November 14, 2018
The Bread Maker of Jerusalem
By Edward GrossmanOn a visit with the proprietor of Russell’s Bakery and his multi-ethnic, multi-political, and multi-religious staff, the story of Israel unfolds in microcosm.
Quarter to four in the morning. There’s nobody in the shuk—the Maḥaneh Yehudah market in Jerusalem—nobody, that is, except Russell, a Zionist who has his ovens up and running nice and hot.
Yes, if a Zionist is as a Zionist does, Russell’s indisputably a Zionist. Grabbing a handful of dough, he weighs it, trims it, puts it aside before shaping. Two baguette ovens by the Italian manufacturer Tiorini. Plus a German unit for country, walnut, spelt, sourdough, and other round or braided loaves, including, on Fridays, ḥallah. It’s a vintage Matador by Werner & Pfleiderer dating to when Angela Merkel geborene Kasner was a clergyman’s young daughter in the German Democratic Republic. Experts at ovens, the Germans are, the bald, bareheaded, gray-bearded Russell jokes.
The boss and co-owner of Russell’s Bakery is in his workshop-cum-retail space and has on a plain t-shirt. He’s an immigrant, an oleh (one who “comes up”) from South Africa. An officer in younger days in the Golani brigade, by reputation Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. Marines, and nowadays he’s unhappy with his adoptive country. Is this odd? Well, it may seem to be, given that the UN’s latest World Happiness Index ranks the Jewish state at number eleven among 156 countries, edging the U.S. in seventeenth place. The so-called Palestinian Authority, a hop and a skip from the bakery? Number 104. Syria, minutes by F-16 or F-35? Number 150.