8/10/99

My Boss Max

Had I quit that job, I would have been murdered by my fellow immigrants.

    I was sweeping floors on my 25th birthday, muttering to myself that this is what I had come to be. I was an ulpan student at Kibbutz Na'an, and I was learning Hebrew at about the same rate as I was getting rich.
    Then one day, someone came to interview all the immigrants at the ulpan. What do you want to do after learning Hebrew, he asked.
    "I want to work at The Jerusalem Post," I said, "or be an advertising copywriter." But I knew it was nearly impossible to get a job at the Post, and there was only one full-time English-language copywriter in the country.
    He told me I could study a trade, at no cost, and get paid living expenses to boot.
    "What sort of trade?"
    He began reading from a long list: "Hotel management, --"
    "Stop! I'll take it."
    If I couldn't do what I most wanted, this seemed like a good alternative. At least I would be commanding others to sweep floors.
    I improved my Hebrew just enough to say "Shalom" when I left Na'an, and moved to  Maon Tiran, an immigrant absorption center. Maon Tiran was in the heart of Herzliya Pituah, a minute from the beach, close to the Tadmor hotel school, and heavily populated by very rich people, very big dogs, and even bigger cockroaches.
    "You're going to need a roommate," the lady at Tiran told me, then said to the fellow beside me, "You too." We looked at each other, shrugged, smiled, and ended up living together for 20 months.
    Georges Nayberg was a tall, blond, quiet Frenchman who, like me, was studying hotel management, and had no money. We signed in, dumped our knapsacks in room 211, then made a beeline for the supermarket across the square.
    We didn't yet know it, but that Supersol was rated the most expensive supermarket in the country.
    We walked up and down the aisles looking at prices, sighing a lot and feeling despondent. "Do you like rice?" I asked Georges.
    "Yes."
    "Good. Because that's all we can afford to eat."
    We bought a bag of rice, went home and prepared dinner: two bowls of rice.
    We were feeling doubly pathetic, because both of us loved to cook.
    Clearly, we had to find jobs, and fast.
    Two days later, we were employed at the nearby Sharon Hotel -- the wonderful and fabulous Sharon! -- and four days after that, I quit. If I was going to retain any enthusiasm for hotel work, I reasoned, I could not remain in that desperately depressing job.

THAT'S WHEN I met Max.
    Max Geffen owned a delicatessen near the Supersol. Yeah, he grumped, he could use a hand. I was hired!
    "Sweep da floor," he grumped.
    Terrific.
    But I came to love that job, and even Max, and even his wife Ruth. Ruth didn't grump: she boomed.
    "Sim! Git a move on, or I'll give you a smeck so hard yill trevel!" By travel, she meant head-first, out the plate-glass window. I had to learn her thick South African accent. "Give me the reddy reckna!" she'd command me; "ready reckoner," I learned quickly, was the calculator. "Mix!" she'd howl at poor old Max, who was hiding in the back of the store, "Give thet lezy boy semthing to do!"
    "Sweep da floor," he'd grump.
    I earned a modest salary, but more important, I got fed. Max, who seldom found any reason to speak much, commented on my prodigious appetite by arching an eyebrow at me.
    Friday afternoon, the end of my first week at Max's, he was putting together a huge package of delectables, which I assumed was for a party they were having. I was about to go home, across the square. "Here," he mumbled, giving me the food when Ruth's back was turned, "feed your buddies."
    I dashed into my room and showed Georges the treasure. We were yipping and yapping excitedly, then the thought came to us: we couldn't eat it all, and it was too much to fit in our tiny fridge; what to do?
    I went out into the hallway and shouted: "FREE FOOD!!"
    The stampede of hungry immigrants became a tradition on Friday afternoons. Georges and I became very popular. I would have been murdered had I quit that job.
    One Friday, Max was left with 19 unsold French breads, which he thrust at me along with the usual stuff: tinned goods, delectible salads and the ends of deli meats -- we used to joke that we made ends meet on meat ends. On that day, "FREE FOOD!" was enough garlic bread for the entire building.
    As time went by, the routine at Max's became set. After classes, I took over the shop, while Max retired to his crate at the back. Folks came in, greeted Max, he'd nod and grunt, and I would do it all until late in the day when Ruth burst in. I had to stop chatting with the customers and start looking very busy. Ruthless Ruth pointed out how much I had not managed to do all day and wondered what she was paying me for, and Max and I would exchange knowing looks.
    That's mostly how we communicated. Max, a small man with a deeply lined face, moustache and barely a wisp of hair behind each ear, trained me from the beginning to understand without explanation. If I got anything wrong, I would surely hear about it -- from her. Max didn't want to be bothered.
    But Max and I developed a code of expressions -- grins, winks, nods, rolling eyes --  to share thoughts about the various types who came into the shop: nudniks, yakkers, sexy dolls, loudmouth louts, weirdos.
    Sometimes we'd be idle in the empty shop, and Max would break the silence with a coded joke. "Yesh Time?" he'd mumble, and we'd guffaw -- recalling the fellow who once came in barking that question. Yes, I told him, we had Time. "Awright," he said dully, "gimme a Kent."
    One of the rare times he actually laughed out loud was after a woman came in with her young daughter and asked for cigarettes. The girl pleaded for candy. The mother snarled "Ichsa! Poison!" Whereupon I gave the woman her smokes and said, "Lady, your poison." Sheepishly, she bought the kid some candy.
    I won kudos from Max once -- for physically throwing a customer out of the store. The man was making his purchases and began ranting about politics. That was OK, until he called Menahem Begin a Nazi. Max seemed very pleased at my ferocious response, even if we did lose a customer.
    Much of the clientele came from the local South African community, and I was slowly immersed into the culture. I could say "have a nice weekend" in Afrikaans, I dated a South African for a while, and I tried eating biltong. I failed, but I tried. Biltong is a twist of dried, cured meat that you need lion's teeth to eat. The best belly laugh I ever got out of Max was when he had me try to bite a biltong. But delicate little South African preteen girls would come in, buy a biltong and rip into it with frightening savagery. I knew then and there I could never marry a South African.
     Ruth was so tough, I imagined she could shred a biltong with her lips. But despite her bustle, bristle and bluster, she was good-hearted and -- once I got over my sheer fear of her -- good-humored. Eventually, I would respond to a sharp tongue-lashing by giving her a bear hug, and the laughs would be on her.

I COULD have been very happy if life remained exactly as it did forever, but in a short time, everything changed.
    Max sold the store to an Israeli, and retired.
    Georges dropped out of school to take up a mysterious "foreign service" job. The day I moved to Jerusalem, he moved to Dakar, Senegal. (Ever disdainful of Americans, he ended up marrying a Brooklyn girl and now lives in New York.)
    Tiran ultimately cleared out its mostly Western immigrants and shut down.
    The Sharon Hotel (trivia fact: Idi Amin named his son Sharon, after the hotel, where he once stayed) declared itself a disaster area and was renovated.
     The Tadmor school lost its greatest asset, our chef teacher George Klein. George was wizardly both as a chef and teacher. Adored by all, he trained many of the country's professional cooks. But one day, on the way to our class, he jumped over a chain-link fence, and his ring got caught. He lost a finger, could not hold a knife anymore, and the last time I saw him, he was selling cigarettes in Jaffa.
    Me? I did not become a hotel manager.
    One day, having realized that I could not grind through to the end of the two-year course, I reluctantly perused the Help Wanted ads in The Jerusalem Post. That very day, I saw an ad. I thought I was dreaming:
    "The Jerusalem Post seeks advertising copywriter."
    I didn't merely apply for the position, I commandeered it. Quite a coup for a floor sweeper, salami slicer, hotel busboy, and purveyor of biltong.