Dough

Mort Zachter's memoir — "Dough" — considers both kinds of dough: the yeasty kind that's the staff of life and the green kind that gets you the stuff of life. Though that may be too light-hearted a way to describe what is, at its core, a wistful story about Zachter's family and the secret at its heart.

"Dough" is a classic American immigrant tale of survival and success: Zachter's Russian immigrant grandparents come to the U.S., go through the typical Ellis Island name change and open a bakery in 1926 on the Lower East Side of NYC. His earliest memories are of the smell of bread and of his two uncles — Joe and Harry Wolk — working in the dirty, dusty, bustling bakery. Eventually Zachter's mother has to quit the teaching job she loves to help maintain the bakery.

The business is open from seven in the morning until midnight, seven days a week. The work is endless but the family never seems to get ahead. Zachter often seems bemused and slightly confused as a child trying to figure out the world; how things work and why. But he's surrounded by busy adults who answer questions with more questions until he begins to realize there are few answers in this family. 

Zachter has other plans for himself than a life like his mother's — spent at the bakery at the beck and call of her brother Harry, being paid in bread and desserts. Zachter gets a degree, works as a CPA with a specialty in taxation — even teaching it at NYU. Then comes law school — earning a degree nights while working days — and marriage. Zachter and his wife work hard to make ends meet but are in debt from his schooling and borrowing from her family to pay for the adoptions of their two children.

Then, one afternoon, the 36-year-old Zachter answers the phone for his ailing father and discovers the unimaginable. The bakery is not the black hole it appears to be. On the contrary; it has provided an income for his uncles to invest in stocks and bonds. The two men are millionaires with about five million dollars scattered around in different accounts.

That we, as readers, know that revelation is coming from the beginning makes it no less powerful. Zachter is understandably stunned; all the more so when he realizes his parents are well aware of the fact that Joe and Harry are wealthy. 

The book shifts back and forth between Zachter's look back at growing up in the 60s and the strange family dynamics. It is by turns funny and sad, thoughtful and appalling — but always engrossing. When Zachter, his wife and two friends finally begin to dig through the archeological site that is Harry and Joe's apartment, clues — and more questions — are unearthed layer by layer. There are no real answers for Zachter to find, only a way to learn to live with the truth. 

As for me, I was fixated on the fact that the bakery wasn't a bakery but a storefront that sold "day-old." The baked goods were merely merchandise: "stuff;" pick up the "stuff," deliver the "stuff." Would Harry — the sibling in charge — have been a different person with a different attitude if the family had been actual bakers and made the bread, cakes and cookies from scratch themselves?

Maybe something happened to Harry as a child in Russia before they emigrated. Something that gave him a hunger that can't be satisfied; a thirst that can't be quenched. A longing that manifests itself in money amassed and never spent, never enjoyed, never used to upgrade the business, never used for family aid and comfort.

In the end, Harry is not rich. He is "a poor man with money, which is not the same thing," as Garcia Marquez aptly phrases it.

Comments

[Sarah Laurence]

That sounds like an interesting book capturing the immigrant experience. I love Garcia Marquez’s quotation and his writing. Novels move me more than memoirs.

The canoe over logs on snow is a classic winter up north photo (below). We look for color where we can find it.

I hope this comment works, I thought I posted a comment on the garden post (I love the scroll) a few days ago, but it didn’t publish. Gremlins.

[LINDA FROM EACH LITTLE WORLD]

Dough was a great book. A very specific kind of experience based on time and place. Totally engrossing.

A couple of others have had trouble posting comments lately but I think they've just been passing glitches. Gremlins as you say.