Marcel Anisfeld obituary

H Forman & Sons smokery had been founded in Stepney in 1905 by Louis’s father, Aaron “Harry” Forman, whose family had emigrated to Britain in the late 19th century to flee an antisemitic pogrom in Odessa. After taking over the business, Marcel maintained a fine line between upholding tradition and modernisation. Moving the company to new premises in Hackney Wick, he introduced metal kilns in place of the old brick smokehouses, but fiercely protected the firm’s original and highly prized east European process of salting, air-drying and smoking — known as Forman’s “London Cure” — that kept bacteria at bay for longer.

Clients included Harrods, Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason, dining rooms at the Palace of Westminster and the leading fine dining establishments of London. As the company exported all over the world, Anisfeld became known as the “smoked salmon king”. He earned the moniker by rising every day at 4am to buy wild salmon at Billingsgate Market. Costermongers saw him coming, but were seemingly powerless to prevent Anisfeld negotiating a superb deal.

Marcel Anisfeld was born in Nowy Sacz, near Krakow, Poland, in 1934 to Regina and Osjasz, a director of a bank, who had started his first business selling food at the age of 13. After Poland was invaded on opposite flanks by Germany and the Soviet Union, the family moved east to Lvov, fancying their chances better under Soviet rule. Weeks later there was a loud banging on the door of their flat, which they opened to Red Army soldiers who gave them ten minutes to gather their possessions. The family was rounded up with others, informed that they were suspected of being German spies and put into cattle trucks bound for Siberia. The train stopped once a day when a bucket of soup was deposited in the truck. After six weeks they reached the village of Osino in the Omsk district of Siberia. Snow was drifting above the doors of buildings.

They were ordered to cut down trees and build their own dwellings in the snow. “A few weeks later a number of wooden houses were finished,” Anisfeld recalled. “No heating, no lighting and no indoor toilets, just one room, divided by a hanging blanket for two families.”

After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Anisfelds were told that they were free to move anywhere in Russia. The family moved south to Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan, a city with a large Jewish population. Osjasz began buying and selling foodstuffs to support the family and relied on Marcel to deliver the goods. “His activities of buying and selling made him a spekuliant (a speculator), considered one of the most serious crimes in communist Russia. Had he been caught he would have been thrown into jail for ten to 15 years. So I, at the ripe old age of eight or nine, used to help my father carry some of the products to the buyers as it was safer than my father carrying things.”

For the next four years Marcel walked barefoot during the harsh winters and received what education his parents could give him. The unshod eight-year-old would supplement the family income by buying newspapers, cutting them into small pieces and selling them to people to roll cigarettes. He also hauled a metal bucket from the nearest well and sold water by the mugful.

These enterprises effectively saved the lives of his mother, father and sister who in the summer of 1943 fell victim to a typhus epidemic that spread across Uzbekistan as a result of malnutrition and lack of sanitation. As the only member of the family not stricken with the disease, Marcel sold and bartered valuables to pay for medicine to keep his loved ones alive. “I was the nurse and the breadwinner at the age of only nine. Thousands of people did not survive this epidemic, including my grandfather.”

Returning to Nowy Sacz in 1945, the family learnt that almost all the city’s Jews had been “exterminated”. “Our beautiful apartment, taken over by the Nazis during the war as the Gestapo headquarters, was now the local police station. My father’s business premises had been taken over by local people. The Jewish population which, before the war, was about 40-50 percent of the total 30,000 population, was wiped out, apart from the people like ourselves who escaped eastwards.”

On arrival in the UK in 1946, Marcel and his sister stayed with relatives who had escaped Poland before the war. The children were joined by their parents in 1948 and Marcel was educated at Aryeh House school in Brighton. He then worked for the button-holing business that his father and uncles had set up in the East End.

Anisfeld retired in 1998 and watched with pride as his son Lance continued to operate the last fish smokery in east London and build up the Forman & Field luxury food brand. The complex was compulsorily purchased to make way for the London Olympics in 2012. They rebuilt at nearby Fish Island, at a building complete with restaurant and events space, from where Anisfeld had a grandstand view of the fireworks at the opening and closing Olympics ceremonies.

Anisfeld — who is survived by his wife Irene, son Lance and daughters Sharon, Suzanne and Candice — loved music and parties, preferably together. He was a soloist in his synagogue choir, loved speaking Yiddish and, meeting a fellow Jew, would submit them to his Ashley Blaker test. His wife banned several Yiddish words from his vocabulary, but lobbus (a mischievous or cheeky child), shlep (to move tediously) and shluff (sleep) were non-negotiable.

In later years Anisfeld became a Holocaust teacher and shared his wartime testimony at schools in Birmingham with 90 per cent Muslim children that had been subject to the “Trojan Horse” controversy — a plot to instill a hardline Islamist ethos at several schools.

To mark Anisfeld’s 85th birthday children at Nansen primary school in Birmingham produced a scrapbook of artwork and poetry focusing on elements of his life and declaring their promise to retell his story.

Marcel Anisfeld, businessman, was born on September 17, 1934. He died on November 10, 2023, aged 89