Anne Russ Federman, the Last of Russ's Culinary Daughters, Dies at 97.
'Anne Russ Federman, who gained a New York brand of culinary celebrity as one of three sisters with whom Joel Russ shared the name of his venerable Lower East Side temple of herring, lox and other delicacies, Russ & Daughters, died on Thursday at her home in Pembroke Pines, Fla. She was 97 and the last survivor of the four.
The cause was heart failure, her granddaughter Niki Russ Federman said. With Josh Russ Tupper, her cousin, Niki Federman represents the fourth generation of the family to own and run the store, at 179 East Houston Street in Manhattan, near First Avenue.
Joel Russ, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia in what is now Poland, started out in the food business by peddling mushrooms and herring from a pushcart on Hester and Orchard Streets. He opened Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizers in 1914, moved to Houston Street in 1920 and enlisted his daughters as partners (he had no sons) in 1933, after they married.
As the neighborhood morphed from an immigrant ghetto to a trendy destination, Russ & Daughters endured. It is now coupled with a cafe around the corner, another at the Jewish Museum uptown on Fifth Avenue, and a booming catering and online ordering business (embellished with innovations like wasabi fish roe).
It remains among the last of the neighborhood’s so-called appetizing stores, which can be loosely defined as places where finicky customers argue with counter people about the perfection and price of smoked fish, cream cheeses, dried fruits, salads and other delectable “appetizers” that Niki Federman once described as “Jewish madeleines that have the ability to transport you in time and connect you to your lineage.”
Anne Federman began working in the store when she was 14. Working weekends meant she missed football games at nearby Seward Park High School (where the actor Walter Matthau was a classmate). It also led to a diminished teenage social life because she usually smelled of fish. . .
he store also elicited mouthwatering reminiscences from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal and the journalist Morley Safer in a documentary film, “The Sturgeon Queens” (2013).
Martha Stewart recalled recently that in the early 20th century there were two dozen or more appetizing stores on the Lower East Side. “Today,” she wrote, “only one remains: Russ & Daughters.”
The reason, Mark Federman explained, was simple: “No one wanted their kids in the business.”
Yes, his daughter is now an owner of Russ & Daughters, but his son, Noah, practices medicine.
“As far as I know, I am the only Jewish father who was disappointed that his kid became a doctor,” Mr. Federman said. “I was thinking sturgeon, not surgeon.”'
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/obituaries/anne-russ-federman-dies.html?
