In fact there is some evidence that Frederick did leave Moscow for a period during the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution—specifically, sometime between November 1904 and September 1906. As he explained to American diplomats more than a dozen years later, “In 1905, I was on my way to San Francisco and stopped in Philippine Islands, Manila, when Russo-Japanese War broke out. I was accompanying a Russian nobleman as interpreter.” He also told an American tourist a more detailed variant of the same story.
Was this the truth or invention? If Frederick was trying to persuade the diplomats that he was a loyal American despite having lived abroad for twenty-five years, what good could it have done him to make up an aborted trip to San Francisco with a stop in the Philippines (which had recently become an American colony)? As it happens, there is evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Frederick had family ties to Berlin through his wife. It is possible that he moved there temporarily to escape the violence in Moscow; it is also possible that he went there to open a restaurant. However, after World War I, with Germany defeated and widely reviled, it would not have been in Frederick’s interests to acknowledge any connections to that country, especially when dealing with American officials. Nevertheless, judging by the fragmentary evidence available, Berlin is the more likely version.
Although Aquarium had survived serious damage, Aumont had been frightened by the violence and destruction he witnessed during the revolution. His self-indulgent business practices also caught up to him, and by early 1907 bankruptcy was looming. Aumont decided to escape to France (he stole his employees’ money when he left), and Aquarium fell on hard times for a number of years.
Frederick needed a new job, and the next one he got marked his emergence into the topmost ranks of his profession. Among Moscow’s many celebrated restaurants, one stood out because of its age—it dated from the beginning of the nineteenth century—and its fame. Yar Restaurant, or simply Yar, as Muscovites called it, was considered by many connoisseurs to be the finest in Russia and one of the best in all of Europe. Jobs in Yar were coveted by waiters not only because of its prestige but because of the generosity of many of its famous and wealthy clients. That Frederick became a maître d’hôtel there, probably starting in 1908 if not before, is testimony to how far he had come in Russia. By then he had probably already developed his glib, if often grammatically flawed, command of spoken Russian. His French would have been useful with some patrons, but he would need to communicate readily in Russian with most of the others as well as his employer and the restaurant’s staff.
Yar was located on the northwestern edge of Moscow. To be near his new job Frederick moved his family from the calm of Chukhinsky Lane to 18 Petersburg Highway, which was the main road to the imperial capital about 350 miles to the northwest. Although two miles farther out from the city center than Frederick’s old neighborhood near Aquarium, Yar was well situated in terms of attracting clients. Directly across the highway, on the edge of Khodynka Field (where over a thousand people had been trampled to death during a celebration commemorating the 1896 coronation of Nicholas II, a tragedy that many took as a bad omen for his reign), were the Moscow racetrack and the airport of the Moscow Society of Aeronautics. During the early years of the twentieth century, airplanes were a new craze in Russia, as they were elsewhere around the world. Muscovites saw their first airplane on September 15, 1909, when the French aviator Legagneux demonstrated his Voisin biplane at Khodynka Field. Thousands thrilled at the sight, and spectators flocked in ever-increasing numbers to subsequent displays of aerial acrobatics. Yar was happy to provide champagne and other potables to celebrate exhibitions of hair-raising stunts by the spindly aircraft, as well as to mourn the victims of their disastrous crashes.
When Frederick began to work at Yar the owner was Aleksey Akimovich Sudakov, who had bought the restaurant in 1896 and nurtured it to its great success and fame over the next twenty years. Sudakov was an absolute perfectionist and would not have given Frederick a visible and responsible position without being certain of his professionalism and polish. Despite the obvious differences between them, there are also several striking parallels between Frederick’s life path and Sudakov’s. Sudakov was born a peasant in Yaroslavl province and went through a demanding apprenticeship as a lowly assistant waiter before becoming a manager and finally buying a small restaurant of his own. This background is not unlike Frederick’s origins in black, rural Mississippi and his work in big city restaurants and hotels. Both men succeeded only because of their own talents and because they had learned all aspects of the restaurant and entertainment business from the ground up.
But it was not only Sudakov who could serve as a mentor—there also was Aleksey Fyodorovich Natruskin, the “king” of Yar’s staff, as Sudakov himself described him. Natruskin was the senior maître d’hôtel when Frederick worked there and had held this position without interruption for thirty years. As such, he was Frederick’s immediate superior and would have played a role in honing his already advanced skills, either actively or by example. Well known to several generations of Yar’s loyal customers, Natruskin was much admired and respected by them for his ability to balance his dignified manner with the utmost attention to their desires and tastes, a combination that they found very flattering (and that many later remembered as Frederick’s salient traits as well). Natruskin’s calculated skills were well rewarded by the clients he charmed and made feel at home. Visiting grand dukes gave him jeweled gifts as mementos while businessmen and others tipped him lavishly in cash. By the time he retired, he had saved 200,000 rubles, the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s money, which he used to buy an investment property in Moscow. There was much in his life and career that Frederick would imitate; there was also much in it that he would surpass.
As might be expected in view of Frederick’s success in working with such exacting colleagues, the relations among them were rooted not only in pragmatic considerations but also in mutual respect and even affection. There is evidence for this in the grandest event in Yar’s twentieth-century history—an event that Frederick helped orchestrate—the celebration on December 19, 1909, of Yar’s reopening following a major reconstruction. The day was filled with many remarkable tributes to Sudakov, and Frederick joined the five other senior employees in composing and signing a memorable one of their own (in Russian, of course). Identifying themselves as Sudakov’s “closest assistants and collaborators,” they proclaimed that they “saluted” him as “an energetic and conscientious proprietor” and “bowed down” to him as “a person of rare humanity.” They assured him of their “genuine affection,” not only because of his “skillful management,” but also because of his “sensitive soul, which responds to all that is honest and good.” They concluded their tribute by wishing Sudakov “Many Years” (“Mnogaya Leta”), which is actually the name of a Russian Orthodox hymn asking God to grant the celebrant a long life. Proclaiming the hymn’s title at the end of congratulatory remarks such as these would traditionally serve as the prompt for singing it, and the six signers of the address almost certainly did so, together with many of the others present.