BAKERY

By Sally Forth
Staff Writer

Since it opened on April 15, 1957 an Irishwoman with a brogue has come thrice every week to a Jewish bakery in Cranston for sliced Italian bread. Says Patrick Smith, 82, "Words can’t express how good it is."

Another customer was my father, a secular Jew. Every Saturday he’d take one or all of us along while making the rounds of local delicatessens and bakeries in search of kosher treats. I can still hear in my mind’s ear my sister Emilie squealing "Russian teacakes!" loud enough to wake the dead. She was youngest and shrillest, but we all ogled the nosh, Yiddish for sweets, especially the teacakes—moist, frosted pink, marbled in rainbow colors and flavored with hint of rum. In those days, a kid didn’t have to be Jewish to know that Perler’s on Elmwood Avenue in Providence and the Rainbow Bakery on Reservoir Avenue in Cranston made the best Russian teacakes.

Perler’s is gone, closed in 1972 after a devastating fire. In fact, besides the venerable Korb’s Baking Company (established in 1906), the only survivors among the states once extensive network of Jewish bakeries are those maintained by the progeny of Barney Kaplan—Kaplan’s Bakery, Barney’s Bagels, and Rainbow Bakery, Inc.

Rainbow is Barney’s most pressing legacy—the last bakery owned by Barney Kaplan when he was alive. Soon after starting out the new venture with shortlived partner Al Brody (they’d rented a cramped concrete edifice on Reservoir Avenue some two blocks north of Rainbow’s present address), Barney told my father how he and Brody had come up with the name. "We couldn’t decide whose name should go first on the sign, but then I thought of Judy Garland’s famous song. It was a natural."

A truer testament to Barney Kaplan, the lifelong baker, is that Rainbow survives with an amazing continuity, thanks to his son Murray, Murray’s wife Debbie, their son Scott, and a close-knit "family" of employees.

Survive? Some forty years after it all began, the place is thriving. On a pleasant Saturday morning, a regular stream of customers leave the store with heavy, moist rye breads loaded with carroway seeds, a bagful of assorted bagels, or onion rolls brimming with onions. "Instead of putting stuff on top, everything runs through our breads, which a lot of people don’t do today," insists Debbie Kaplan. Other customers depart with their boxes and bags filled with diverse pastries, cookies, cupcakes, and cakes—including those legendary Russian teacakes.

But busy? According to Murray, 49. "Sometimes during the holidays, customers are lined up all the way out onto Reservoir Avenue," he says, "and we have to work 24-hour shirts." Overseeing Rainbow’s entire operation, Murray puts in 80 to 90 hours during a typical work week. "You gotta love this to do it," he admits.

He’s loved it from the beginning. "I started with my father when I was ten years old," says Murray. Gradually learning how to make breads, Murray and his brother Daniel, two years older, hand-knotted the dough for the rolls… "We’d roll the dough out into strips and make knots for Kaiser rolls, a round roll," Murray explains, "and at the end of a day you could see what you’d created, what you’d made, and how it’d come out."

That particular satisfaction has long been a Kaplan tradition. "My grandmother Abraham started the first Kaplan bakery in Providence around 1910," says Murray, "and his father, my great-grandfather, was said to have been a flour miller in Russia." More recently, Murray has been introducing Scott, 28, to the finer points of baking. "He’s fourth generation," Murray boasts.

While baking can be considered an art in itself, young Murray soon acquired a decorator’s learning. As a seventh grader, "My mother used to yell at me to stop playing with the frosting," he recalls, "but I’d been inspired." Mesmerized is more like it—after watching a master cake decorator employed by his father create swan-shaped tiers for wedding cakes out of marzipan. "It was an experience just to watch him work," Murray says, "I wanted to do stuff like that."

Thirty years of practice later, Murray showed me just how deftly he can "spin a rose" for a festive cake. Swirling frosting out the tip of a decorator’s tool, in a few seconds he’s formed petals that look so delicate that if you just breathed on them, they’d stir.

Murray’s distinct flair has enabled him to decorate cakes or ceremonial challahs (enormous loaves of Jewish egg-bread up to six feet long) with lifelike drawings of celebrities. Once he sculpted a giant pound cake into a three-dimensional witch for the bakery’s Halloween window display. "It looked like a person sitting there," Debbie says. But Murray’s greatest renown has been earned by creating replicas of famous buildings—like the State House (it weighed several hundred pounds) he baked for the 1976 Rhode Island Bicentennial. "The State House was certainly the biggest challenge I’ve had," he says, "aerial photographs were taken, and I had to research the building’s exact dimensions." Such scale productions can be months in the making prior to any baking.

Except those obstacles pale before others, Barney was running the business in cramped quarters with his second wife Leah and their sons Daniel and Murray when he purchased a vacant lot at 800 and 804 Reservoir Avenue on February 4, 1964. Groundbreaking began for the Kaplan Building, with Pollacks Delicatessen to be a neighboring income store. Tragically, Barney Kaplan never saw his building completed. Suffering a severe heart attack, he died in December, two months before it opened in February 1965. That left Leah with two grief-stricken teenagers to go it on her own. "This was before bakeries were primarily mechanized," Debbie says, "when everything had to be made from scratch."

Like mixing the sours. "Sours were the base of the doughs for rye bread, real rye bread," Murray explains, "You’d mix it, it’d have to ferment, you’d see it crack, then you’d have to do another mix and it’d have to ferment again. My mother would do this most evenings, well into the night- hunched over a wooden trough."

Somehow Leah Kaplan persevered, remaining the bakery’s backbone until her death in 1979. "She was an extraordinary woman," says Debbie, Murray’s spouse since 1968.

In fact, Rainbow’s history has been peopled by extraordinary persons. Consider lifelong baker Rico Gatzilli, who used to make all the Rainbow puff pastries by himself before retiring in 1996 at age 89. Hired in 1960, Garzilli remembers what his old friend Barney Kaplan was all about. "This was during a terrific blizzard. All night long, it was snowing. Usually I got up at 4 a.m. to walk to work about five blocks away, but as I stepped off my steps, the snow hit almost to my hose, so I went back inside and called the bakery. Barney answered, ‘Barney, I can’t get to work this morning,’ I said. He said, ‘You get a shovel and shovel your way here!" Garzilli did.

END