True Confections (27 page)

Julius didn’t know that even while he was still making his way toward Madagascar, the transports of Jews from German territories into occupied Poland had resumed, as had work to complete the fortifications of the Warsaw Ghetto. Eichmann’s beloved Madagascar Plan had stalled. Germany had not achieved a quick victory over Britain (the Battle of Britain had not gone as predicted so confidently by the Luftwaffe, despite their colorful maps and pins), and so the British fleet, crucial to the Madagascar Plan, would not be available to ship all the Jews to their island colony in the Indian Ocean after all. There was no alternative means of efficiently transporting four million Jews out of Europe.

In late August 1940, Rademacher begged Ribbentrop to hold a meeting at his ministry so they could revise the Madagascar Plan and put it in motion. Ribbentrop did nothing. Eichmann’s Madagascar memo was never approved by Richard Heydrich, chair of the Wannsee Conference. From time to time, one or another official of the Third Reich would raise the question of a
future plan for the ghetto colony on Madagascar for all the Jews of Europe, but by early December of that year, it had been abandoned entirely. The Madagascar Plan was stillborn, and the massive logistical quagmire of Jewish deportations would be solved in another, more efficient way. If the Jewish island colony in the Indian Ocean was a First Solution, then the answer to the vexing Jewish Question would be the Final Solution.

I
HAVE TO
admit the time line is way off here. Why is the sudden and successful British invasion of Madagascar in May 1942 not in this story? I suppose it’s not really possible that Julius had no awareness of the stealth landing in Courrier Bay by the combined forces of the 13th Assault Flotilla. He had already been on Madagascar for more than a year at that point. So let’s allow for the possibility that he welcomed the British forces. Perhaps he even played a small role, and had a secret involvement in the mysteriously deployed guiding beacons that enabled the invading, unlit British flotilla to glide past the dangers in the shoals of the harbor and land the troops safely in the darkness, while the Vichy slept. That would be good, if Julius did that. It improves the story. Let’s say he did.

Soon after the British secured Madagascar, Free French Forces took over from the Vichy government. But looking at Julius’s land acquisitions, I have to admit that a less nice version of this story has Julius doing business with the Vichy officials one way or another from the moment he arrives on the island in March 1941. The drunken banker is thick as thieves with them. The Vichy haven’t got much to do, governing this godforsaken jungle in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and Julius is an amusement. They are willing to assist this pushy, ambitious Hungarian Jew with his coatful of diamonds in securing a
position of power and authority in advance of the hordes. Why not? He will be useful to them.

Perhaps Julius is unhappy to see the corrupt Vichy officials replaced by the Free French officers who now govern the island, as it dawns on him that the chances of the Madagascar Plan’s being executed as proposed are dwindling with every passing day. Surely the Third Reich wouldn’t want to go to the trouble and expense of delivering the Jews of Europe to Madagascar only to see them pick up and take themselves wherever in the world they pleased after that. Even without knowledge of what has transpired in Europe, it is clear that without the Vichy in control of Madagascar, the plan collapses.

Perhaps Julius recognized then that he and he alone has escaped to Madagascar, while his family, everyone he has left behind, will be swallowed up by the incoming tide of history. Perhaps he never tried to reach them at all. Perhaps he did nothing but cultivate his holdings and wait. He is helpless. What can he do, from here, but hope for the best?

It is established fact that he spent the war years on Madagascar, where he was safe. But he died there, too, of malaria, soon after the end of the war, at the age of forty-two. Julius left behind his beautiful, young common-law wife, Lalao (she had been his housekeeper), and their two children, Darwin, who was two, and Huxley, who was an infant.

I don’t really have a good way of telling this story seamlessly. While it is true that it is difficult to reconcile the time line completely, or really nail down the facts one way or the other, how important is that in the larger scheme of things? Can we just skip over these discrepancies? Let’s say Julius was isolated on Madagascar from the moment he arrived, and in a way he was a prisoner of his circumstances. The larger truths of this story are what matters, and it would be pointless to get too distracted by
details. In fact, a failure of imagination may be the most honorable choice here. Think of it this way: if for even a brief moment any of us could possess the full realization of all the horrors of human experience, how would it be possible to live?

J
ULIUS HAD NO
way of knowing that Germany had occupied Hungary in 1944, when Hungary was on the verge of negotiating with the Allies after the German losses on the Eastern front. Nor did he know that tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews had already been killed in labor camps and deportations even before the occupation.

He would not have been able to imagine that the shul on Dohány Street had been turned into a small concentration camp. Adolf Eichmann himself had taken over the rabbi’s office behind the beautiful rose window in the women’s balcony. Eichmann organized a Budapest Jewish council to oversee the Jews who remained in Hungary, all two hundred thousand of them, now concentrated in Budapest, crammed into two thousand homes scattered through the city, each designated Jewish dwelling marked with a conspicuous yellow Star of David.

Julius did not know that nineteen people had been assigned to his apartment, and that for several miserable months Szilvia, Matild, and Geza had shared a narrow bed in what had been Matild’s room, a room in which four strangers also slept.

Nor did he know that the Arrow Cross Party members had rampaged through the Jewish Quarter, shooting hundreds of Jews and throwing their bodies into the Danube, Péter’s among them. Szilvia, Matild, and Geza were among the thousand who lay buried in the mass graves in the courtyard of the synagogue on Dohány Street, just up the street from where Fischer’s dry goods shop once did business, before the Arrow Cross burned it
to the ground with seven members of the Fischer family, who had refused to wear their yellow stars, locked inside.

Ágnes had been arrested and placed in the Kistarcsa transit camp for two months before she was marched with hundreds of other prisoners all the way to the Austrian border in freezing November sleet. On the third day of the march, when Ágnes was so weakened by a fever that she was unable to walk, she was shot and left at the side of the road.

By the end of 1944, here is what Julius Czaplinsky did know. He was thirty-eight years old. His wife and children were dead. He was rich beyond imagining. He was safe from the turmoil of war. And he was utterly alone. The other four million Jews of Europe weren’t coming. There would never be one ship unloading its bewildered cargo of Jews. There would never be a single grateful recipient of all the wisdom and generosity Julius was so prepared to bestow upon his landsmen. The Madagascar Plan had brought only Julius Czaplinsky, the first, last, and only Jew on Madagascar.

I
SHOULD NOT BE
held accountable for the Bereavemints fiasco. Why bring this up now? That is simply an unfair piece of Zip’s history to lay at my doorstep. And even if I was involved, it was nine years ago. I am perfectly willing to take responsibility for certain poor decisions in the history of Zip’s Candies, with Little Susies at the top of that list, but not the Bereavemints. It is true that I headed the product development team at Zip’s Candies, but that’s just a designation on paper, a fancy way of captioning the management scheduling and availability of our workers and equipment. “Product development team” was really just a bookkeeping term. Who was on that team? Petey Leventhal, a couple of hourly line workers, and me.

And the product was certainly not my idea, let’s be clear about that, if we have to talk about Bereavemints. It was Howard’s. He should have been identified as part of the Zip’s so-called product development team, because it was his product. I encouraged him when I should have been more honest. In truth, I never thought it was a good idea, but Howard was proud of the concept, which he dreamed up after eighteen holes on the Yale golf course with his high school friend Morty Rubin, whose family has run Rubin & Sons Memorial Chapel on George Street for fifty years. It has always struck me as peculiar that someone in Sidney Rubin’s line of work would name his son Morton. Morty the mortician thought Bereavemints was a great idea.

Howard came home from his afternoon with Morty brimming with enthusiasm, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I really thought, which was that this product was not only questionable in concept, but was also neither a good match for the Zip’s Candies image nor for our production lines. I was walking on eggshells with Howard by then, and I didn’t want to discourage him if something made him happy, even if it meant biting my tongue at moments.

I had counted on Frieda to throw cold water on the idea, but I had underestimated the blinding effect of a Jewish mother’s obsessive love for her wunderkind, and though she was a canny businesswoman with a good nose for the candy business, Frieda was impervious to any possible flaws in a new piece that originated with her precious Howdy.

It was 2001, and Sam had been gone for two years. In his lifetime, no problematic product like the Bereavemint could ever have been deemed of sufficient quality or potential value to carry the Zip’s Candies name and signature green umbrella on the wrapper. Few people realize that Eli made notes for a fourth line that was never put into production, a wafery, layered butter-cookie center enrobed in vanilla icing that he called PanKakes, which was consistent with the
Little Black Sambo
inspiration for each of our lines. Why? “When Black Mumbo saw the melted butter, wasn’t she pleased! ‘Now,’ said she, ‘we’ll all have pancakes for supper!’”

Bereavemints had no such continuity with our existing lines or potential for brand association. I repeat: it wasn’t a good fit at all for Zip’s. I would have much rather pursued development of those PanKakes. But Sam was dead and mine would have been the lone voice of dissent while everyone else was so enthusiastic. In retrospect, it isn’t clear to me that even if I had made my misgivings known, that Howard would have been willing to slam
the brakes on this runaway disaster, in part because the small test batches were fine. It was the one and only production batch that was catastrophic.

Z
IP’S
B
EREAVEMINTS, SMALL
, gray, rectangular, molded, spiced peppermints in somber black waxed wrappers printed with discreet green umbrellas, were not envisioned as a retail product in their first production phase, but instead were meant for distribution chiefly to funeral homes, support groups, grief counselors, and religious organizations. The concept was sound enough—something to freshen the breath of funereal personnel and the bereaved alike; it is a regrettable fact that sorrow and halitosis often go together, what with all the coffee drinking, crying, inattention to personal hygiene during the stressful experience, and the ceaseless consumption of funereal carbohydrates.

It was a good idea, in concept, maybe, for some other company, one already running a line of cough lozenges, for example. Perhaps it was even a brilliant idea for a niche product for the right brand, one with a more herbal-supplement sort of profile, but it wasn’t for us. I have an intense aversion to the flavor of cloves, which admittedly may have clouded my judgment about the viability of the product in the market, but that has absolutely nothing to do with what happened.

We had to do most of the blending and pouring by hand, using certain processing elements on the Mumbo Jumbo line. That’s where we lost quality control. I was specifically concerned that I could not be a good judge of the flavor adjustments, and I had made my limitations known to Howard. He said it didn’t matter, but in retrospect I should have insisted that someone else have ultimate responsibility for sampling the test batches more frequently.

Owing to a terrible and significant last-minute miscalculation during production (we used a basic sugar and corn syrup hard-candy recipe, with cinnamon, clove oil, and peppermint extract), the proportion of cinnamon, clove oil, and peppermint extract in that first test batch of Bereavemints was terribly, horribly concentrated. I don’t know how it happened. I had tasted a sample of the batch at an earlier stage of the blending and had not thought it necessary to do so again. I know that two employees have stated they saw me taste the batch again just before the pour, and I may have given that impression, but I am certain that I did not actually taste the batch again.

We wrapped the mints by hand and boxed them by hand, and then we stickered the boxes by hand with a simple and tasteful black-and-white label set in Castine, the font often used on traditional headstones. I employed Julie and her friend Wendy to come to Zip’s one afternoon right after school and spend a few hours with green Sharpies, drawing a simple umbrella on the lid of each box. The Zip’s green umbrella, though originally inspired by Little Black Sambo’s green umbrella, has long been an integral part of our brand identity.

We distributed these inaugural boxes of Zip’s Bereavemints gratis to some forty funeral homes throughout Connecticut. Within ten days, Bereavemints had caused twenty-three episodes of choking or bronchial spasm, two of them severe graveside allergic reactions.

The consequent cascade of lawsuits was inevitable, given how disruptive the Bereavemints reactions had been to any number of funerals and memorial services. Death and the rituals surrounding death are occasions when people are already very sensitive. Therefore, as so many documents from so many different law firms throughout the state suggested, if injured grievously by an improperly manufactured hard candy at such a
fragile time, they are especially susceptible to trauma, which can lead to anxiety, sleeplessness, loss of gainful livelihood, diminished capacity for enjoyment of life, and poor self-esteem.