Mara’s Salon in San Francisco, has hosted art shows and even DJ concerts at her Gough Street Salon. And though her business caters to a vastly different clientele than Kaliko’s, both hairdressers estimate 30 percent or more of their customers are Jewish.
Though he’s been in business decades longer than Burmenko, Kaliko still exudes the zeal of a much younger man: “I am quite fortunate. I thought only movie stars and singers enjoyed going to work.”
Kaliko will retire whenever he feels like it, but not everyone gets that option. The fate of Mikhail “Misha” Treistman illustrates this all too well.
When bandits hit Tel Aviv Market in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district in late 2003, they hadn’t counted on Treistman. The five robbers used an intricate system and communicated to each other with hand signals during the heist. One bought a cheap item with a large bill, giving a partner a clear glimpse of where the counterman stored the large bills. Then an accomplice left inadequate change on the counter and left the store. When the proprietor chased him down, another robber grabbed the cash from the register.
It was a scheme designed for small stores like Tel Aviv: A 7-11 employee probably wouldn’t leap over the counter regarding a matter of 10 bucks, but at a mom ‘n’ pop store that’s not company money, but family money.
The plan almost worked to perfection: Counterman Sam Treistman, Mikhail’s son, did indeed chase the bandit out of the store. But when another robber grabbed the money, then-68-year-old Mikhail stepped in. After being pushed or tripping, the old man cracked his head on the ground. Treistman was discharged from the hospital, but undetected cranial bleeding soon put him into a coma. He hovered between life and death for nearly a month and he woke up in a delusional state.
Though Treistman largely recovered, the part of his brain he utilized to quickly add up figures and work a cash register was irreparably damaged. Treistman’s wife and daughter have their own careers outside the store, and Sam Treistman’s wife was transferred to Arizona, and his family relocated. So the old man tried to go back to working the 10-hour days that put his kids through school.
Mikhail Treistman survived the Holocaust and worked hard his whole life. But he had to admit he couldn’t do it anymore. After decades in the kosher meat and convenience store business, the family threw in the towel and sold to two 30-something Israeli brothers.
Tears flow down Caroline Katz’s face when she thinks about the wrenching realization her father came to when it became apparent he could no longer partake in his life’s profession.
Now retired, he is financially comfortable after years on the job and a wife who still works. He’s a popular man at Orthodox Adath Israel. But, stripped of the ability to live the way he’d choose, life feels that much emptier.
“Just driving by, I think, ‘That was my father’s store.’ I grew up in there,” says Katz, before emotions overcome her.
“That was the hardest part. But we had to let go. Like everything, we had to just let it go.”