The Endurance of Joe Mermelstein

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Perhaps you saw the recent page one article in The New York Times about taxi driver Sam Goldstein, who the Times called the longest-serving taxi driver in the city. Goldstein is a well-known figure in the industry. He had been profiled in the Daily News several time and in other papers, even the London Guardian, before the Times discovered him. Unfortunately, the paper of record got it wrong. Goldstein is not the longest-serving (as the Times knows, but refuses to admit). Josef Mermelstein, now 80, has been driving four years longer, and he is still at it.

This is his story:

The Endurance of
Joe Mermelstein

By DAN ACKMAN

"I am not your ordinary taxi driver," Josef Mermelstein says, and in ways he is the anti-cabbie.

New Yorkers complain that cabbies drive too fast. Mr. Mermelstein drives slowly. New Yorkers say too many cabbies don't speak good English. Mr. Mermelstein is fluent, his speech enriched by a heavy middle European accent. New Yorkers grouse that cabbies don't know their way around. Mr. Mermelstein knows every landmark, including some, like the old Taft Hotel, that are no longer there.

Josef Mermelstein, 77, a survivor of Auschwitz, has been driving a yellow cab in this town for 47 years. There may be a few cabbies who have been driving as long. One or two a bit longer. But not many.

Extraordinary as he is, Mr. Mermelstein has this much in common with the greenest hack five years out of Bangladesh: He is attracted to the job by a combination of freedom and security; and he has a deep and abiding aversion for how cabbies are treated by the current Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Mr. Mermelstein was born to an affluent landowning family in a small village called Geredne in what was then Czechoslovakia, now part of the Ukraine. During the war, the local authorities took control of his father's land. The family got it back briefly, but soon after Josef, his parents and his eight brothers and sisters were sent to nearby concentration camps.

Josef was later shipped to Auschwitz. He survived because he was young and healthy and because the Germans need slave labor to work outside the camp. "They would ask for electricians. I knew as much about being an electrician as I knew about the atom bomb, but I’d go."

He returned to Geredne after the war, but then went back to the American zone of Germany, in part to avoid conscription in he Czech army, and was able to emigrate to the United States.

In New York, he worked in the garment business, but not steadily. "When you were from an upper class family, you didn't learn a trade. Here, I had to pay the price for it. The poor guy from my village got a job easier."

Mr. Mermelstein is disinclined to talk about his experiences during the war. "My story is no so different from all the other stories." His might be "interesting," he concedes, but he prefers no to dwell on the time when his parents and three of his eight siblings were murdered. Has he considered relating his experience to Steven Spielberg's Shoah project? "Yes, I've heard of Spielberg," he says, "and maybe one day when I'll take a day off and make an appointment." For now, he is too busy driving, "serving the public."

Mr. Mermelstein rises at dawn and makes his way from the two-bedroom apartment on the lower east side that he shares with his older brother Leo, 79, to a garage on the East River where he keeps the taxi he bought three years ago. He is the only one to drive his cab, which he keeps in pristine condition. That is why the TLC inspection system makes him furious.

Mermelstein, like all cab owners, has to submit his car for inspection three times a year at the TLC center in Woodside, Queens. But because the inspectors always seem to find something-- anything-- wrong with the car, he says the reality is he must go to Woodside six or nine times a year, spending a half day, most of it waiting, each time.

Recently, the inspectors found fault with the paint job on his driver-side front door. There was not a scratch on it, but if they said it did not match the paint on the rest of the car. Mr. Mermelstein had had the door repainted a year-and-a-half earlier after a fender bender. Since then, the car, including the door, had passed inspection four times. But fifth time a keen-eyed the inspectors noticed that the two shades of bright yellow were not exactly in sync. Mr. Mermelstein had to get the entire car re-painted.

Mr. Mermelstein started as a taxi driver in 1953. At first, he drove part-time in the months where he could not find work in the garment business. "I got so sick of looking for work that I said, look, I have to buy myself a job," he recalled. He bought a taxicab-- a 1955 Ford-- and a medallion in 1956. One day, his boss at the factory told him to look for a job because the factory would be closing in a few weeks. "I took the boss over to the window and said, ‘you see that cab out there -- that's my job."

It has been that way ever since, though Mr. Mermelstein did try other lies of work. In 1967, he built houses in Staten Island, but had trouble selling them. He bought eggs in New Jersey and sold them to diners in Manhattan. That business lasted for about a year. Even while building houses, he would park his cab near the Staten Island Ferry depot, take the ferry, work with contractors all day, and drive the taxi at night. What was it like driving a cab in the ‘50s? "There was a lot of traffic then, but not like it is now," he says.

The biggest change came recently, what Mr. Mermelstein describes as a pattern of harassment by the police department taxi squad and TLC inspectors who can stop taxi drivers without probable cause and then search the cab inside and out for the tiniest infraction. "It's unbelievable what people are doing out there. I have to be afraid to go work in America, after serving the public for so many years? I am not asking so much. If I pass a light, fine, give me a ticket. But I'm just asking that they leave me alone. This way, I'm afraid to go to work-- and they get away with it."

As hard as the job has become for him, he allows it's worse for the newer drivers. These drivers have to pay around $100 to lease a taxi for a 12-hour shift, plus $20 for gas, and pay that off before they take home a dime. "Something happens, they can go home with nothing. It's not an easy life, that's all I can tell you."

Mr. Mermelstein gets along largely by going along. "A guy gets in my cab, he tells me I'm a half hour late for an appointment. I'm not the type to be a wise guy. I don't say, ‘Maybe you should have got up a little earlier.' I go the way they say, even if I know it's the wrong way. I swallow everything. I answer questions if they want. I take them where they want to go and that's it."

"I'm a simple guy," Mr. Mermelstein says. "I have no hobbies. All I want to do is work and be left alone. I hope that's not a crime."

As he has grown older, Mr. Mermelstein has returned to the Orthodox Judaism in which he was raised. On a trip to Israel he learned of a book written by a rabbi named Shulem Adler, who happened to be the grandfather of the rabbi who taught Josef and his brothers at the Yeshiva in Geredne. He paid to have a thousand copies of the book, a commentary on the Torah, reprinted.

He has also returned to his hometown, and is paying to restore the wall to the Jewish cemetery there. He raises this topic reluctantly. "I'm not looking for publicity. I don't want any contributions." No even from Leo, a retired factory owner. About his brother's efforts Leo has this to say: "He's a unique person, and that's it."

Despite his level head, Mr. Mermelstein has become something of an activist. He tried to take his concerns about how cabbies are being treated to TLC commissioner Diane McGrath-McKechnie. He waited outside her office for three hours. When she returned, she went inside and had her receptionist tell Mr. Mermelstein that she was too busy to see him. "I spent all my life in the trade and I don't have the right that she should see me for one minute!" Unapologetically, he compares the current regime to the Gestapo, an institution he knows first-hand.

With all the problems, the traffic, the customers in a rush, the official harassment, considering his age, does he ever consider quitting? "No!" says Josef Mermelstein. "I don't want to quit. They are not going to force me out. I will stay and fight. I will quit when I feel like it. I get disgusted sometimes, but I go on."

February 10, 2001