The Matzo Ball Heiress Read Online Free PDF

anonymous dentures amused me for weeks. But by my first traffic light I come to the conclusion that I ought to stick to the historical angle.
    Ben Franklin didn’t invent electricity, but as every schoolkid knows he took a lot of credit for reshaping it. The same goes for Izzy Greenblotz regarding matzo, but even though his legend was passed down through our family, somehow Izzy’s name hasn’t made it to the history books. Until Izzy Greenblotz came into the picture, matzo was mostly made the traditional old way, by hand, as it had been since the days of Moses.
    When Izzy Greenblotz started making matzo he baked with the help of simple machinery that didn’t do much to speed things along. He’d apprenticed at a traditional matzo baker, and was a quick study: he was manager of the shift workers within a few years. A young man with no family to support, he squirreled away his earnings. In 1915 he was able to buy a Model T that he hooted and tooted all over the Lower East Side. The baker was upset that his manager was upstaging him. Izzy had a brainstorm on how to leave this irritant boss behind.
    He looked to America’s most famous industrialist for inspiration.
    If I could rewrite family history, I’d have my great-grandfather’s moneymaking “Eureka!,” or whatever the Yiddish equivalent is, come one day at the epicenter of Lower East Side intellectualism: the East Broadway Garden Cafeteria, where Emma Goldman and John Reed plotted cultural revolt and slurped borscht. (I saw the campus film board’s presentation of Warren Beatty’s four-hour Reds— with an audience of two—and read Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World during my brief obsession with Lyle Finkel, my twenty-one-year-old anarchist resident counselor my freshman year at Brown.) We’d all like to reinvent our roots; even Alex Haley did some tweaking.
    Alas, I know my great-grandfather was way too much of a brash entrepreneur to be involved in Goldman and Reed’s leftie lot. I know from family lore that even though he managed to save money, he was big on cards, especially pinochle. And he was also big on whores from Allen Street brothels. Imagine his kosher-factory inspiration hitting there. Wherever the breakthrough came, Izzy Greenblotz soon became the Henry Ford of Matzo.
    It’s ironic that the famously anti-Semite Ford was the role model for this aspiring immigrant Jew. According to a PBS American Masters special I helped research with Vondra, by 1916, the time the Greenblotz factory was up and running, Henry Ford and his $5 daily wages that allowed for worker satisfaction and rapid assembly of his automobiles were folklore. Henry Ford’s big year was 1913, the year he launched assembly-line production of the Model T. Izzy Greenblotz’s big year was 1916, the year he launched his factory. Izzy—gung ho about mass production after reading a newspaper article about Ford—enlisted an engineer and showed him drawings he had sketched that are now under glass at the factory. You have to wonder where the hell he found a backer. Or for that matter, a suitable engineer. In any case, the engineer he found to bring his ideas to fruition did a top-notch job, because those very same machines are still used in our factory. Outdated, but functional. Who the hell makes modernized matzo machines? With so few companies in the ring, there’s no money in it.
    Primitive matzo machinery had been around for almost fifty years when Izzy put his mark on it. They probably used it in the bakery where he apprenticed. So Izzy wasn’t de facto the inventor. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car either. But Izzy and Henry both perfected what others had done, and made their families rich in doing so.
     
    As my cab zigzags through the streets close to the factory, I eye the new Lower East Side with ambivalence. It’s sad if you’re the nostalgic type. Every month an old stalwart like Schapiro’s Wines closes and a new boutique or trendy bar opens. The old Kedem winery