.. Book Review
Sweet and Low By RICH COHEN
Reviewed by PEGGY BARNETT

"Sweet and Low" may be remembered as a lullaby, but the Wisenstadt family legend says that the artificial sweetener that made their fortune was named because of a Tennyson poem. Rich Cohen, the disinherited grandson of the patriarch, thinks maybe he just wanted to sound cultured.

In this book, Sweet and Low, Cohen pulls no punches as he recounts the story of his mother's family and their rise and fall. However, he makes it a very entertaining story. One wonders how he had the courage to tell these outrageous anecdotes. Perhaps because his whole branch of the family has been deliberately left out of any financial gain, he has nothing to lose!

"The diet craze that turned Sweet'N Low into a household name" was part of a quest for "freedom: freedom from history, freedom from exclusion . . . It's the longing that created the fortune and destroyed the family." Cohen loves New York, and he clearly enjoyed the research needed to write this book. He does not include a bibliography, but instead gives numerous informative footnotes. (Though maybe a history of Haiti is pushing it a bit.)

He begins with Morris Eisenstadt, who immigrated from Poland, and who worked on the Brooklyn waterfront. His son Ben was the founder of the Sweet'N Low company, who became a lawyer but earned a living working in a diner and running a cafeteria. "I sometimes think that a family is no more than a collection of stories. . ."

Cohen's first discursion is a brief history of the Jews in New York, which includes a story about how an epithet got its name. In addition to family jokes, his asides lend humor to the saga. Betty (Cohen's grandmother) does not fare well in his book. "Betty was Lady Macbethstein, plotting and planning, not among the Scottish royals on the bluffs and moors, but among the Jewish proletariat, in the steamy walk-ups and Sabbath dinners of immigrant Brooklyn."

Then there was the revered Abraham, killed in World War II, and Gladys, the aunt who never left her room in her parents' house. Marvin, Ben and Betty's oldest son, runs the company finally and insists on being known as "Uncle Marvelous." His older son Jeffrey also becomes president of the company, continuing the concept of primogeniture. None of these relatives emerge in Cohen's book as admirable characters.

Cohen has published several books, and his work has appeared in leading magazines. If he is settling old scores in Sweet'N Low, he does it in hilarious fashion. It is a compelling story of a company and a family, told by one who knows where the secrets are hidden.

It is available at the Mary Willis Library.

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