couple’s willingness to work together and work hard, adjusting always to the changing times and needs of their customers. The area around Lombard Street was initially filled with people struggling to integrate into American life. Jewish East Baltimore was crowded with the influx of thousands of destitute newcomers, many of whom spoke Yiddish and little or no English and had to contend with rearing children in a new world while the parents themselves emerged fitfully from the old. Jews tried to earn their livelihood as garment workers, seamstresses, tailors, laborers, hired hands, and tutors. Some of the more enterprising set up their own shops. Most families lived in crowded apartments with few amenities and limited sanitary conditions.
Innovations that made life easier came slowly over the next decades as Harry and Ida sought to bring up a family: the Attmans did not have an indoor bathroom with bathtub and hot water until 1927, when Edward was seven (until then, outhouses were common and communal bathhouses were the rule); instead of electric lights, dangerous gas jets illuminated homes at night; linoleum was yet to be introduced to cover bare floors; instead of refrigerators, insulated boxes were cooled with blocks of ice delivered by truck. In the summertime, to escape a hot, humid Baltimore night, the Attman children would take blankets and sleep in nearby Patterson Park. Still in the distant future were air conditioning, easy access to telephones, and affordable automobiles.
However, all these people, living in the same conditions and from the same religious and cultural backgrounds, found common ground and camaraderie. In the Jewish areas, the streets were alive with people of all ages, but especially young adults who had been the early arriving immigrants and the children of newly forming families. At one point, sixty synagogues dotted the area around Lombard Street. And seemingly at the center of it all was that crowded row of shops along several blocks of Lombard Street where patrons could find much of their needs for home: from live fish and chickens to two-cent chocolate sodas to clothing and hardware items.
Across the street from Attman’s store was Blank’s department store, which carried a variety of fabrics. Within the same block was Fayman’s and Ben’s, two stores which handled all kinds of clothing, from socks for children and bras for women to men’s pants and shirts, much of it in odd lots. There was Brotman’s kosher butcher shop, Yankelov’s chickens, and down the street Lazinsky’s fish store and Crystal’s Bakery. Next door to Attman’s was Holzman’s Bakery. In the 1100 block of Lombard Street was Stone’s Bakery, where patrons could buy hot rolls and bagels, baked fresh every hour. Among the other delis was Atlantic Import, operated by Harry’s parents, brother, and brother-in-law. That store lasted until the riots.
As an Italian woman who grew up in nearby Little Italy told me about her memories of her mother taking her there to shop, “Thanks to those Jewish merchants, Lombard Street then was our supermarket before there were supermarkets.”
For Jews living and working in the Lombard 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
