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whoever needed it. It’s not like I was sleeping in or goofing off.
    I got pleasant hellos from the customers who knew me. I wasn’t used to “pleasant.” In New York, a person was either ignored or greeted like a wealthy relative, looked down on or sucked up to. Nashville was the sane center of New York extremes. I’d only been here seven months and the culture shock of the people, the sounds, even little things like the lack of street smells, was still strong. I wondered if Dad and Uncle Murray had ever acclimated. I knew one person who hadn’t.
    My father lived in Nashville for twenty-five years. He had only been here once, on a mustering-out layover at Berry Field Air National Guard Base on his return from Germany, but he liked the weather and the slower pace of things. Being an impulsive man, he decided to open a deli here with my mother and his brother Murray. Dad worked for his father-in-law’s company, Royal Woven, which made the labels that went in the back of shirts. He oversaw the shipments that came from South Carolina looms and he hated it. Uncle Murray was a borderline-unsuccessful jingle writer who thought he’d have better luck selling real songs where songs were being bought. They were being bought in New York too, but he had competition there from guys with names like Bacharach and Diamond. He didn’t do any better in Nashville, but the deli enjoyed a novelty success at first, and then just became a local fixture.
    Why did Dad choose a deli instead of, say, a clothing store, which was something he at least knew a little about? I couldn’t say for sure, but I think it was rooted in the old Jewish idea that if you were a baker or a butcher your family would never go hungry. Or maybe he was running from the past he loathed. Probably a little of both.
    After a few weeks, Mom decided not to stay. She missed her family, she didn’t want me growing up in the South, and—call her a prima donna—she didn’t like smelling of pastrami and grease day after day. She never divorced my father, but they never lived together again. I think they knew that would happen and just let events take their course. Dad wasn’t happy working for her father in the garment district, and she wasn’t happy with a husband who was willing to give up a sure thing for something so risky.
    P.S. Her dad went bust when the shmatta business migrated to Taiwan and India in the 1970s, and we ended up moving in with him and bubbe in Queens to help pay the bills. My mother worked as a department manager for Gimbels, also not a smart move. They went bust in 1987. After that, it was all pickup jobs at store after store. It was like a Western where someone kept shooting horses out from under her. My father helped when he could; sending us money was one reason he never had the cash to expand or diversify. The big urban tornado of 1998 was another reason. The storm tore up the Nashville business district, including the deli. Insurance covered some of it, but Dad and Uncle Murray decided it was time to upgrade the electrical and the appliances. That was all out-ofpocket.
    My mom died in 1999, shortly after her parents. Dad died later the same year, stressed all to hell by rebuilding in the aftermath of the tornado. I was in school by then, working hard not to be them. My folks had been so cocked up by finance in one form or another that I decided to make it my career. I wanted to understand what they never could: how people and companies went broke. I swore that would never happen to me. If anything, I was going to be the one who sent other people to the poorhouse. The revenge of the Katz family was at hand. The financial rapture. Gweninator: Judgment Day.
    Cut to inheriting the deli when my Uncle Murray passed. By that time I was thirtysomething, unhappily married, and a little bored with theory. I had spent years studying what other people did wrong, and right, and the shortcuts they took to make things work. I wanted to try that myself.