Ernie offers no excuses.
Looking back at the way he ran his kitchen, the way he acted toward his wives, children, grandchildren and even employees, there are few regrets.
Did he yell?
Hardly at all.
Did he call people names?
“I never did any of that,” he says. “I only gave advice.”
So, maybe a few employees fled in fear and frustration after Ernie’s advice.
Life goes on.
Did he ever call any of his kitchen helpers dumb?
“Maybe they were dumb,” he says. “I had nothing to do with that. I was selling my pastries, that’s all.”
Did he abuse his own family when they worked beside him?
“Ha!”
But the family isn’t laughing. By most accounts, Ernie’s always been a royal pain in the ass; a real son of a bitch.
Always has been; always will be.
Yet they admit that his very pluck, that contrarian stick-in-the-mud personality, probably saved his life as a German prisoner of war during World War Two.
Ernie knows that all too well.
Already heard the story?
Let him tell you again. Hear him out, and you might finally begin to understand the man he is today.
He’ll tell you straight out: he’s no feel-good Roberto Benini in “A Beautiful Life, ” no warm and fuzzy “Patch Adams.” He’s more “Cool Hand Luke.” He’s a puny, pint-sized man whose attitude was all small-dog bark with just a little bit of bite.
To survive those years under the gun, Ernie used his tough-guy chutzpah like Hogan’s heroes brandished humor to stymie their captors, or the boys from MASH employed their lightning wit and satire.
See, he’ll tell you, Ernie was Jewish, and that was not a good thing to be in 1942 in Czechoslovakia, or anywhere else in Europe for that matter.
As millions like him were rounded up, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and could have well been sent to the extermination camps to die – just like his neighbors, cousins, aunts, uncles and even his mother.
He was also lucky. When the German SS officer arrived in need of someone to feed his men, he asked Ernie if he could cook.
Could he cook?
Hell, yeah, he could cook.
But along with his signature sneer, that sour-faced bad attitude, Ernie has something else that made him stand out – he had talent, tons of it:
He could go into the kitchen and bake up a sweet sugary storm of stuff to die for — you name it; poppy-seed strudels, Austrian Sacher torte and lemon Napoleons — enough to make his German SS Corps captors drool with anticipation.
He made delicacies for the officers to eat with their champagne and beer. He made poppy-seed strudels, pasta with poppy-seeds, pastries and frankfurters.
The Nazis said he cooked cannoli like an Italian.
That was good for Ernie.
They kept him alive for his cooking skills.
He hated the Germans for being what they were — monsters.
Those cooking chops gave this skinny little prisoner a bit of ammunition – a way to gain leverage with his captors; men who could have killed him with a snap of a finger.
Ernie was a fast learner.
He figured out that the best way to keep any German officer’s gun on safety was through his stomach.
Ernie tells stories of those days, mostly to Marianne, his daughter-in-law.
He doesn’t bother with Morde or even his grand daughters. Because get this: Ernie is still such a son of a bitch who won’t give the time of day to anyone he doesn’t respect in the kitchen.
So he tells Marianne, and few others, that he didn’t kiss any German ass.
He did his job and he did it well, so they let him be. And he kept that chip on his shoulder; the one the Germans couldn’t knock off.
If you didn’t do it his way, you ended up with egg on your face.
And the same goes today, Ernie will tell you with a shrug.
Why change a recipe that’s already perfect?
But along with that sour demeanor has come a wise, world-weary sense of humor. Like the joke is on the rest of the world somehow.
Yet it’s all enveloped in a cloak of sadness. He has kept some mementos of those years feeding those hated Germans, including a portrait of the mother Sarah he still talks about; and still misses.
It’s the only chink in the old man’s armor – he still terribly misses the mother he last saw as a boy, at the train station of his home town in Europe, who had come to see him off on his way to the work camp.
She was worried whether he had nice strong shoes.
Then the Nazis took her, too.
Ernie uses a walker now, and sometimes a wheelchair. But he’s still kicking; still baking.
In Ernie’s mind, the idea was always to sell pastries.
Nothing more, nothing less.
He, and everyone who worked with him, could not lose sight of that goal.
When he talks of Sharon, and her role in the bakery, his voice softens.
He tells of how she worked by herself for days in Lake Tahoe those summers when he had to return to his bakery in Oakland.
“She was a smart girl. She was the best at arithmetic. She ran my bakery. Besides Einstein, she was the only one who knew the math and how to manage things.”
But he’s still not one to listen to complaints.
When asked if Sharon might have been unhappy, he repeats how he bought a car for her. And the fact that she and her friends could always help themselves to free pastries.
Perhaps he really can’t remember the details.
Maybe he’s repressed them.
No excuses. Not for the way he treated his wives, or his children.
Not anybody.
He knows that Morde has always wondered whether his father really ever wanted a wife as a real companion rather than just someone to help out in his kitchen.
Did he always want things to go a certain way?
“I don’t want things to go a certain way. I want it to go the way it’s supposed to be.”
In other words, the chef is the top kitchen dog.
He’s the boss.
Just like his mother Sarah was the boss.
He learned his kitchen demeanor from her.
“There was one mother,” he says. “She made the cakes. I listened to what she said. I put the knives in the right places. The forks.”
So the old chef has mellowed. The memory is foggy. The shouting all but gone.
“He has no reason to yell anymore,” Morde says. “All he does is sit there and chew the cud. He’s 91-years-old. What does he have to do?
“He cracks jokes. He’s sarcastic. There’s no reason to yell.
Because Ernie is the last son-of-a-bitch standing.
And the rest of the world can go to hell.
