Neve Shalom book and author event Jan. 27
By Michele Alperin
Jan. 4, 2008

Even after inheriting millions from his apparently poverty-stricken but definitely workaholic uncles, Mort Zachter of Princeton, continued to peddle his trade as a certified public accountant and tax attorney. That is, until Sept. 11.

"After 9/11," Zachter said, "I realized I was as crazy as my uncles. I could do what I really dreamed about -- write -- and didn't have to work in a profession as a CPA."

Having spent nearly five years on the 101st floor of 1 World Trade Center, he felt the tragedy very personally.

Zachter will appear along with Lucette Lagnado, Victoria Redel, and Dalia Sofer at Congregation Neve Shalom's fourteenth annual Book and Author Event on Sunday, Jan. 27. It is free and open to the public.

The event, sponsored by Neve Shalom's Adult Education committee, was founded by former Neve Shalom member and author Samuel G. Freedman when he lived in Metuchen. For more information, call (732) 548-2238.

Lagnado, author of "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World," writes for the Wall Street Journal and is a finalist in nonfiction for the Jewish Book Council's 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Sofer received one of this year's Whiting Writer's Award for new authors and her new book, "Septembers of Shiraz," was named one of the 100 Notable Books for 2007 by The New York Times.

Redel's novel "The Border of Truth: A Novel," is based on her father's experience escaping from Europe alone, as a teenager, in 1940; her first novel, "Loverboy," was adapted into a feature film. Past speakers at the annual Book and Author event have included Mimi Sheraton, Alex Kates Shulman, Ari Goldman, and Rebecca Goldstein.

Zachter's new memoir, "Dough," opens with a strange revelation -- that his family, while pretending to a genteel poverty, was either sitting on millions, in the case of his bachelor uncles, or in full knowledge of the family fortune, in his parents' case. But he was kept in the dark -- until one day, with his father in the hospital and his remaining uncle stricken with Alzheimer's, he answered the phone at his parents' home.

After confirming that he was speaking to Mr. Zachter, a stockbroker said to him, "There is a million dollars in the money-market account. I suggest you buy a million dollars worth of treasuries to maximize the return."

Zachter was dumfounded.

The essence of the book, though, is not the revelation itself but how Zachter works through the dynamics of this family secret. He shares the process of moving beyond his sense of betrayal about his parents' secretiveness; his anger at his uncles who forced his mother to work without pay at "the store," a wholesale bakery; his dismay at his own apparent entrapment in the workaholic ethic of his family; and, yes, even his guilt at the possibility of using the money that he eventually inherited to follow his own dream -- of becoming a writer.

Zachter has always loved writing. Even in high school he wrote many of the sports articles in his class yearbook and received the award for best English student in his graduating class. He wondered whether he might have gone on to become a college professor if things had been different. But it wasn't to be.

Although his mother adamantly opposed having Zachter work with his uncles in the family business, in the end his parents pushed him toward accounting, and that's what he did at Brooklyn College. Zachter attributes their insistence to their growing up in the 1930s.

"They were both products of the Depression," he said. "So having a job was very important to them."

Zachter also muses about whether his parents, who were aware that Zachter would one day inherit the family money from his bachelor uncles, were perhaps "preparing me in some way to have the responsibility," and indeed his accounting and tax expertise saved him a bundle of money when the time came.

Zachter is now philosophical about his CPA and believes that it was, in fact, better preparation for writing than an academic track.

"It gave me the opportunity to meet lots of different people and see a lot of different businesses," he said. Had he pursued an academic path, he asserted, "I would have a narrower focus in my life. Maybe I would have been much better read, but might not have the insights into people that I have now."

Zachter conceded that his uncles were incredible businessmen. Probably the most lucrative part of their business, he said, was supplying restaurants like the Second Avenue Deli with bread and cake, where the markup was higher than retail.

But part of their business success was their day-and-night devotion to the bakery. Between the two uncles and his mother, the store was open from 5 or 6 in the morning until midnight.

"They gave up having a family life for the sake of being in the bakery," he said, with some sadness. "In a sense the bakery, for my uncles, was their family life."

He noted that only one uncle actually came to his bar mitzvah.

"They never went out and socialized but knew everyone in the neighborhood and everyone knew them," Zachter recalled.

Although the discovery of his parents' secretiveness was a huge disappointment, he admitted to learning a lot from them. First of all, he said, they taught him humility. His mother used to tell him, "Never compare yourself to another person in a face-to-face conversation, because then one of you is going to walk away feeling second best." And the corollary was "do the best you can."

From his father's side, he learned persistence and attention to detail. Zachter's grandfather, Jacob, was a furrier, and he remembers his father explaining to him that furriers had to be the most meticulous kind of tailors -- they couldn't waste any of the material because fur is very expensive. Similarly, Zachter sees himself as thorough and meticulous and careful and willing to "sit on my tush" and do what needs to be done.

A few years ago, when Zachter's synagogue, Beth El in East Windsor, had a leaky roof and badly needed renovations, he and his wife got involved.

"That was my way, perhaps, of making up for some of the things my uncles could have done but didn't do with the money," he said.

Eventually Zachter was even able to allow himself to be a little extravagant. For a special anniversary, he and his wife treated themselves to a memorable three-day trip to Paris on a Concorde.

"In retrospect, it is now something very special, a memory we would never forget, a thing we could never have done in our wildest dreams," he said.

But the most significant decision he made after receiving the money was to pursue a new career as an author.

When he decided to start out with a memoir, he said, the first issue was to hash out with his wife, Nurit, how much of their personal life he would reveal. He wasn't too worried, because he took the advice of one of his favorite writers, Calvin Trillin, who follows "the Dostoevsky rule": When you write nonfiction, you shouldn't write anything that's terribly bad about anyone unless you write as well as Dostoevsky.

The process of learning to write was mostly writing and rewriting he said. He also took classes at the 92^nd street Y in New York and at the Arts Council in Princeton, with Anne Neumann. Zachter also mentions people in the community helped him out, including Esther Schor, a professor at Princeton University, who took time to read an early version of "Dough" and gave him her feedback.

Zachter claims he had to learn the whole gamut of writing skills -- how to show and not tell, the importance of details, correct punctuation, how to alternate sentences between short and long, how to create dramatic tension, how to organize a book, how to open and end it. Slowly he began to master his craft, he said, "based on feedback from others and mostly from writing over and over and just working on it with a kind of diligence -- my grandfather's ability to make sure he used up as little fur as possible."

Zachter figures that he's made it to first base as a writer with the publication of "Dough."

"I liken my growth as a writer to my daughter's growth through the years," he explained. "When she was in elementary school, I felt I was in elementary school as a writer. Now she is in middle school, and I think with the publication of this book I have made it to middle school as a writer."

He is already hard at work on his next book, a biography of the Brooklyn Dodgers' Gil Hodges. Summing up his feelings about the new profession he was able to choose for himself, he said, "I love what I do, and I'm blessed."