Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (20 page)
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Authors: Ted Merwin
Tags: #REL040030 Religion / Judaism / History
Beginning in the 1980s, Modern Orthodox Judaism, which promoted the idea that Jews could participate equally in American society and yet still maintain fidelity to religious law, gained strength. While Hasidic Jews had colonized neighborhoods in Brooklyn beginning in the interwar period and had seen their numbers climb dramatically in the years after the Holocaust, it was Modern Orthodox Jews who experienced the most dramatic rise in both visibility and influence.
One leading Orthodox rabbi, Walter S. Wurzburger, was quoted in a front-page article in the
New York Times
noting that the “vigor as well as the image” of Orthodox Judaism had been “completely revitalized.” Indeed, he crowed, “Gone are the predictions of the inevitable demise of what was widely dismissed as an obsolete movement that could not cope with the challenges of an ‘open’ society.”
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The resurgence of Orthodox Judaism spelled trouble for the typical kosher delicatessen. Many modern Orthodox Jews lacked nostalgia for the forms of Jewish culture that had been so important to their second-generation parents. Unless a delicatessen were
glatt
kosher, meaning that it adhered to the most rigid standards (including closing on the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays), they would generally avoid eating in it. Even to be seen walking into a non-
glatt
kosher delicatessen exposed one to the risk of ostracism from the community, under the assumption that observers might be misled into eating there themselves.
Delicatessen food was widely perceived as low class. Bryan Miller, restaurant critic for the
New York Times
, noting the expansion of kosher dining options in the city, observed that Jews appeared eager to shed what he called the “gastronomic barbells” of delicatessen food. The hearty food served in delicatessens represented, he averred, the weight of the immigrant Jewish heritage, which Jews self-consciously cast off in the act of adapting their heritage to meet the needs of upward social and economic mobility.
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The more “yuppified” that Orthodox Jews became, the more that they tended to disdain the deli. Some restaurants combined deli favorites with other types of food; for example, Jacob’s Ladder in Cedarhurst, Long Island, served not just kosher matzoh ball soup, chopped liver, cold cuts, and potted brisket of beef but also hamburgers, barbequed chicken wings, spareribs, and chicken fricassee. But others avoided deli food entirely and sold more cosmopolitan, gourmet fare. On the Upper West Side, Orthodox Jews flocked to Benjamin of Tudela (named after a globe-trotting medieval Spanish rabbi) for its kosher steaks,
chops, duck, chicken, and fish. The restaurant’s brick walls, charcoal-gray rugs, and bouquets of wildflowers all bespoke an affluent clientele.
Nanou, a kosher French restaurant in downtown Manhattan serving the cuisine of Provençal, featured roast duck with orange sauce on its menu, along with grilled veal chops with mushroom sauce. In the Riverdale section of the Bronx, owner Michael Posit took his nonkosher French restaurant named Dexter’s and turned it into a kosher restaurant that served chicken breast stuffed with veal mousse and medallions of beef with a sauce made from red wines, shallots, and thyme.
Other kosher restaurants soon rushed to occupy the upscale market niche, including Café Masada and La Kasbah (both serving North African cuisine) and Levana (serving a mix of Italian and French cuisine, with sauces and condiments “painted” on the plate). On Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood formerly crammed with Jewish delis, the latest dining establishment was Little Budapest, a fancy Hungarian Jewish restaurant. And many Jews—and non-Jews—when they weren’t eating out, took advantage of dozens of kosher cooking classes at the Ninety-Second Street Y, organized by Batia Louzon Plotch, a Sephardic woman from Tunisia who sought to expand the idea of kosher food. “What they knew about Jewish food was Eastern European,” she said of her students. “In my family, Jewish food is couscous [on] Friday night.”
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A master Japanese chef, Hidehiko Takada, taught the course on sushi, and the Chinese cookbook author Millie Chan taught the course on Northern Chinese cuisine. Other chefs instructed budding chefs to prepare kosher versions of Thai, Persian, Iraqi, Northern Italian, and Indian food.
Another new trend was the kosher gourmet club, in which a group of couples met once a month in one of their homes, with each couple bringing a different dish from the cuisine of the month, which could be anything from Cajun to Hawaiian to Fiji. These would often be quite extravagant affairs, with each
couple vying to bring the fanciest dish and the hosts finding the appropriate music, dress, and decor to accompany the chosen cuisine. One of the group members might even be responsible for giving a
d’var Torah
(minisermon, or commentary on the Torah) in keeping with the dinner’s theme.
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At the same time that nonkosher deli food was growing in popularity among Jews and non-Jews alike, kosher food was also becoming more sophisticated and increasing its appeal. Trends toward kosher food that was healthy, international, and gourmet accelerated through the 1990s and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the Upper West Side of New York, one could eat in a kosher sushi restaurant one night and a kosher Mexican restaurant the next. A spate of new kosher cookbooks emphasized Sephardic cuisine, which is based much more on fruits and vegetables than is meat-heavy Ashkenazic cookery. The Jewish delicatessen began to seem increasingly like a throwback to an earlier age, its fare hopelessly prosaic, unhealthy, and low class. As the humorist Sam Levenson pointed out in a
Saturday Review
article that was reprinted for years on the back of the Second Avenue Deli’s menu, the deli was a remnant of a world that was sadly “all but destroyed by upward mobility.”
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Thus, by the turn of the millennium, the Jewish delicatessen had become, in the words of the writer Richard Jay Scholem, “almost as obsolete as the buggy whip,” given “the healthy eating movement, with its emphasis on low fat, cholesterol and calorie food, the diminution and diffusion of this area’s Jewish population and the coming of age of a new generation without nostalgic memories of Jewish deli food.”
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The journalist Joseph Berger found that a small number of delis, such as the Second Avenue and the Carnegie, still functioned as what he called “Disneylands for tourists or nostalgia seekers who want to savor a way of life that is passing on.”
123
Readers of
Harper’s
“Facts about New York City” tongue-in-cheek statistics column learned in 1998 that while there were no fewer than thirty-one branches of the Astoria Federal Savings
Bank at which automatic-teller transactions could be conducted in Yiddish, the number of kosher delis in the city had declined by 88 percent since 1965. While the continued vitality of the immigrant Jewish language might seem to go hand-in-hand with a continued appetite for eastern European Jewish food, the magazine failed to point out, however, that the Yiddish-speaking ATM machines were concentrated in Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, where few delicatessens were located.
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In the Bronx, a hundred delicatessens had dwindled to no more than three. Closed were the delis near the county courthouse, the delis near the movie theaters on the Grand Concourse (themselves also boarded up), and the delis underneath the pool halls. Even Schweller’s, which had been a neighborhood fixture on Jerome Avenue, shut its doors after sixty-five years in business. As the journalist Jonathan Mark put it, “Kid, we’re not talking about little groceries that call themselves delicatessens. We’re talking about the ma and pa
fleishig
restaurants with seven or eight tables, where you sit down like a human being and have some soup, flanken in the pot, a pastrami on rye the size of your fist with a side of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray; delis where grilled franks and knishes are crackling just inside the steamed windows, and neon Hebrew letters shine into the night.” Before Greek diners, pizza parlors or hamburger joints, Mark noted, “a kosher frank was what passed for fast food in this city.”
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As Jewish waiters and countermen who retired or passed away were replaced by non-Jewish employees, the very nature of the deli-going experience changed; few waiters did a vaudeville act in the course of serving a bowl of soup and a sandwich. In some delis, according to David Sax, waiters from such far-flung places as Egypt, China, and Mexico “took on the role with aplomb,” learning “the shtick and the banter that’s passed down almost like Talmudic knowledge.”
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But in most delis, the waiter was trained to be just like a server in any other restaurant—unfailingly helpful and polite, a far cry from the obnoxious but highly entertaining Jewish waiter of old.
As the Jewish population of New York declined substantially, falling from two million in 1950 to about half that number by the early 1990s, many formerly Jewish neighborhoods saw new immigrant groups become dominant. The last kosher delicatessen in Flushing, Flushing Delight on Union Street, closed in 1995, ending a four-decade-long presence of a kosher deli at that location. Instead of Jewish stores and restaurants, Chinese, Korean, and Indian businesses proliferated, catering to the needs of those immigrants. The Jewish population was aging, with very few younger Jews moving in to replace those who died or moved away. “With the neighborhood changing the way it is, there just wasn’t enough business,” Flushing Delight’s owner, Paul Reilly, told the
New York Times
. “More and more people, when they go to Florida, they aren’t coming back.”
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Even Hebrew National had moved out of New York by the late 1980s; its relocation to Indianapolis was widely viewed as the end of an era. The announcement of the move sparked a labor dispute in which two hundred employees walked out of the company’s factory in Maspeth, Queens, and in which a small bomb was placed in the car of one of the company’s managers. It led to a pitched legal battle between Hebrew National and Schulem Rubin, the senior rabbi for New York State’s kosher compliance division, who was accused by the company of waiting two years after a governmental inspection to give the company a failing grade on its kashrut standards; the company insisted that the state was retaliating against it for moving to the Midwest. The move showed that deli meats were just like steel, fabric, and other consumer products that used to be made in New York; they would increasingly come to be manufactured in places where companies could find cheaper labor and lower taxes.
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Hebrew National never recovered its reputation in the Orthodox community. Before long, most Orthodox Jews eschewed eating the company’s products. Even many Conservative Jews did not eat Hebrew National meats for years, until in 2004, the company finally obtained a new certification, Triangle K.
But even though Triangle K is actually under the supervision of an Orthodox rabbi, it is not
glatt
—the strictest standard of kosher—and thus not suitable for Orthodox Jews themselves.
By the early years of the twenty-first century, then, the deli was widely seen as a throwback to an immigrant or second-generation way of life, in which different values had held sway. Jews could not flatter themselves on their success in American society by eating the food of their parents and grandparents. Their nostalgia for that way of life was still present, but it was indulged on particular family occasions rather than on a frequent, regular basis. At the same time, Jews had discovered the cuisines of other cultures and had turned their back on their own style of cooking, which was perceived, in the main, as unhealthy, low class, and unappetizing.
As we shall see in the next and final chapter, the deli in the twenty-first century plays a sharply diminished role in Jewish culture, even as nostalgia for the delis of the past has become in itself an important part of Jewish identity. At the same time, Jewish food is mutating in unexpected ways, and those delis that still exist are trying a plethora of strategies, including focusing on sustainability and attempting to attract a customer base of non-Jews, to keep themselves afloat.
The changes in Jewish aspirations are summed up by a late twentieth-century advertising campaign by Manischewitz; the company printed a fictional letter written by Mrs. Manischewitz to her grandmother, in which she recalls her upbringing in the Bronx and
kvells
(expresses her pride) over her son’s graduation from Brown. “Who would have believed,” she asks in amazement, “from a
shtetl
to the Ivy League?”
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The Contemporary Jewish Deli—Whistling Past the Graveyard
A couple goes out to eat one evening at the neighborhood kosher deli. They are amazed when a suave Chinese waiter, speaking perfect Yiddish, comes up to their table to take their order. On their way out, they ask the owner how he ever managed to train a Chinese waiter to speak Yiddish. “Shh,” he tells them, “he thinks I’m teaching him English!”
T
he setting for this revealing joke is the Lower East Side, where most Jews (and Chinese) settled when they first arrived in the United States. Only in that neighborhood, where so many Jews lived in such close proximity to one another, could a non-Jewish immigrant possibly confuse the language spoken by everyone around him with the language of the American people. To think that anyone could confuse Yiddish and English—this was hilarious to Jews, given how much outside the mainstream Jews knew themselves to be. If only Yiddish and English
were
the same, then Jews might not suffer so acutely their exclusion from American society. The waiter believes that he is on the way to becoming an American—wait until he finds out the truth! The only nation that he is assimilating into is the Jewish one.
And yet that is precisely it: the deli
does
represent America for the clueless Chinese waiter. It is, after all, the only “America”
he knows outside his own community. In this sense, he is not so unlike the immigrant Jews themselves, for whom the deli was to become a place in which they began to erect the framework for an American identity. The waiter was to get his revenge when his own cuisine trumped that of the delicatessen. (And of course, Asians have been recently dubbed the “new Jews” for their success in American society; they are viewed as achieving this success in much the same way that Jews did, through a combination of intellect, sacrifice, hard work, and determination.)
It seems appropriate, then, that in Ben’s, a deli that boasts an Art Deco–style interior (“Who said a nosh can’t be posh?” reads the sign behind the deli counter that lists the hors d’oeuvres), the well-heeled, mostly Jewish patrons are literally surrounded by the words of this joke, as if
embraced
by a past in which the deli truly was the central institution in Jewish life. By reading—and perhaps even telling to each other—the joke in English, the patrons of Ben’s remind themselves how far they have come, how much they have transcended their own ancestors’ immigrant origins, how much
they
have succeeded in becoming American.
z l z
When the Second Avenue Deli reopened in midtown Manhattan in late 2007 after having closed two years earlier in the East Village, it did so with much fanfare. Even though a thousand new restaurants open in New York every year, it would be difficult to think of another restaurant opening that generated quite so much excitement and anticipation. Almost every media outlet in the city descended on the deli to cover what was trumpeted, in messianic terms, as the “second coming” of the Second Avenue Deli, which is arguably the most famous kosher deli in America—and also one of the last.
The drama of the story was inescapable. Abe Lebewohl, the beloved deli owner, was murdered in broad daylight in 1996 (in a still-unsolved crime) while taking the deli’s receipts to the
bank, leaving the business in the hands of his brother, Jack, who ran the deli until its demise, which he blamed on the skyrocketing real estate prices in the rapidly gentrifying East Village.
Now Jeremy Lebewohl, Jack’s twenty-five-year-old son, had emerged like a dark-horse candidate to take over the family business. Since when did the younger generation want to take over a deli? Hadn’t so many children of the owners of small ethnic businesses, including countless kosher delis, turned their back on the family business in order to become doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers? Would Jeremy be like his uncle—if he knew you were sick, would he show up in person at your apartment or dorm room with a bowl of chicken soup in his hand? Or would the new Second Avenue Deli be just a restaurant like any other? The story of the Second Avenue Deli encapsulated so many aspects of life in New York. Like a once-glorious sports team that had suffered a string of losing seasons but now had a scrappy new manager who was determined to win a pennant, the Second Avenue had a fighting chance once again. It had, you might say, a shot at redemption.
In fact, the Second Avenue Deli had for a long time worn the defiant, slightly pugnacious air of a survivor. It had opened originally in 1954, a good four decades after most Jews had moved away from the Lower East Side neighborhood, the immigrant ghetto known for its overcrowded, disease-ridden tenements and horrific sweatshops.
But the kosher deli, with its flashy lightbulb-bordered sign with faux-Yiddish letters, had insisted on serving the foods beloved of these same immigrants and their children, in the hopes of bringing them back for a taste of the old neighborhood. Both Jews and non-Jews made pilgrimages to the deli to soak up the atmosphere of the Jewish past. And Lebewohl was a well-known figure, given to outlandish publicity stunts such as creating busts of famous people in chopped liver, giving out free sausages when a baseball player hit a home run, and maintaining public friendships with a range of characters from Mayor Ed Koch to the pornographer Al Goldstein and pretty
much everyone in between. From the handprints on the Walk of Fame outside the door to the Molly Picon room inside, the place glittered with the aura of celebrity while still trading on its down-at-the-heels East Village chic. It saw itself as having nurtured the growth of the downtown arts scene and particularly the emergence of off-Broadway in the 1960s.
The Second Avenue Deli had become a quintessential part of New York, its appeal extending to many non-Jews, including tourists from all over the world. I dined one evening in the old Second Avenue Deli when a group of Jewish artists and scholars whom I knew from New York University was replaced at the same table by a family wearing traditional African garb, as if they had just come from a meeting at the nearby United Nations. I regretted not having brought a camera; I would have liked to take pictures of the successive groups of people who occupied the same table at the deli over the course of a single evening. The photos would have said a lot not just about the deli but about the polyglot nature of the city.
Over time, then, the deli had come to stand for a whole host of places and experiences that New Yorkers (and others) felt had become endangered: for the Jewish Lower East Side, for the counterculture of the East Village (the demise of the Second Avenue Deli was compared by some observers to the recent shuttering of the punk music club CBGB’s), for immigrant Jewish culture (
Yiddishkeit
), for mom-and-pop businesses, for fatty Jewish food. Its closing seemed to mark the end of an era in more ways than one.
It is little wonder that when the deli closed on Tenth Street, a disappointed blogger sighed, “Sic transit gloria matzoh balls.”
1
The comic Jackie Mason, a Second Avenue Deli regular, joked, “It’s almost like wiping out Carnegie Hall. . . . A sandwich to a Jew is just as important as a country to a gentile.”
2
Its closing truly seemed to mark the end of an era, just as its rebirth two years later seemed nothing short of miraculous. But can any new deli bring back the days of yore? Or does it inevitably have what the journalist Ron Rosenbaum, writing for
Slate
, calls a
“theme-park vibe, a whistling-past-the-graveyard-schmaltzy nostalgia for schmaltz”
3
—a cardboard-cutout version of the past?
The essayist Adam Gopnik has traced what he calls the “drying up” of Jewish comedy in New York to the period between the release of
Annie Hall
and the release of
Broadway Danny Rose
, in which the “black-and-white world of the comics shpritzing at the Carnegie Deli is frankly presented as a Chagall world, a folk-tale setting, the whole thing vanished.” Gopnik connects this transition to the fading of New York ethnic life in general, from the Asian countermen slicing fish at Zabar’s—the iconic gourmet Jewish food shop—on the Upper West Side to the lack of overt Jewish references on
Seinfeld
, where the “Jewish situations are mimed by rote, while the real energy of the jokes lies in the observation of secular middle-class manners.”
4
For years, part of the experience of going to the Carnegie Deli in New York was watching a wacky promotional video,
What a Pickle: The World’s Greatest Deli Musical
, that played on a loop at the restaurant to divert those who were waiting on line. The video starts with the late owner, Milton Parker, shlepping around an immense pickle. It then switches to a black-and-white silent-movie format with intertitles and background music, in which one of the deli waiters is shown walking home after work and slipping on a pickle on the sidewalk, where he is helped up by a beautiful woman. He romances her by taking her for a picnic in Central Park with sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli. The video then shows the customers and waiters singing and dancing at the Carnegie, with a big-band theme of everyone “swinging” at the “Deli King.” The waiter disastrously juggles the food in a rapid-paced patter song, showing off the immense portions, including the “world’s biggest sandwiches” and “world’s biggest matzo ball.”
5
Parker drops some names of celebrities and their favorite sandwiches, and then the video again switches modes, with “Barry Whitefish” (Wayne Lammers, who also codirected the video and wrote the lyrics), a Barry White look-alike clad entirely
in white, who sings a mellow song about pastrami, kasha, and other deli specialties to his leggy blond date as they enjoy a candlelight dinner in the deli and go for a horse-and-buggy ride. After showing a brief segment on how the pastrami and cheesecake is prepared at the deli’s plant in New Jersey, the scene returns once more to the deli, where customers around the dining room yell out their hometowns, states, or countries (everywhere from New Jersey to India and Japan), and the video ends with a sing-along (complete with a bouncing ball) to the tune “Till We Meet Again,” including the words “Till We Eat Again / I’ll be thinking of food until we meet again.” Interposed in the middle of the song is a sequence of obviously non-Jewish waitresses, trying to insult the customers in stereotypically obnoxious fashion.
One of the most striking aspects of the video, which was produced in 1999, is how non-Jewish the Carnegie Deli seems. Other than the owner and manager, and perhaps the waiter who plays the main role, there is nary a Jewish person in the place—the waiters and customers almost all appear to be non-Jews. The clearly nonkosher food nevertheless does represent a link to Jewish tradition, but it is used either for Jews to romance non-Jews or for non-Jews to romance each other. The quality of the food seems much less important than the quantity, and the humorous aspects of the dining experience—the ridiculously huge portions, the funny-sounding names of the foods, the nasty waitresses, the boisterous fellow customers, the attempts of both staff and customers to be comedians, and the obsessive mock-seriousness with which the food is treated—come to the fore.
Thus, not only is it possible to find yourself in a video if you eat in the deli, but eating in the deli
is
like being on television—or in the movies. You are surrounded by pictures of celebrities, you eat the same foods that celebrities eat, and the entire atmosphere is one that performance theorists would call “ludic”—the playfulness is not incidental to the experience but constitutive of it. Rather than merely being a pleasant diversion while you wait on line, watching the video helps to create the
frame for the dining experience, by giving the viewer a set of expectations and understandings that will condition the experience of the meal, which is tied up with notions of celebrity (and fantasies of being a celebrity), vaguely Jewishly coded foods (the pastrami, matzoh balls, etc.), and an overall sense of excess (the “world’s biggest sandwiches”). But unlike Sammy’s Rumanian Restaurant on the Lower East Side, a place that actually does incorporate comedy and music into the dining experience—a meal there is like a meal at a Jewish wedding or bar/bat mitzvah—the nonkosher Carnegie Deli seems to cater more to non-Jews than to Jews.
By contrast, because the kosher deli serves a mostly Jewish clientele, it is clearly an endangered species in New York; there are only about fifteen kosher delis left in the five boroughs—a 99 percent drop since the deli’s heyday in the 1930s. Noah’s Ark, the only remaining kosher deli on the Lower East Side, closed in 2013, as did Adelman’s, which was one of only three kosher delis left in southern Brooklyn—a former mecca for kosher delis. But, especially given Manhattan real estate prices, which make it almost impossible for nonchain restaurants to survive, even kosher-style delis are not immune; the Stage Deli closed at the end of 2012, a victim both of the overall decline in people’s appetite for Jewish deli foods and of rising retail rents that surpassed $1 million a year.
6
While it may not be surprising that there are relatively few urban delis left, many suburban delis are suffering the same fate. Five kosher delis—two of which dated back to the 1950s—have closed on Long Island in just the past eighteen months, as fewer non-Orthodox Jews keep kosher and as deli food continues to give way to other, more multicultural alternatives. Scott Horowitz, the owner of the only kosher wholesaler left on Long Island, urges delis to reinvent corned beef and pastrami in new taste combinations—kosher tapas, for example. “If they taste it, they will like it,” he told the journalist Stewart Ain. “It’s not the staple it once was, and if they don’t get the young people, there’s no future in the business.”
7
Steve Weiss, who owns Regal
Kosher Deli in Plainview, told me flatly that “younger people have lost the taste for deli. They eat sushi instead.”
8
Kosher food companies are thus increasingly marketing their products to non-Jews; in 2011, the media reported that Manischewitz has spent millions of dollars on advertisements that do not mention the words “Jewish” or “kosher.” The ads ran in mainstream newspapers such as the
Washington Post
and the
Newark Star-Ledger
. According to company spokesperson Elie Jacobs, “There’s a tagline we use, ‘Bringing families to the table since 1888,’ and we want to be part of that family with you whether it’s Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, or Easter.”
9
Now that Manischewitz has been sold to a huge equity firm, Bain Capital, it is seeking more than ever to find non-Jewish customers, just as Hebrew National and Levy’s Rye Bread did beginning in the 1960s. In the words of the company’s chief rabbi, Yaakov Y. Horowitz, Manischewitz desires to “promote ‘kosher’ as a quality-control designation, rather than simply a religious one.”
10
The humorist Paul Rudnick parodied this strategy in the
New Yorker
, inventing ludicrous imaginary Manischewitz campaigns in which creamy horseradish with dill is left for Santa on Christmas Eve and James Bond serves home-style potato latkes to the queen of England.
11
