Dahan, a slightly built modern Orthodox man dressed in jeans, lights a cigarette and inhales.
The business is “very hard,” he tells a visitor in Hebrew. “[The customers] are very hard — justifiably so because they’re spending a lot of money.”
He reaches back to fetch a $275 etrog, nearly all green, unlike its yellow brethren.
“You see that?” he says, pointing to a white speck smaller than the period at the end of a sentence. It’s the slightest of flaws, if that. But someone might scorn it.
The entire enterprise yields an annual profit of less than $10,000, Dahan says.
“I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the tradition,” he says.
His late grandfather, Yaakov Assayag, a tailor in Marrakesh, got into the business 70 years ago, and several of Assayag’s sons followed suit. Lore holds, Dahan explains, that Morocco’s Dumdir has yielded the finest etrogim since the exile following the Second Temple’s destruction.
A customer enters. The first etrog proffered fails to impress in price ($275) or looks. The second ($300) falls short, too. Dahan hands over a third costing $350.
“It’s a beauty,” he says.
The man asks whether Dahan’s competitors offer his top quality. It’s a softball that even a fatigued Dahan swats. It’s nearing 8 p.m. and he’ll be here until midnight.
“You won’t find better,” Dahan states authoritatively, as if it were fact not opinion. “Don’t make a mistake. You’ll wait for the last day, won’t get what you want and you’ll be going crazy.”
Hillel Kuttler wrote this article for JTA.
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