It All Started With a Deli. M. Hirsh Goldberg

Street area, it was a competitive life combined with a closeness of family and community. This was especially true for Harry and Ida. Running a food-oriented business, and doing so in two locations—Baltimore Street and Lombard Street until 1946 when they sold the Baltimore street building—was challenging and demanding. They worked part or all of seven days a week, with their busiest days Thursday, Saturday night, and Sunday. “My father always said whenever he came into work it was too late, and whenever he left it was too early,” Edward remembers. “And he never would pull the blind down and say, ‘We’re closed.’ If a customer came and needed something, he opened up the store to take care of him. That was his nature to do that.”

      Leonard, too, remembers how his mother would delay dinner until his father would come home, which could be late because his father often stayed open to serve late-arriving customers. “When are we going to eat?” Leonard would ask, and his mother would reply, “When your father comes. When there’s no more business, then he comes home.” Although the family would always wait, Leonard found to his surprise that nothing ever seemed to get burned, that “everything seemed to taste good no matter what time we ate.” Leonard also saw first-hand his father’s work ethic and concern for others. When he worked in the store alongside his father, he remembered the times when even though they had already turned off the lights to go home, his father might see a car coming down Lombard Street and say, ‘I can’t close it up. These people may be coming from somewhere and need to get food.’

      “And many times we would reopen the store, turn on all the lights and take care of these people.”

      That attention to customer service was a hallmark of Harry and Ida’s attitude about business, and they conveyed it to their children. Marc Attman, Seymour’s son, recalls Seymour relating to him the lessons he learned from his parents:

      — “Always go out of your way to be a diplomat.”

      — “Look into a person’s eyes when you talk to them.”

      — “When you say something, mean it.”

      As with many small family-owned businesses, the Attman children helped out in the store. Edward, being the oldest, was the first to help, working after school and on weekends. When he was old enough to reach the slicing machine, he cut deli on a hand-operated slicer before electric slicers were introduced. Even after he graduated high school and was attending University of Baltimore, Eddie would work every day after school because “things were very tough in those years” and he wanted to help pay for his college tuition (then costing $30 a month, an amount the Attmans strained to meet). He continued to help out for a while even after he returned from his army service following World War II. As they became older, Seymour and Leonard also worked in the store after school. It proved to be an important experience for their future business lives, as Leonard later acknowledged in an interview with the Jewish Museum of Maryland: “It gave me the ability, as well as my brothers, to get to meet people from all different ethnic backgrounds and be able to interact with anyone of any race, creed, color with a degree of ease, then as well as now.”

      As a 10-year-old, Leonard would at times be assigned to work the cash register and give change. Since Harry knew five languages fluently, he imparted this awareness to his children as a way to enhance customer relations and sales. “My father wanted the customer always to feel at home. So he made me learn taking cash and counting change back to them in their language. If people came in and they could only speak Yiddish, I was to count the money back to them in Yiddish. If they were Russian, I was to count back in Russian. To this day, I can still count extremely rapidly from one to 100 in Russian. I can also say in Russian ‘hello,’ ‘you’re welcome,’ and ‘thank you.’”

      The result was a customer who was both astonished and appreciative.

      “I made that person feel at home coming into the store,” Leonard says. “And they would look forward to that. Here is this young kid who would be in their safety zone, so to speak, that somebody like that would be handling their money, giving them the cash. They didn’t even always look at the money. They just looked at me counting it to them in their own language.”

      Seymour, too, learned some Yiddish, Russian and Italian as a way to further business, as he recounted in a 1982 oral history interview with the Jewish Historical Society of Maryland: “If you could speak the language, you could sell because a lot of people were immigrants, so you could suggest this or that to them, like a herring is a ‘shlutke,’ and butter is ‘matzlaw,’ which is Russian. In Jewish you would say ‘pitter’ or ‘putter.’ I had a lot of Russian people come in and this is the way I learned. They got a big kick out of this because they would think I was a foreigner. When they asked me where I was from and I would tell them I’m born in America, they would really crack up. It was a novelty for them. Just like it would be a novelty if you’d go to Europe and some child spoke English.”

      Later, some of Harry and Ida’s grandchildren would come down to the store to help. Marc, Seymour’s son who now manages the delicatessen, started as an 8-year-old assisting in the store. Ed’s son, Ron, the oldest of the grandchildren and the first of his generation to work in the deli, would arrive on a Saturday night and work as cashier (“I could only make change in English,” he recalls). Here he saw the array of patrons who would come by: both the poor who had only 25 cents for a bag of deli shavings, as well as judges, policemen, politicians, and community leaders. Even then-Maryland State Comptroller Louis Goldstein would frequent Attman’s on Saturday nights. “I learned more about people those Saturday nights than I ever expected,” Ron says.

      Another aspect of Harry and Ida Attman that left a life-long imprint on their children was their charitableness, with both food and money. During the Depression or when it was hard times, Harry would provide 6 ounce bags of food to any homeless individual who came to the store. Collectors for Jewish charities would also visit the store for donations, and Harry never turned them away without some contribution. Harry would also often offer collectors a chance to sit down and have a roll and coffee, and then converse with them about politics, religion or Torah. According to Leonard, if there were a sickness in the family or any other problem, his father would mention the problem to these collectors, many of whom were rabbis, and they would declare they would go back and say an extra special prayer. True to their word, a letter would come back to Harry attesting that the prayers had been made. Later, these contacts proved helpful when Seymour needed an operation in Milwaukee and a rabbi from Milwaukee who had periodically visited the store for years put the family up for the week that they were in the city while Seymour underwent his operation.

      Ida, too, was charitable. She was an active sponsor of the ladies auxiliaries in behalf of religious schools and donated to charities by means of pushkes (charity boxes) that she kept in the house. The sons remember her standard practice every Friday afternoon or on the eve of a Jewish holiday. Before she lit candles, she would open a closet door and put pennies, nickels, dimes or quarters—in multiples of 18 or 36 (representing in numbers the Hebrew word for “life”)—into the 15 charity boxes that she had nailed to the back of the door. These charity boxes were from different schools, yeshivas or organizations located in Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, and other cities, as well as in Israel (then Palestine). Periodically, a collector would come by to collect the money and leave a receipt for the donations. Among those boxes was one from the synagogue in Milwaukee.

      The Jewish religion and Jewish traditions were a central part of the Attman home and imbued Edward, Seymour and Leonard with meaningful and lasting impressions.

      The Attmans kept a kosher home and observed all the Jewish holidays. On Friday night and Saturday after services, the family ate together, with Ida providing meals and desserts of her own recipes. Harry put on tefillin every weekday, and Ida prayed each morning from a prayer book especially geared for women. Called a Techina, the prayers were printed in Yiddish.

      To Harry and Ida, the Jewish education of their children was, as Leonard says, “of prime importance.”

      For their Jewish education, Ed, Seymour and Leonard were enrolled in the Hebrew Parochial School (later to be named the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore; founded in 1917, it was the first Hebrew day school in America outside New York City). In its beginning years, the school