Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (10 page)

Even as delicatessens became both setting and theme for popular culture, they took on a highly theatrical vibe of their own. Beyond the celebrity atmosphere, one of the most entertaining aspects of the Jewish delicatessen was provided by the stereotypically snooty Jewish waiters, many of whom were former actors from the Yiddish or vaudeville stage. Jewish delicatessen waiters were frequently bossy and obnoxious to the customers; they told them where to sit, what to order, and how to behave. They acted, in other words, more like the famously snooty waiters in high-class Parisian restaurants than the servers that one would expect in a New York sandwich shop.

The short-tempered, sarcastic delicatessen waiter was always ready with a cynical remark that cut the customer down to size like an expert tailor taking a swipe at a garment. He expressed the resentment, always bubbling above the surface like the froth on a glass of seltzer, that the Jewish laborer felt for those who were starting to put on airs. The waiter was also left behind in a backbreaking occupation, serving his social betters with food that symbolized upward mobility.
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As Diane Kassner, the bewigged and heavily-made-up waitress who worked for decades at the Second Avenue Deli, intoned with a mixture of stoicism and regret as she dumped matzoh ball soup from a tin cup into a customer’s bowl, “You’ll be the richer; I’ll be the pourer.”
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Many waiters labored for decades in the same restaurant; it was not uncommon for the waiters at Ratner’s (which was a well-known dairy restaurant) to work into their eighties or
nineties. It is no wonder that the waiters at Lindy’s joked about writing a book about their experience, under the title “I’ve Waited Long Enough.”
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The Jewish waiter was, in Alan Richman’s words, “as much as an American original as the workingmen who drove herds of cattle, laid railroad tracks, built skyscrapers.” The only difference, he conceded, was that the waiter “just moved a lot slower.”
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Why did customers want to be insulted or treated jocularly when they ate in Jewish delicatessens? Most Jews were probably able to discriminate between what was truly nasty or inattentive treatment and what was essentially an appeal to a common “language” or way of interacting, in which raised voices and sarcasm were a shared inheritance from Yiddish immigrant culture. Who else could talk to you so obnoxiously other than a close friend or family member? “A waiter in Lindy’s,” it was said, “is not only your servant. He’s also your relative.”
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The waiter was a kind of surrogate uncle or grandfather for the duration of the meal; he paradoxically made you feel at home by treating you with undisguised contempt.

Furthermore, the hostile-seeming server was nothing new in American culture. An anonymous New York waitress, quoted in 1916, was asked about the effect of the work on her physical and emotional state. “Sore feet and a devilish mean disposition,” she responded.
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In the early years of the twentieth century, when women were first being hired in significant numbers as waitresses (until then, the idea of having women serve male customers carried awkward sexual connotations), the stereotype of the ill-mannered “hasher” developed. “Almost everyone agreed that the ‘hasher’ (girl who waited table) of a generation ago was an untidy, uneven-tempered, unpredictable creature,” noted one observer during the Depression. “She didn’t have charm.” But by the 1930s, an important change had occurred, in that “pulchritude and personality are just as necessary to the food-dispenser as pork chops and
pastrami
.”
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Many non-Jews also enjoyed being ribbed by the waiters, despite the disparity between the way in which they were
treated in non-Jewish restaurants and the delicatessen waiters’ brusqueness. The sociologist Harry G. Levine recalled that his Irish and Scotch-Irish mother, who hailed from Hibbing, Minnesota, after she saw a Broadway show made a beeline for the Stage or Lindy’s, where she could look forward to an equally diverting performance from a different breed of entertainers, the “bossy, know-it-all waiters,” whom Levine said were no less salient in his memory than “the Formica tables, the walls lined with pictures of celebrities [he’d] never heard of, the glass cases filled with enormous cheesecakes, and the multimeat sandwiches named after comedians.”
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Outside the theater district, the appeal of the delicatessen spread rapidly, as take-out food suddenly jumped in popularity. While the immigrant Jewish wife was expected to cook for her
family, the second-generation Jewish wife began to pay others to cook for her and her family. A Yiddish song recorded in the late 1920s by Pesach Burstein, “Git Mir Di Meidlach Fun Amol” (Give Me the Girls from Yesteryear), lamented that modern Jewish women danced to jazz music, smoked cigarettes, and fed their men with gassy food from the corner delicatessen. If only, the singer fantasized, he could find one of the virtuous old-time girls—non-Jewish girls, it seems—with blond hair, beautiful braids, and the inclination to prepare home-cooked meals for her beau.
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Even after marriage, it seemed, Jewish women continued to take food out from the local delicatessen. As the homemaker Ethel Somers complained in 1927, “In this age of delicatessen lure, simple home dinners are becoming all too uncommon. . . . They are commonly shunned.”
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Sometimes it fell to the husbands to do the delicatessen shopping, perhaps because their wives were out of the house. “Already some of the young men who married last June are dropping in at the delicatessen about dinner time to get a few sandwiches,” a humor column in
Life
magazine noted sarcastically in 1929.
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At a time of expanding freedoms for women, many conservative commentators viewed delis as enabling women to evade their household responsibilities. What would women do if they no longer had to spend the afternoon shopping and cooking for dinner? Either they could keep working after marriage, or they could use their afternoons for leisure pursuits such as playing cards, going to film and theater matinees, clothes shopping, reading novels, and attending meetings and classes. As a Brooklyn Jewish mother in Daniel Fuchs’s proletarian novel
Homage to Blenholt
noted sarcastically, “all the young ladies, they don’t cook like the older generation. Lunch they eat in the delicatessen stores with the baby carriages outside, and in the night when the husbands come home from work, they throw together pastrami, cole slaw, potato salad, and finished, supper.”
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These New York housewives were, to some extent, following in the footsteps of the feminist and social reformer Jane
Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house with a heavily Jewish clientele. As early as 1904, Addams had advocated the ordering of all food from take-out stores in order to release women from “domestic servitude.” As
Everybody’s Magazine
reported, “She would have your meals delivered at the house-door, just as the returned washing is. Your beefsteak would be ‘done’ as your linen is. Cooking is drudgery and should be ‘done’ on the outside. . . . [She] [f]ound great bake, soup, meat, delicatessen shops.”
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Women could join the workforce and still, through taking out food, have dinner on the table when their husbands walked in the door. This, according to the journalist L. H. Robins, helped to create the “beehive” nature of the New York economy, which generated greater wealth than any other city on earth. But it was not just that the wives were earning money that made the husbands tolerant of all the take-out dinners they ate from the delicatessen. Robins insisted that most husbands would rather keep their wives from toil, thus preserving their beauty, than sit down to a home-cooked repast at the end of each day.
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The effect of delicatessen food on customers’ marriages was a matter of heated debate. One deli owner reported in 1925 that his interaction with his customers gave him intimate knowledge of what was going on in their homes; he boasted that he was a greater expert in marital relationships than were Brigham Young, King Solomon, and the local family court judge put together! The secret of a good marriage, he disclosed, was to live near a delicatessen, speculating that if the range were stolen from some of his customers’ kitchens, it would take a month before they would notice the theft.
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Others, by contrast, viewed the delicatessen as destroying marriages and disrupting family life. At an annual convention in Baltimore of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, its president, Mrs. John D. Sherman, claimed that the “delicatessen wife,” a term that she evidently coined, gave her husband grounds for divorce. She linked the buying of prepared food to participation in other “jazzy” activities, coupled with an alarming
tendency to shirk the housework.
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As Agnes V. Mahoney of the Industrial Survey and Research Bureau put it, it was precisely the reliance of many wives on the corner delicatessen and its “ready-cooked tin-can food” that had increased the incidence of broken homes.
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Florence Guy Seabury’s satirical essay “The Delicatessen Husband” took up the situation of a man who “lives from can to mouth.”
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Since his wife works long hours as a chemist, he is delegated to do the household shopping. But he feels emasculated by the shopping experience, viewing delicatessens in particular as home wreckers and “emblems of a declining civilization.” In short, he concludes, they are “generations removed from his ideals.”
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Nevertheless, by the turn of the twenty-first century, Seabury predicted, everything from clothing to newborn babies would arrive wrapped up in neat delicatessen-type packages. Seabury suggested that the proliferation of delicatessens represented a degree of progress since while a delicatessen husband might be “cursed with the task of bringing into his walled apartment his share of the canned tongue and chicken wings,” he at least did not have to slaughter the animal himself or split the wood to make the fire for his own dinner and coffee.
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Delicatessen stores were also viewed as the unfortunate byproducts of powerful new technologies that were rapidly reshaping American culture. One prominent critic, Silas Bent, assailed the toll on the mind and body that the “mechanized” way of living was beginning to take. Bent viewed the speed with which food could be produced and circulated as symbolic of the drastic changes in modern life. In a chapter titled “From Barbecue to Delicatessen Dinner,” Bent traced these developments from primitive man’s way of eating to the modern methods by which foodstuffs were circulated around the globe. The almost instant availability of an astonishing variety of food, Bent believed, caused a host of both physical and emotional problems. “The machine,” Bent lamented, “is sending more and more of us out of the home into restaurants, cafeterias, clubs and hotels; it is making us soft and dyspeptic, hurried and worried.”
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Those men who brought delicatessen food home without first requesting permission of the lady of the house risked becoming the target of considerable wrath. In Arthur Kober’s short story “You Can’t Beat Friedkin’s Meats,” published in 1938 in the
New Yorker
, Mrs. Gross is enraged when her husband brings home a large paper bag of cold cuts from the local kosher delicatessen for their Saturday lunch. “Mine cooking is no good, ha?” she explodes, before rushing out to throw the food in the face of the hapless delicatessen owner.
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Similarly, in Jo Sinclair’s major work of postwar fiction,
Wasteland
, a Jewish mother is horribly insulted when her grownup son purchases corned-beef sandwiches for his Friday-night repast rather than eat her cooking.
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Yet, by the interwar era, the delicatessen had become the quintessential urban store, preserving denizens from having to cook for themselves whenever they found it impractical or inconvenient to do so. By 1921, according to an advertising-industry trade publication, there were already 319 delicatessens in the Bronx, even though Jewish migration to the neighborhood had not yet reached its peak.
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The humorist Montague Glass jokingly suggested that a “booster” sign be erected at the entrance to the city reading, “New York: Gateway to Westchester County,” with the “information” that “New York City Contains 9,622,849 Delicatessen Stores (Estimated) and Over 38,658,031 Miles of Electric Railroad.”
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Nor was the popularity of delicatessens limited to New York. As one journalist in Baltimore put it, a “studio apartment, with a cocktail shaker and a dinner furnished by the nearest delicatessen store, usually represents the sum total of standardized living among thousands of city dwellers in these modern times.”
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Tracing the history of the delicatessen store from its modest beginnings as a purveyor of “Swiss cheese and pickled lambs’ tongues” to its gussied-up modern incarnation with its menu of “broiled guinea hen and mushrooms under glass to alligator pear salad and petit fours,” she found that the delicatessen had come a long way in the sophistication of its fare and the elegance of its window displays. Indeed, she noted, delicatessen
stores in America were judged superior to their European counterparts, given the greater variety of foods available in this country—“tomatoes, peaches, alligator pears and pineapples are rare and expensive luxuries abroad, while they are plentiful and comparatively cheap here.”
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Just as before the First World War, Sunday night remained the delicatessen’s busiest time of the week. Calling the delicatessen the “urbanite’s pantry-keeper,” Robins dubbed those delicatessens that were open on Sundays “oases in a desert of locked-up plenty.” The delicatessen was, he noted, nothing short of a “life saver” for those who were entertaining unexpected guests, for families whose cook had walked out, for travelers who came back from vacation to an empty larder, for people who decided on the spur of the moment to have a picnic, for those who had planned to go the beach but whose plans were foiled by rain—actually “for almost any kind of New Yorker there is.”
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