Daddy Rich Reviews a Book - Dough!

I am so excited - Daddy Rich has officially posted his first review. Daddy Rich was beginning to get envious of all the wonderful perks Mommy Meryl and Miss Allie are getting via this review site. So when he saw the book Dough: A Memoir by Mort Zachter sitting on our counter the other day and asked what it was for, he was all excited and asked if he could read it. I told him absolutely on one condition - he reviews it too!!

The deal was sealed and without further ado, here is Daddy Rich's review:

The book Dough: A Memoir is a memoir by Mort Zachter, a suburban Long Island lawyer & accountant turned writer who grew up in what can be described as a working class family in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Early in the book the author indicates how “growing up he felt poor – not a homeless hungry dressed-in-rags poor, but a never-discussed sense that we simply couldn't afford better.”

The family business (a commissioned bakery started by his Russian immigrant grandparents on New York’s Lower East Side) referred to as “The Store” was run by his 2 bachelor uncles Joe & Harry. The author’s mother worked part-time at the bakery too, “never paid for her efforts, she received only whatever left over bread, cake or cookies she could carry home.” This was her duty to the family business run by her brothers.

The story takes place in 1994, the store having been closed sometime in the 1980’s after one of his Uncle’s had died. His other uncle, Harry, although still alive, was now living with the author’s parents in their 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, suffering from Parkinson’s disease and dementia.

The author, struggling financially in maintaining an accounting practice by day, and going to law school at night while trying to support a wife and the expenses associated with adopting two children, was dealt an “awakening” early in the story when he accidentally found out that Uncle Harry had been sitting on a small fortune – to the tune of approximately $6 million. This is something that would never be known by the lifestyles maintained by his uncle and his parents.

As with many first generation immigrant families, certain things were just not talked about openly, and the discovery of this fortune by the author was not something that he was going to get all the answers about easily. Instead it became a process of slowly learning things about his family-yet in the end still not learning everything - about how this fortune was amassed.

The story, although a fast read, was told in a bifurcated structure that alternates between the distant and near past. This structure at times proved distracting, yet was probably necessary to effectively tell the story.

Throughout the story, the author had to reconcile in his mind how his family hid this fortune and did nothing towards helping the next generation (himself) as he struggled financially to go to Law School at night while working days at a job he didn’t like, and having to borrow money from his wife’s family to pay the expenses to adopt his children.



Although in college the author wanted to be an English major and a writer, he chose the path of accountancy and law because he knew he had to make money to not only support his family but he believed that one day he would have to support his elderly parents and uncle too.

Despite this, the story was told in a non-judgmental tone. Perhaps this is because in the end, after his uncle died, to save on estate taxes his mother renounced her claim on the money and let it pass to the author. One wonders what tone this story might have had if in the end, the uncle who died with no will, lost all the money to estate taxes and the new found family fortune was lost as quickly as it was found ?