LifeStory | Marty

Marty Rubenstein | “Any Secret Family Recipes?”

“Any Secret Family Recipes to Share?”

“My mom was a terrible cook. One of the reasons I became a good cook, and I'll tell you how that happened, are what my mom made that was good that I loved were, there’s a Yiddish word called Merkhls, which meant dishes that were attributable to the dishes she learned in Europe. You know, like blintzes and gefilte fish and baking her own challahs breads and that kind of stuff. Those things she made were delicious. Otherwise, not a good cook at all. When I moved to California, the reason I moved was I got involved in a film project, which is all my film life was a different thing, which I'll tell you about when you get interested. When I was in New York after I got out of the Army and I was working in New York at the time, I spent five years after I had spent that one year, I went to college, spent a year in L.A., working in accounting, was drafted, got out in New York, started working at accounting again. I got a job working for a couple of accounting firms, one which was a very prestigious accounting firm, which I was interviewed for a whole day, had to take exams and everything. It was very high class, had about a hundred people in the firm and every accountant was pretty good in order to get a job. So that was the last good job before, and I worked for the firm, all during college I had a job for the Israel Bond Drive which was, remember when Israel started in 1947 and the Israel bond drive in the early fifties was raising money. Of course, they had defeated the Nazis. So I worked for the Israel bond drive and I used to deliver, you know, I was a stock boy because I was just in college at the time. And I, I met some very important people in the Jewish community during that. I used to deliver stuff to Golda Meir, who became the prime minister when she was in this country. Her real name was Meyerson, and she was from Minneapolis. She was an American Jew, went to Israel. One weekend, she raised $50 million in in New York, and then later she became prime minister. And they said, listen, you need to take an Israeli name. You can't be using Meyerson. So she took the name Meir and became prime minister. And I used to do stuff for her, and I also delivered stuff to Henry Morgenthau Junior, who was secretary of Treasury for Roosevelt, and then the guys I worked for in the Israel bond drive were guys who financed and created the arms industry, the underground arms industry, while Israel was trying to gain its independence, you know, fight the Arabs. The Arabs wouldn't accept the fact that the U.N. had given you know it was Truman who had a Jewish partner in his haberdashery business who gave the go ahead for America to accept Israel as a country. So I had a kind of interesting high school and early college age. Plus, you know, the fun I had was in dancing, and that was it for me. I mean, that was my most enjoyable thing. And I had every girl I ever met who I went with, I got through dancing. And I was one of the better in New York amateur dancers at the time. New York Palladium was the main place. But in those days, there were dances, the hotels all around New York, the Algonquin, the Riverside. During the summer there were dancing. These bands would go up to the Catskills, Puente would play up there and other bands. So I used to send my mom to the Catskills for a month every year. And I used to go there. That's where I met the owner of Ripley Clothes, which then bought Bond clothes, and he was very wealthy and we became friends and he used to drag me up to the Catskills. He gave me a job. So at 14 I was packing suits on Delancey Street. My father had me working at a very young age because he wouldn't give me any money. So I've been working steadily since, well, 14 years since I was about 14 years of age. I used to be an entertainer as a kid. And I used to be the M.C. of the kid shows and I sang and danced a lot in Yiddish and in Hebrew. So then all the ladies wanted to dance with me, which was just awful for me. My mom, you know, used to force me to do this. Well, I'll tell you, when I got to, you know, when I was in New York, there were two kinds of dancers, ones who danced on the proper beat and ones who for the average dancer who really didn't have a feel for what it was to dance Latin music. Of course, to dance properly, you have to dance on a beat, which was we called the two beat, which was the off beat, which is the beat that jazz is essentially. Remember that Latin, Puerto Ricans played Latin music, but it was with a jazz bass by Puente. I mean, although it came from Africa originally to Cuba to Puerto Rico to the United States, there were Cuban bands that used to play it, and so do we. They were kind of different cause they had violins. And most of the Puerto Ricans were percussion brass based. Anyway, it was a lot of fun for me.”

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