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me since I was a tot. The newer employees are Dominican and they call out Shalom! with a heavy Hispanic accent. I wave back. The din of machines, and the pulsating, rhythmic Latino music on the soundspeaker makes it hard to hold a conversation. This time of the year everyone and everything is in overdrive, as ninety percent of our annual business will transpire in the next month and a half.
    The small factory store adjacent to Jake’s office is a mecca for Jewish tourists, both observant and those simply nostalgic for the Lower East Side in its Jewish heyday. It brings in minuscule profits, but we keep it open because its raison d’être is the same as those tony Fifth Avenue boutiques that give cachet to mall spin-offs in mid-America. (Our true big business is in the supermarket chains, like Florida’s Publix and New York’s D’ Agostino’s.)
    Greenblotz has employed Gertie, the elderly sweetheart who runs the store, since the forties. Gertie is bent with arthritis and has such a gaunt bloodless face that I always think she might pass out any second. She refuses to sit, even though she is thin and frail, and may be eighty, even ninety. No one dares to ask her exact age, because she will work here as long as she wants to. Gertie is as much of a lure for the tourists as the specialty macaroons.
    She lights up when she sees me and beckons me in with a crooked finger.
    “Ess, kindele.” She says: “Eat well, my child” in Yiddish.
    The smattering of Yiddish I know includes the words and phrases I picked up from Gertie talking with customers, and the expressions I’ve gleaned by listening to New Yorkers talk in supermarkets and department stores. This includes schtickel , which means a piece, as in: Give me a schtickel of pickle . My favorite Yiddish word is the one that pretty much sums up my life, farblungett , which roughly means lost without a damn clue how to remedy the situation.
    Gertie hands me an open tin of chocolate-chip macaroons and I poke my fingers in, grabbing the two top ones. Three or more and my Lotte Berk trainer would kill me. It took nearly a year to rein in the bulging tummy and thunder thighs I was gifted with after my scary bout with depression.
    I give Gertie a kiss on her rawhide cheek and tell her I have an interview and can’t talk until afterward. I enter the office that has been Matzo Central for almost a century, where Izzy Greenblotz would sit, and then his sons, and then his grandchildren, Uncle Nathan before the car crash, and then my dad and Aunt Shara who hated each other so much they installed a wall to divide the space.
    When Jake got ahold of the reins, he took down the “Berlin Wall” and put in a new couch and an Ansel Adams print. I would have gone with a contemporary Jewish artist to reflect the newly hip Lower East Side; maybe I’d frame a Ben Katchor cartoon original or perhaps I would shell out serious bucks for a painting by Eric Fischl. But Jake is the man in charge and he “loves mountains,” even if the same mountain print graces half the insurance firms of the United States.
    I’m a snob, true, but a private one. I never tear into anyone publicly about taste. I’m exceedingly well mannered to both him and Siobhan, because despite the misgivings my other relatives have about her—mainly to do with her religion, and a misguided view that she’s a gold digger—I think Siobhan has a great heart, genuinely loves Jake, and for heaven’s sake, she puts up with our bag-of-nuts family. Jake’s made it a point to thank me for not ostracizing Siobhan the way Aunt Shara’s daughters have. They have hardly ever met her, yet they claim to hate her. God knows what those two witches think of me. The last time Siobhan and I saw my female cousins in the flesh was at Grandpa Reuben’s funeral. Marcy, the nastier and eldest, was glaring at me most of the service—perhaps because Siobhan was out of her view, sandwiched between Jake and myself for protection.
    I give Moses a