Eulogy for a Friend
by David Thompson (nom de plume)
I always have considered the last day of January to be one of the most dismal days of
the year. Today is no exception. I have left my house in a cold rain to attend the
funeral of a man whom I have not seen in many years, a man with whom I have no
special kinship. Nevertheless, here I stand at the door of the Temple Beth Emanuel,
my breath freezing on the pane of glass, debating whether I should go in or leave.
Though the memorial service has already begun, I am drawn inside to join the
procession.
Inside, the enormity of the tabernacle adds to the gloom of the occasion. It seems
almost as cold inside as outside. The half dozen mourners are clustered at the front
of the auditorium. I pass the seemingly endless rows of empty pews and seat myself
a dozen rows back so as not to disturb the service. As the rabbi goes into some
Yiddish rituals, I do not feel the grief being of the other mourners. Rather,
melancholia overcomes me; a pensive reflectiveness invades my entire being. It
seems unfortunate to me that the death of this man occurred before I realized the
significance of a statement he made to me when I was his employee so many years
ago.
I have known him from the days of my teenage youth when I worked in his bakery.
He was, at that time, a young man in his mid-twenties that had been sent to Texas by
his father to open a kosher bakery. Upon meeting him I knew at once from his accent
that he had migrated here from the East. Physical striking, he was an American Jew
in the New York tradition.
Among his very conspicuous features was his jet black hair, which was of the thickest
texture. Its perfect styling served as a frame for his thin but stern face. His face
appeared vigorous, but had deep lines running vertically and horizontally. The skin
remained tight like worn leather, tanned by horrendous heating. His beetling
forehead cast shadows over his cold, dark eyes, making them appear as if they were
set abnormally deep into his face. His chiseled nose jutted from his face, seeming as
out of place as an alpine peak on the Texas coastal plains. His solemn, somber mouth
belched a constant stream of cigarette smoke and, when he spoke, the words
managed to escape his lips without sacrificing a single precious moment of tobacco
pleasure. He was of medium height and a rather stocky build. His muscular arms
were scarred from the numerous burns he had suffered from accidental contact with
oven shelves. His hands were cracked and dry and occasionally gushed blood from
their daily regime of working the leaven dough and boiling and baking bagels in
intense heat. Supporting his torso, a rather spindly pair of legs transported him with
a peculiar methodical gait. To me, his name, Jerome Horenkaufer, typified all of his
odd characteristics.
It quickly became evident to me that Jerome was fiercely proud of his Jewish
heritage. It was on January 31, 1975 that I went for a job interview at Brooklyn Bagels
and Bialeys. The date had special significance for Jerome. It had something to do
with an event that had occurred some thirty-five years earlier in a Jewish ghetto in
Germany – a ghetto that his father’s family had been forced into by the Nazis. Jerome
seemed determined to impress upon me the significance of this particular date. I
never asked him, however, even years later, to elaborate on the events that
transpired in that ghetto.
Amid our discussions of a work schedule and rate of pay, he intermittently protested
with frenzied movements and mannerisms the mistreatment of the Jews. He swore
the “never again” vow that came to epitomize, at least in my mind, American Jews in
general and Jerome Horenkaufer in particular. Eventually, he conceded that I was
hired and took me on a tour of the bakery. Though he had worked in his father’s
bakeries in Philadelphia since his childhood, he had built this business himself out of
his own money, his own sweat, and his own aspirations. With exuberant pride, he
explained the purpose of each piece of equipment in producing a finished bagel.
The machinery itself was not particularly old, but the lines and cracks in the cold
metallic surfaces indicated wear from intensive use. He showed me the baking area,
which consisted of the oven and a large, boiling cauldron of murky water, corn meal,
and bagel starch he almost affectionately referred to as “the kettle.” He explained
that it necessary to boil bagels before baking them in order to give them a glossy
finish. Some bagel bakeries, he claimed, did not employ this process, but he could
never consider selling a Brooklyn Bagel without doing so!
On the other side of the kettle was the butcher-block table where over the years of
my employment I watched Jerome toil daily forming bagel shapes, one at a time,
from mounds of dough weighing several hundred pounds. I frequently marveled at
his skill, hypnotized by his rhythmic, metered movements. The process began with
Jerome lighting a cigarette and placing it tightly between his lips, freeing his hands
to work the dough. He would next slice a 4-foot-long rope from the dough mound,
and then roll the rope outward beneath his palms, forcing his shoulders away from
the direction of his palm movement, then inward toward his chest, his shoulders
heaving back into his work. His upper body movement seemed cartoonish, like a
giant pair of scissors as he rocked backward and then forward, alternating his body’s
weight on heel and toe. The cigarette dangling from his lips would jostle up and
down in response to the motion of his body. The rolling process was repeated exactly
five times. He would then wrap the end of the rope around the palm of his right hand,
tear that portion from the rest of the rope, press the ends together with the heel of his
palm, and give it one final roll forward to form a perfect bagel shape. Five more rolls
of the rope would follow, then another tear, press, roll, and another bagel shape. He
would continue in this manner until the entire 4-foot dough rope had been
methodically reduced to its final bagel. Then, he would immediately proceed to cut
away a new rope and roll it into more bagels. This regimen continued until the
several hundred pounds of dough had been transformed into a thousand or so
individual bagel shapes, interrupted only occasionally for Jerome to free his hands so
that he could light up another cigarette when the previous one had been ultimately
consumed.
The bakery did own a machine that formed the bagel shapes automatically, but
Jerome choose to spend several hours a day making bagels by hand because, as he
frequently reminded me, the machine bagels were simply inferior. Frankly, I must
admit the bagels rolled on Jerome’s table, by Jerome’s hand, were without exception
perfectly symmetrical geometric circles. Though the machine bagels rarely
achieved that perfection, the sheer volume of his business precluded him from
making all the bagels by hand. His business grew so rapidly that, a year or so after I
began working for him, Jerome reluctantly conceded that he would have to permit
the machine to form the bagel shapes, except for the cinnamon raisin variety, the
production of which insisted he would never relinquish to the machine.
Behind the table was the most ominous machine I had ever seen. It was used to mix
the bagel dough and had the capacity to turn six hundred pounds of dough at one
time. A wobbly stepladder led to the opening at the top where the operator had to
hang over the lip of the mixer to properly oversee the mixing. The arms of the
machine were so powerful, Jerome cautioned, that the operator had to be very
careful while the machine was in operation. It could easily crush every bone in a
man’s body should he accidentally lose his footing on the stepladder and fall into the
mixer. I might have thought such a possibility to be unimaginable until he told me
the story of an unfortunate employee in one of his father’s bakeries in Philly. The
unfortunate buffoon had lost his left arm in a mixer when he became distracted from
his work during heated debate with a co-worker over the performance of the Eagles
the previous Sunday. “It was ripped from his shoulder in an instant,” Jerome warned.
I remember that I felt a chill down my spine as Jerome coolly recalled the sequence
of events. I hoped that I would never be asked to operate that machine.
Jay’s took great pride in his work and it was reflected in his product. He seemed
perpetually angry, perhaps embittered by some life experience that he never shared
with me. He managed to channel his anger into a zealous work ethic. He always
seemed determined to prove something to someone – his father perhaps. I can’t be
sure. This aspect of his personality seemed to me particularly Jewish, though he was
not religiously orthodox. He took charge of every aspect of the bakery’s operations.
I often felt that if he had been forced to do so, he could have single-handedly kept the
machinery operating and the bagels baking without failing to fill a wholesale order
or making any of his retail customers wait more than a few seconds for a piping-hot
Brooklyn Bagel.
None of the other employees at the bakery seemed to like Jerome very much. I
suppose that was because he seemed so severe. He shunned small talk and
discussions of topics related to their personal lives. I think it was more likely that he
was simply socially awkward, so he couldn’t easily interact with the others. For some
reason, however, he made an exception where I was concerned. I felt he had a
special fondness for me, though I’m not sure why I felt this way. He certainly never
told me did. Nor did we seem to have much in common. He was hard-driving,
sometimes overbearing, and always obsessive in his commitment to even the most
routine tasks. I was introverted and tended to be more passive, usually allowing
others to take charge. After we closed the bakery for the day, he and I would
routinely stroll across the parking lot to a delicatessen for dinner. We sat in the same
booth each time where we frequently discussed my plans for college and a possible
career in law. He always encouraged me to pursue my education – I was definitely a
college-boy, he would say.
At the start of each work shift, Jerome gave the employees a list of the tasks to be
completed that day. It was his practice to leave it to the employees to divide up the
work among us. Inevitably, I was stuck with the most undesirable jobs such as
cleaning the bathrooms or sweeping and mopping the floors. I hated those tasks
almost as much as I hated myself for deferring to the other employees. Occasionally,
I was allowed to work at the kettle or the oven. Once in a while they offered to let me
mix the dough, but I always remembered that terrible story Jerome had told me at
my interview and preferred sweeping and mopping to running the mixer.
Toward the end of my employment, a competitor opened a new bakery a few blocks
away. The new bakery was quite a bit larger than Jerome’s, but the owners seemed
to concentrate their operation on supplying corporate clients such as supermarkets.
Jerome had supplied supermarkets, but not as a large-scale operation. Jerome
began to quickly lose his supermarket contracts to his new competitor, and resigned
himself to focus on his retail business for a time. He confidently predicted his
competitor’s demise. Their product was clearly inferior, he insisted. Their business
philosophy was cold and calculated; their production process, he argued, was sterile
and heavily automated. A bagel man could not possibly make quality bagels unless
he got his hands into the dough, he maintained. As Jerome saw it, they emphasized
volume over quality, caring more about making profits than making quality bagels. I
was certain that Jerome’s confidence was genuine and that in due course his superior
product would drive his new competitors out of business.
A day or two before I finally quit the bakery to attend college, Jerome called me
away from my mopping duties and told me something that, at the time, I didn’t really
appreciate. “It’s the pride you put into it, not the task, that gives it value, that makes
it a worthy purpose; the pride is worth the working for.” He wasn’t the most eloquent
or grammatical man I’d ever met, but I assumed he told me this because he wanted
me to put a bit more “elbow- grease” into my mopping. Admittedly, I had been
shirking a bit in my final few days of employment.
One evening a few years later, only a week or two before my graduation from
college, I went back to the bakery to visit my old friend. He closed up the shop and
we strolled across the parking lot to the deli and sat in our old booth. It seemed, for
me, as if only a few days had passed since we had last performed this ritual. But
Jerome appeared quite different. Apparently his competitor’s business had thrived
over the previous few years, whereas Jerome’s had sputtered. Now, they were
putting pressure on him to merge his operations with theirs. Jerome was convinced
that, if he did, he would shortly be forced out. He protested bitterly about how they
had taken away not only his wholesale business by under-bidding him on contracts
with the supermarkets, but how his long-time retail patrons had steadily been stolen
away as well. “They don’t boil their bagels first,” he lamented, shaking his head as if
expressing the collective embarrassment of good bagel men everywhere.
As he spoke, I became impressed that the lines in his face I had once attributed to his
strength and determination now appeared to be lines of weariness and resignation.
Could this be the same man I had known? I was astounded by the hundreds of gray
hairs that suddenly seemed to have sprouted in Jerome’s jet black hair! He asked if I
wanted to go back to the bakery and have a few drinks with him. I declined, citing a
need to prepare for final examinations. That evening was the last time I ever saw
him. I couldn’t bear to see him that way again.
Ten more years had passed when I learned that Jerome had finally decided to enter
into a partnership with his competitors. A few months later, however, his share was
bought out completely by the partners, though Jerome was kept on in a salaried
position as manager of the old bakery. The partnership thrived and by the time the
partners decided to incorporate and sell shares to the public, the number of bakeries
in their chain had increased to more than 50 in Texas and surrounding states. Jerome
had been reduced to a mere employee of the corporation doing many of the same
jobs I had done while I was employed at the bakery. He worked for a couple of years
cleaning toilets and mopping floors until the accident occurred that took his life.
The circumstances of the accident are still quite perplexing to me. He had arrived
early that morning to get a head start on the backup of supermarket orders. He died
in the grip of the very same mixer that he had warned me about on the day of my
interview all those years ago. As I sit listening to the mourners’ heavy sobs, I wonder
how a lifetime bagel man like Jerome could have fallen into that machine. The cause
of death, according to the autopsy report, was profound blunt trauma to the head. He
had apparently been drinking heavily and leaned over the lip of the mixer too far.
The deadly arms of the machine crushed every bone in his body. I think, however,
his spirit was broken long before the accident. For the day he sold out to his
competitors was the day he sacrificed the pride he placed in his purpose, and that
was, I think, ultimately the cause of his death.