Rose Feiss “wasn't that typical bubby” says her granddaughter and cookbook author June Hersh. She ran her own business and was “a very progressive, feisty, strong, independent, empowered woman, well beyond her time. She probably would have been more suited for this time in history than she was for the time that she lived,” says June. 

Born in 1901 in Minsk, Rose came to the United States as a child with her family. They settled in Morgantown, West Virginia, not far from the Pennsylvania border, where her father Aaron worked as a rabbi and shochet (a person certified to slaughter animals according to Jewish law). “He was really a jack of all trades in the world of Jewishness, in this very small Jewish community,” June says. 

In her early 20s, Rose met her husband David at a dance. He came from a Sephardic family from the island of Rhodes in Greece “and my grandmother was Ashkenazi. As silly as it sounds, that actually ruffled some feathers,” June explains. But Rose embraced David's heritage, learning Sephardi recipes from her mother-in-law like one for matzo meat cakes and string beans in a spicy tomato sauce. 

When World War II broke out, Rose and David’s son Murray enlisted in the U.S. Navy, forging his papers since he was only 17. To keep busy, Rose started to make lampshades with frames David built for her at his wire factory. She enlisted other women in the neighborhood, “and the story goes that she opened a small, little factory and started to employ these women,” June shares. Rose carried pots of food — “probably of cabbage soup,” June adds — on the subway to feed everyone. 

After the war, Murray went to business school on the GI Bill and opened Murray Feiss lighting, which built the lamps for his mom’s company StyleCraft. All three family businesses, including his father’s wire company, worked together in a factory in the south Bronx — today, that 10 block stretch of Walnut Avenue is named Rose Feiss Boulevard. 

Her grandmother built a successful company in the middle of the twentieth century, but looking back at the family history, June says: “Where did she learn that? I mean, nobody taught her. She was just this incredibly savvy, self-starting woman who said, ‘I can be more than just what's expected of me.’” She recalls her grandmother co-signing mortgages of the people who worked with her and helping put their kids through college. 

Rose never stopped going to work. When she was older, she would lay down on the couch in her son Murray’s office and feign sleep during his meeting with the president of Chase Manhattan Bank, interrupting it to say: “What are you, an idiot? That’s a stupid deal,” June shares. “That was my grandmother.” 

“That's our comfort food. It's really not matzo ball soup in my family. It's really cabbage soup. That's the food that makes us feel nourished and nurtured.”

When June was little, her grandparents lived with her family and on Friday nights after Shabbat dinner, Rose would gather June and her sister Andrea to work on lampshades together. It was “a way for my grandmother to teach my sister and me that you have a responsibility to your family,” June says. 

When June was older Rose also taught her to make her signature recipes: the Sephardi matzo meat cakes and a deeply savory cabbage soup with sauerkraut and hot dogs. June isn’t sure where her grandmother learned the soup recipe — though it might have been something she remembered from her childhood. “I'm sure it didn't have hot dogs in [it in] Minsk. But it sure did have hot dogs in New Rochelle, New York. And that's where I learned to make it,” June says. 

One Halloween, when June’s kids were little, she was making a pot of it when her daughter’s friends came over to get ready for trick-or-treating. “Apparently, all of them found it very inviting,” June says. When they returned with their candy haul, they sat down for steaming bowls of the soup. Brewing a batch, as June calls it, became a Halloween tradition.  

Her kids are now grown, but June still makes the soup for her family, particularly when one of them is going through a hard time. “That's our comfort food. It's really not matzo ball soup in my family. It's really cabbage soup. That's the food that makes us feel nourished and nurtured,” she says.