Famous Nathan (3 page)

The farmers of Radymno had the reputation of raising the finest beef cattle in Galicia. “They fed their cows with cooked food, nothing raw,” Nathan explained. “And that was the best meat in the whole country.” The beef was, of course, slaughtered in accordance with Jewish dietary strictures.

Young Nathan asked what he could get for the money he had saved. The butcher put the precious Radymno beef in wrapping paper, and the prodigal son headed home to Narol. To travel quickly, in order that the meat wouldn't spoil, he rode rather than walked. “I paid, like a taxi driver, but instead of taxi, a horse and wagon,” he recalled.

Rose Handwerker, Nathan's mother, kept a strict kosher home. “Everything was already kosher, kosher made. They used to heat up bricks, make them hot, burning hot, and with pliers, you take them and the table should be made kosher by that.” When Nathan arrived into the bosom of family with his package of kosher meat, he knew that he could place his prize on the household table with perfect assurance.

“So I see the table is clean, so I take the sack, take it up, and take it out and put it on the table, and say to my mother, ‘Now you give the children to eat, here.'” Rose was overjoyed to see him, and Nathan's little brothers and sisters were happy to see the miracle of beef appearing before them.

Beyond the heartwarming homecoming, there is a hint here of the future of Nathan Handwerker. Even as a thirteen-year-old boy, he was aware of the importance of quality. He didn't go to any butcher; he went to what he knew was the best butcher in town. He didn't bring his family run-of-the-mill meat; he brought them Radymno beef. The boy in the story would grow up to be a man who was fanatical about ensuring the quality of everything he sold.

There is other prescient evidence, other inklings that fate was shadowing Nathan's path forward. Poland was (and still is) the land of the sausage. The Handwerkers were too poor to include a lot of meat in their diet, and much of the local product was pork based and thus
trayf
. Though the family cupboard might have been a bit bare, nevertheless, the area in which the Handwerkers lived had rich and varied culinary traditions. The ethnic foodways were intermingled to the degree that even today, dietary historians can't be certain whether classic chicken soup originated as a Jewish dish or a Polish one.

Kraków spread its influence throughout the region and, eventually, throughout the world. A famous dish associated with the city, duck cooked with mushrooms and buckwheat groats, would have been beyond the family budget of a poor shtetl shoemaker. But during his time at the Radymno bakery, Nathan must have turned out baked items also closely linked to Kraków, including jam-filled rolls called
buchts
and a yeasted wheat creation very similar to a bagel but referred to in the area as a “pretzel.” In fact, Kraków and thus Galicia has been commonly credited with the origin of the bagel, known originally as the
bajgiel
and traditionally given to women during childbirth.

And sausage? “The intestine is endless” went the old Polish saying, and Poles used pig, sheep, and cow intestines as casings for a dizzying number of kielbasas and wursts, stuffed with smoked, cured, chopped, fermented, minced, or ground meats from all manner of animal and plant product, spiced with all manner of ingredients, including salt, garlic, pepper, milk, caraway, nutmeg, coriander, allspice, marjoram, cumin, juniper, sugar, lemon, bacon, and lard.

Each locality had its specialty. Kraków was associated with a wonderful dry sausage,
Krakowska sucha,
hot smoked, dense, and shot through with such spices as coriander, allspice, cumin, and garlic. “Kielbasa” was merely the Polish word for sausage, and the version most closely linked with Galicia is
Kielbasa lisiecka
. Coarsely ground from lean, heavily salted pork, the cured meat was spiced with pepper and garlic. In a time-honored method, butchers cased the mixture and had the links looped on sticks to be hot smoked over hardwood fires.

The primary ingredient of such Galician sausages was pork, and thus they would represent double negatives for a poor Jewish table like that of the Handwerker family—not kosher in the first place and too expensive in the second. Probably the first sausage that Nathan Handwerker ever ate was a
kishke,
which was not really meat based at all. A cow intestine (
kishke
is the Yiddish word for “guts” or “innards”) was stuffed with various mixtures of matzo, flour, and chicken fat. The result was a kind of spiced, tube-shaped matzo ball in a meat casing, often served with gravy.

But there was a local Polish meat sausage that might have stirred an early awakening in the taste buds of the young son of Galicia. The
parówka
was a fat, linked wurst popular throughout Poland. It could be made with pork, but there were kosher, beef-only
parówka,
too. Chicken was often used as a filler. The meat was mildly spiced and finely ground. The
parówka
suspiciously resembles the stubby, all-beef frankfurter that a certain Polish immigrant would later serve up to the Coney Island masses.

Whether or not the
parówka
might be the holy grail first wurst of the future king of the hot dog, it was definitely a commonplace sausage in the Galicia of Nathan Handwerker's youth. It might have provided the boy with a glimpse of the future.

Nathan never returned to the bakery in Radymno. He stayed with his family. Jacob continued his desperate journeys through the countryside, searching for work. The relationship between the father and his third-oldest son took on a chilly, slightly competitive turn. Jacob ridiculed Nathan when he returned from a foray into the outside world having made no money. And in an incident Nathan remembered for his whole life, Jacob promised him new trousers for Passover to replace his single much-mended pair and then failed to produce.

But beyond poverty, there was another age-old enemy stalking Galicia at that time, a malicious presence that would grow until it engulfed the whole of Europe in a nightmare of blood and fire.

The young and vulnerable Nathan Handwerker would make a perfect victim for the beast.

 

2

To America

“Angels covered me up.” The Handwerker family in Galicia.

IN THE YEARS
leading up to World War I, anyone who could not foresee the looming conflict was a fool. Anyone who was not a fool looked for ways to get out. Nathan Handwerker sought to escape. He well remembered the soldiers he had seen across the pasture fence as a young boy.

“I didn't want to get killed,” he recalled later. “I saw a war was coming. The emperor came to Galicia.”

Franz Joseph arrived in the region for the shield-clashing military exercises that the Austrian army held every year. There were other telltale signs. When Austria constructed a railroad that year, Nathan noticed that it did not lead to the market town of Jarosław but directly to the huge military installations at Prysmzl.

All the preparations for war at least temporarily buoyed the Handwerker finances. The soldiers of the underfunded Austrian army had to buy food to augment their meager rations. Rose Handwerker had by that time taken over much of the responsibility for making the family living.

“She was a businesswoman, selling vegetables,” Nathan recalled of his mother. “She rented a cellar, a deep cellar without lights, a cellar to go down two floors deep, because the deeper the cellar is, you didn't have to heat it up for the winter.”

It turned out that Rose had to go farther and bargain harder to purchase her produce. “The local merchants gave her trouble, so she went to the outskirts. The farmers liked her better there. She spoiled them. She gave them more money in order to be able to buy from them. One farmer had a whole wagon of cabbage. One farmer had carrots. A farmer had radish, horseradish. Potatoes. Chickens. Chickens were tied up at the feet, so she put them in boxes, stacked them, sold them in town. People come up from the army. Everybody's coming to pick up food.”

For five years, from the time he left the bakery in Radymno to when he departed for America, Nathan's job was to assist his mother in her produce business. Recalling the period a half century later, he retained sharp memories of those repeated trips down into the rented root cellar.

“Whatever was left over from the day's selling, I had to carry it into the basement overnight. So I used to carry it down in the dark. If I had a sack of potatoes, it would be hard for me to pick it up again, so I had to go down slow, two floors deep and no light.”

Nathan managed to keep his wits about him and not act simply as a beast of burden. In July 1906, he noticed that the markets of Jarosław were entirely sold out of potatoes.

“Let me go to Narol,” he asked his parents. He knew of a potato farm in his home village. He used to work in the fields there as a child. The wealthy landowner would be sure to have a ready supply.

“I went to this rich farmer—they call him ‘the Baron,'” Nathan recalled. “The richest man in the whole neighborhood—not only in the town but around the town, too. I go in, and I ask him in Polish, ‘So have you got any potatoes?' He took me to a big warehouse; it went up to the ceiling, and the potatoes it filled up.”

Nathan managed to buy 180 pounds of spuds at a penny a pound. He took them back to Jarosław by horse and wagon and made a good profit.

“I was fourteen years old, and this was my first deal that I made for my family. We got about five groschen for a bag of potatoes, five times what I paid. My father and mother made a lot of money.”

The incident helped teach the young boy the unchallengeable law of supply and demand. It also demonstrated how the sale of an inexpensive, humble food can yield a small fortune. Although he never received a formal education, Nathan was a quick study. Always watching and listening, he retained the lessons from his years working as a child, ideas and practices he would later bring to his business. From an early age, he realized the value of an experienced worker and that a premium should be placed on reliable business partners.

Though he did not get along well with his father, Nathan took many of his adult values from examples set by his mother. He followed her idea that maintaining relations with loyal suppliers was good business. Rose also taught her son the virtue of looking out for the wider community. In the case of the great Jarosław potato bonanza, his mother made it a policy to sell only a single bag per customer. “My mother says, ‘No, give everybody a chance to get some.'”

*   *   *

As Nathan came of age, remaining in Galicia meant dodging
chapper
gangs of forcible recruiters and essentially playing chicken with history. Mounting anti-Semitism plagued the whole area. “The Poles were the biggest Jew haters,” Nathan recalled. In the market, a Polish woman once shouted at him, “Jew, go to Palestine!”

Against such bigotry, there were only three bulwarks: religion, the tightly knit Jewish community, and the refuge of family. But faith and family, which had helped preserve shtetl societies for hundreds of years, failed to protect them now. Multiple threats from a collapsed economy, impending war, and ethnic hatreds worked to tear Galicia apart and took their toll on the Handwerkers, as well.

The formerly close-knit family separated. Israel, Nathan's oldest brother, departed for a new life in America. Other Handwerker brothers made exploratory forays into the nearby towns of Lublin and Sandomierz, always working at their father's trade of shoemaking. Nathan proved himself the thrifty one. “I didn't spend too much. When I went out to eat, I used to eat a bowl of soup and one piece of bread. A slice of bread was for three cents. I could eat more, but I wanted to save money.”

Joseph Handwerker, Nathan's older brother and the second oldest sibling, traveled to Germany, the first step in his journey to America. He sent word asking his little brother to come join him. Nathan needed help to decipher the message. “I get a postal card, but I can't read, I can't write. And I couldn't add two and two. I packed up, but I didn't have enough to pay for a railroad ticket to go to Frankfurt.”

His sister Anna loaned him going-away money. “I kissed her good-bye and said, ‘Don't tell nobody.' I knew she wouldn't.”

Nathan told his father he was departing for America, intentionally breaking the news in the synagogue, where he knew Jacob could not cause an argument. He said good-bye with a simple phrase, “
Ich gay avek
” (I'm leaving).

He carried what few clothes he had in a burlap onion bag, because a valise or suitcase would attract the suspicions of the police. He was an eighteen-year-old male, perfect cannon fodder. Nathan made his journey in constant fear of the authorities. At any step along the way, if he had been questioned by the police, he would have been shipped back to Austria and into the army. That would be tantamount to a death sentence, but by some miracle, it never happened.