Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (17 page)

With the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the rise of the civil rights movement, and the involvement of the country in Vietnam, the carefree ethos of the early 1960s began to dissipate. The burgeoning interest in multiculturalism, however, meant that ethnic food rose in popularity; the food historian Warren Belasco has insightfully compared the rise of ethnic food with
the popularity of oak furniture—both spoke to consumers’ desire for the sense of security that they identified with traditional ways of life.
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Belasco attributes the interest in ethnic food to a host of factors, including the spread of foods from one ethnic group to another (for example, “in-migrating blacks [who] sampled out-migrating kosher foods”), the growth of tourism, and the presentation of ethnic foods in the mass media—especially in relation to ethnic movie and television stars.
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Indeed, people in the 1960s counterculture who resisted the “cultural imperialism” that was destroying local foodways around the globe and replacing them with standardized American foods founded a “countercuisine” based largely on ethnic foods. As Belasco puts it, while the first generation had made food from scratch, the second generation sought “old-style sauces to put on American meats and vegetables,” and the third generation purchased “fully processed convenience foods with an Old World aura that could be supplied with a few spices and a picturesque aura.”
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Many ethnic foods were produced by large corporations, including the Pizza Hut chain and R. J. Reynolds’ Chun King line of Oriental food; Chun King trumpeted a “new mood in food” as the impetus for the spread of Chinese food throughout the land.
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Delicatessen foods were no exception to the commodification of ethnic foods; in 1968, Hebrew National was sold to Riviana Foods, which was itself acquired by Colgate-Palmolive, a soap and toothpaste company.
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(The Pines family bought it back in 1980; by 1986, the company was producing half a million frankfurters a day in its plant in Maspeth, Queens.)
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Savvy young entrepreneurs who founded smaller ethnic-food companies could make a quick profit by selling out to bigger companies.
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Jewish foods, like other ethnic foods, were commodified and torn from their original social context. The pastry-wrapped “deli sandwiches” sold under the Campbell’s Pepperidge Farm and Nestlé’s Stouffer’s brands had as much relationship to a real New York delicatessen sandwich as frozen burritos did to authentic Mexican cuisine.

But it was Chinese food that most captivated American Jews. According to the blogger Peter Cherches, Chinese food was a “birthright” for Brooklyn Jews of his generation; he recalls being “weaned on chicken chow mein.”
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And if a rabbi needed to find ten Jews for a
minyan
(prayer quorum), what better place to look than in the local Chinese restaurant? In an updating of the phenomenon of “cross-over eating” found by Donna Gabaccia at the turn of the twentieth century, one ethnic group began to define itself through the consumption of another ethnic group’s food.
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The critic Neil Postman recalled that the shopping district in Flatbush, where he grew up during the Depression, boasted appetizing stores, two kosher delicatessens, three candy stores, and a “very popular” Chinese restaurant. On Friday nights, he and his older siblings had a ritual of bringing a dollar to the Chinese restaurant to buy three dinners for thirty cents each, which included egg drop soup, an egg roll, and chow mein.
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Many theories have been propounded to explain the intense Jewish fondness for Chinese food. Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine, the authors of a landmark study on the subject of New York Jews eating Chinese food, noted that Chinese food was appealing to Jews who, while not keeping strictly kosher (or keeping kosher at home but not away from home), avoided the overt consumption of pork and shellfish. Tuchman and Levine dubbed it “safe
treyf
”—food that was so thoroughly diced and chopped that it was not recognizable as nonkosher. Chinese food thus, according to Tuchman and Levine, became a “flexible open-ended symbol, a kind of blank screen on which [Jews] projected a series of themes relating to their identity as modern Jews and as New Yorkers”
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—one that replaced the equally blank screen or palimpsest of the pastrami sandwich. Through the consumption of Chinese food, Tuchman and Levine suggest, Jews were able to perceive themselves as more sophisticated and urbane, despite the fact that the food was inexpensive and relatively simple. As the British social anthropologist Allison James notes, in writing of magazines and television programs
about foreign cuisines, such cultural products paved the way to a “culinary, expatriate, cosmopolitanism.”
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Others have speculated that Jews felt an affinity to the Chinese, since both were ethnic outsiders in Christian America. The Chinese are often called the “Jews of the East,” and in America they became even more marginalized. Tuchman and Levine note that eating in Chinese restaurants “did not raise the issue of Jews’ marginal position in a Christian society” because the Chinese were even more marginal than the Jews were.
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Indeed, Jewish patrons could feel superior to the Chinese. They could even insult the waiter, turning the tables on the treatment they received in Jewish delicatessens.

As Philip Roth put it in his 1967 novel
Portnoy’s Complaint
, “Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because, one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but
white
—and maybe even Anglo-Saxon.” The idea that Jews could be actually taken for Protestants by the Chinese was especially appealing: “Imagine! No wonder the waiters can’t intimidate us. To them, we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP!”
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Both the Jews and the Chinese operated on a different calendar than Christians did; this was why the biggest night of the year for Jews to eat out in Chinese restaurants was Christmas Eve, a night when most other restaurants were closed. But in addition to serving as this once-a-year gathering place, the Chinese restaurant to some extent also displaced the deli as the weekly Sunday-evening gathering spot for Jewish families.

Of course, Jews still knew, as much as they tried to pretend otherwise, that they were eating forbidden foods. As the old Yiddish saying goes,
Az men est chazzer, zol rinnen iber der bord
—“If you’re going to eat pork, you might as well eat it until it runs over your beard.” In other words, if you are going to sin, you should enjoy it! Guilt, according to a Canadian rabbi, is a “terrific condiment.”
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On the other hand, as the food scholar
Miryam Rotkovitz has noted, the very fact that Chinese food was taboo made the experience of eating in a Chinese restaurant more exciting; it “contributed to the exoticism of the experience.”
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The craze among Jews for Chinese food led to the first cookbook of kosher Chinese food, written by Ruth and Bob Grossman; it presented whimsical recipes that mingled Jewish and Chinese ingredients, such as Foh Nee Shrimp Puffs, which were fried balls of gefilte fish served with hot mustard and plum sauce.
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Furthermore, the opening of kosher Chinese restaurants made it possible for observant Jews—many of whom had grown up in nonkosher households in which Chinese food was a staple and only later embraced Orthodox Judaism—to enjoy Chinese food as much as their less religious coreligionists did.

The marriage of delicatessen and Chinese food had been solemnized on the Lower East Side at Schmulka Bernstein’s (later Bernstein on Essex), a kosher delicatessen that was opened in 1932 by Sol Bernstein, who adopted his father’s name—his father was a butcher and meat manufacturer—as the name of the restaurant. Starting with a small seven-table establishment on Rivington Street between Essex and Ludlow, he moved to 110 Rivington Street, with a factory in the same building, the factory entrance being on Essex Street. The deli expanded in the 1950s by breaking through the wall and taking over the factory space, pushing the factory out to Utica Avenue in Brooklyn.

Bernstein’s daughter, Eleanor, was brought up in an apartment over the store. “My mother never forgave my father for going into the deli business,” she recalled. “When they got married, he was planning to be a doctor, but once he got to medical school, the cadavers upset him. But he joked that he was still an M.D.—a meat dealer!” The deli became known for its specially spiced Romanian pastrami, which other delis tried to copy. It also smoked a lot of geese for the winter holidays; smoked goose was popular among Germans for Christmas and had thus become a favored Chanukah dish for German Jews. In 1960, Eleanor’s father realized that Jews liked Chinese food,
and he called an agency that sent him a Chinese chef one day a week. “The Chinese chef came in like a doctor with a little case,” she said. “He wanted to use his own knives, but the rabbi told him that everything had to be kosher; he gave the chef a lesson about all the special rules. My father took the chef to the restaurant supply stores on the Bowery and bought him whatever he needed.” As demand grew, the restaurant hired more Chinese chefs, until the fateful day when, as Eleanor put it, “a war broke out in the kitchen between the Shanghai and the Cantonese, and my father had to fire everyone—-which wasn’t easy, because they were in a union—and start over.” Over time, the restaurant grew to the point that there were 52 people working in the kitchen and a total of 220 in the store.
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The delicatessen had two different menus—one for the traditional Jewish offerings and one for the Chinese ones. A sample Chinese menu from Bernstein’s on Essex St. from the early 1960s (“Where West Meets East for a Chinese Feast and Kashruth Is Guaranteed”) trumpets the fact that “for the first time,” the “Orthodox Jew or Jewess can taste the food specialties of the Orient,” advising patrons to begin with soup before proceeding to appetizers—egg rolls, spare ribs, or “sweet and pungent” veal—and then on to the main course and dessert. The menu also suggests that each party order a variety of dishes to share, a practice that became so popular that later generations would take it for granted.
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Bernstein hired Chinese waiters and gave them tasseled skullcaps to wear, so they looked like Chinese Jews. He sent his chefs to famous Chinese restaurants such as Pearl’s to try their dishes and adapt them to a kosher menu. Although Bernstein would never eat in a nonkosher restaurant, he would occasionally accompany his staff on these spying missions; he would order one of the restaurant’s signature dishes and poke through the food with his chopsticks until he figured out the ingredients so that he could create a kosher version. Even in the Chinese menu at Bernstein’s, the dishes frequently melded Chinese food—or at least the Americanized versions of Chinese food—with eastern
European Jewish food. Among the specialties of the house were salami fried rice, egg foo yung with chicken livers, and Stuffed Chicken Bernstein—a half chicken stuffed with bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and pastrami. Israeli beers and wines were on the drinks menu, along with German beers and domestic kosher wines.

Italian cuisine was also extremely popular in Jewish communities. Jews and Italians, who often looked similar, both arrived
on these shores in large numbers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The Jewish section of the Lower East Side was right next to Chinatown, but it was also adjacent to the immigrant Italian section, known as Little Italy, which had a large Sicilian and Neapolitan population. Italians and Jews went to school together, played on teams together, and occasionally ate in each other’s apartments, as in the chapter in Henry Roth’s classic Lower East Side Jewish immigrant novel
Call It Sleep
, in which the main character, David Schearl, is served crabs by his new Italian friend, Leo. David is afraid to eat the unfamiliar, clearly nonkosher delicacy, but Leo, sucking on a claw, boasts, “We c’n eat anyt’ing we wants,” adding, “Anyt’ing that’s good.”
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At the turn of the century, according to Philip Taylor, “a Jewish boy . . . could easily recognize an Italian district into which he had strayed, by the sight of certain sausages and cheeses in shops.”
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Italians in Red Hook and Canarsie were not far from the Jewish neighborhoods in Brownsville, Bensonhurst, and Brighton Beach. Jews and Italians were known for getting into conflict over religion, with frequent street fights between the children of the two groups. But by the 1950s, Daniel Rogov recalls, the Italian kids would tag along when the Jewish kids went on quests to eat a hot dog in each of the six delicatessens in the Brooklyn Heights area; if they got into a fight, it was “more like playing stickball” than actually fighting, in the days before gang wars with tire chains.
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Both Jews and Italians loved to eat, and both groups were enraptured by, and obsessed with, the sheer quantity of food that was available in America—the meat, the fish, the coffee, the rich desserts. They also both enjoyed a highly theatrical approach to dining. Mamma Leone’s, the Italian restaurant in the theater district, had extravagant decor, nude statues, singing waiters, and huge quantities of highly Americanized Italian food including spaghetti and meatballs, veal Sorrentina, clams casino, and shrimp scampi. Jewish and Italian families both prized dinnertime as the most important daily occasion.

The historian John Mariani could be writing equally about Jews in noting that in Italian households “the dinner table, not the living room, was the center of political and social discourse that raged on for hours and into the night, until one or another family member collapsed on the couch.”
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Rabbi Eric Cytryn recalled that while there was a kosher deli right around the corner from his house in Westbury, Long Island, his family usually gravitated to a local Italian restaurant instead, even though since they kept kosher, they could not eat any of the meat or shellfish on the menu.
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Beginning in the 1970s, Italian restaurants became increasingly fashionable in New York. Mimi Sheraton, the
New York Times
restaurant critic who happened to be Jewish, relentlessly championed restaurants such as Il Nido and Il Monello that served upscale Northern Italian cuisine, which was a far cry from the pasta and red-sauce-based Southern Italian cuisine that was familiar to most Americans. Even the typical neighborhood Italian restaurant with the red checkered tablecloth and bottle of olive oil on the table was getting rid of its pizza oven and expanding its veal and chicken offerings.
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Sheraton interviewed the comedian Alan King at Il Nido; he talked about growing up in a kosher home but later developing a taste for many different kinds of food, from Italian to Japanese.
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By the 1980s, fashion industry executives, or “fashionistas,” many of whom were Jewish, patronized Tuscan restaurants, where they shook hands on deals to import high-end Italian silk garments and leather shoes made by Prada, Ferragamo, Versace, and other companies. One Italian restaurant in particular, Da Silvano, was a hangout of the crowd from
Vogue
magazine, where the nation’s fashion styles were set.
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By comparison, Jewish delis never developed into “white tablecloth”–type restaurants where important business deals would be struck. But despite the attraction of other ethnic cuisines, many Jews often felt themselves irresistibly pulled back to a deli. The Jewish sculptor Louise Nevelson, for example, favored Italian food (particularly lobster, veal, or angel’s hair pasta with pesto sauce),
although she also often sought out Mexican, Indian, and Japanese restaurants. But when she felt sad, she headed straight for a deli, where she enjoyed “mounds of sour pickles, pickled green tomatoes, rye bread and even pastrami if it’s good and spicy.”
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