Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (3 page)

Every minority group had its own dedicated social space in America. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the influential
phrase “third place” to refer to casual gathering places such as coffee shops and pool halls that occupy an intermediate realm between home and office. These are spaces, he observed, that level social distinctions among patrons, foster civic engagement, and provide a platform for mutual emotional support. As the theme song for the 1970s television show
Cheers
—set in a bar in Boston—goes, it’s the place “where everyone knows your name.”
21

Third spaces function like the eighteenth-century town commons; the historian Sharon Daloz Parks has noted that the grassy square around which villages in New England were built was where people gathered “for play and protest, memorial and celebration, and worked out how they would live together.” For Parks, the commons is indispensable to healthy communal life; she observes that “wherever there is consciousness of participation in a commons, there is an anchored sense of a shared life within a manageable frame.”
22

The Irish imported to America the pub, a venue that was, in the words of the historian Sybil Taylor, a combination “grocery store, funeral parlor, concert hall, restaurant, bar, political forum, congenial meeting place, courting corner, and, most of all, a place for talk.”
23
The scholar Jennifer Nugent Duffy has underscored the role of the pub in promoting “vital economic, political, and social exchanges,” especially for overwhelmed Irish immigrants who dwelled in overcrowded tenement apartments and needed a place to let off steam.
24

Italian immigrants formed “social clubs” in Little Italy, such as the Saint Fortunata Society, established in 1900, where they smoked, played the bowling game of boccie, and cooked together. In 1896, the
New York Times
reported on the plethora of Italian societies and clubs, which boasted a combined membership of tens of thousands of immigrants. Whether by providing an urban hangout or by sponsoring dances and picnics, they provided a way for Italians to reminisce about the Old Country and forge new American identities in a supportive and nurturing environment.
25

Most of these immigrant gathering places were established by, and catered to, men. The delicatessen, although it began as a take-out store and not a restaurant, was no exception; the first delicatessens likely to a large extent served single, immigrant, Jewish men who could not cook for themselves.
26
In general, Jews tended to come to America as whole families, since their homelands had become too inhospitable to Jews to permit them to stay; men from other immigrant groups often returned to their countries of origin with the money that they had earned.

But because delicatessens are oriented around the consumption of red meat, the iconic Jewish eatery did take on a manly vibe, one that was exploited, as we shall see, by vaudeville routines, films, and TV shows about Jewish men using the delicatessen to shore up their precarious sense of masculinity. The food writer Arthur Schwartz has pointed out that, in Yiddish, the word for “overstuffed” is
ongeshtupped
; the meat is crammed between the bread in a crude, sensual way that recalls the act of copulation.
27
The delicatessen, after all, is a space of carnality, of the pleasures of the “flesh”—the word for meat in Yiddish is
fleysh
.

Beyond the gender and sexual politics of the delicatessen, it was not, by any means, the only “third place” in American Jewish life. The synagogue was called in Hebrew
bayt knesset
, or “house of assembly.” Settlement houses for the immigrant generation and Jewish Community Centers, YMHAs (Young Men’s Hebrew Associations), B’nai B’rith (a kind of Jewish equivalent to the Masons, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century), and other institutions offered classes and lectures, put on cultural events, and provided gyms and other recreational opportunities—including sponsoring athletic teams. The Yiddish theater brought together immigrant Jews on a frequent, sometimes nightly, basis. But Jews bonded with especially great intensity around food; as the historians Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer have pointed out, delicatessens “became such an iconic New York institution that their presence marked a Jewish neighborhood more clearly than even that of a synagogue.”
28

Delicatessens were thus prime venues for both Jewish and non-Jewish candidates to campaign for political office. As J. J. Goldberg, the former editor in chief of the
Forward
, noted, “For most of the twentieth century, wooing the Jewish vote meant walking through Jewish neighborhoods, donning a skullcap, and being photographed while eating a kosher knish.”
29
After Henry Morgenthau Jr., a Jewish candidate, lost his 1962 bid to unseat Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a Baptist who frequently campaigned for the Jewish vote in kosher delicatessens, Morgenthau ran into the African American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin on a corner. Rustin was eating a knish. Morgenthau asked him what he was eating. Rustin replied, “I’m eating the reason that you’re not governor.”
30
And George McGovern became the butt of ridicule when, during the 1972 presidential campaign, he ordered a glass of milk to accompany his chopped-chicken-liver sandwich at a kosher delicatessen in New York’s garment district.
31

The delicatessen enabled second-generation Jews to refuel themselves and reinvigorate their own tradition, at the same time as it facilitated their entrance into the mainstream of American society. The comedian Harpo Marx claimed that performing on Broadway was a special thrill because, while in New York, he had “two homes-away-from-home, Lindy’s or Reuben’s.” In these delicatessens, he exulted, “I was back with my own people, who spoke my language, with my accent.”
32
Even as the New York–style delicatessen spread out of New York and took root in other cities, it was known as a place of fellowship, friendship, and good cheer. “The deli is where you go to be Jewish,” the food writer Jonathan Gold reflected. “You live a secular life, but you show up at Junior’s [in Los Angeles] on a Sunday morning and suddenly all your Jewish stuff comes in.”
33

A successful delicatessen, whether in or out of New York, was defined by what one deli owner in L.A. called its “hubbub”—its casualness, conviviality, and sense of community.
34
“Owners traditionally were there to humor their customers,” reflected Bill Ladany, president of the Vienna Sausage Company
in Chicago. “It was as important to be friends as to make chicken noodle soup.”
35
Non-Jews immersed themselves in an environment in which Jewishness rubbed off on them as well. As the food writer Patric Kuh observed, “You might hear Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Tagalog in an L.A. deli, but everyone is essentially talking Yiddish.”
36

But by the mid-twentieth century, Jewish culture was itself in the process of changing, of becoming progressively more Americanized. The Jewish deli began to absorb more and more “American” foods, with many delis ultimately serving more turkey than either corned beef or pastrami. Indeed, by the 1960s, suburban Jewish delis offered entire take-out feasts for Thanksgiving, enabling Jews to carve out an American identity that relied on the consumption of take-out turkey sandwiches rather than a bird roasted at home. “Jewish New York,” the genealogist Ira Wolfman has found, “reveled, and was revealed, in its food. Like much of American Jewish culture, Jewish food was a hybrid—a mishmash of old-world cooking and customs, Jewish dietary laws, and an ongoing accommodation with American life.”
37

Indeed, Jews ate “deli” at every stage of their American lives. Brises (circumcisions), bar mitzvahs, weddings, and shivas (gatherings after a funeral)—all were marked not just by carefully prescribed religious rites but by the consumption of corned beef, pastrami, rolled beef, tongue, and other deli meats catered by a local deli. Indeed, deli owners became expert at producing endless round platters of sandwiches—platters that were held together with frilly toothpicks and swathed by sheets of colorful, crinkly cellophane.

A typical Brooklyn wedding or bar mitzvah reception in the 1950s was a far cry from many of the lavish, ostentatious affairs of today. The party was held at home; kosher delicatessen platters were set out in the backyard, and the bathtub was filled with ice, soda, and beer.
38
“We would have family parties in the [photography] studio downstairs and all the relatives would come and Uncle Louie would cook,” one Jewish New Yorker recalled, noting that her uncle’s corned beef was the main dish at her wedding
reception. “He would have a clothes boiler and put whole corn beefs [sic], pastrami, and spices in them and cook them all day. The relatives and me would gorge themselves on meat, pickles, and soda water. Nothing since could ever compare.”
39

Seven decades after the historian Arthur Schlesinger’s seminal investigation into the previously unacknowledged but pivotal role of food in American history (from the Boston Tea Party and the Whiskey Rebellion to the Lend Lease program during the Second World War),
40
food studies has become its own branch of the academy. Scholars in this field, led by Warren Belasco, Carole Counihan, and Darra Goldstein, view food as a nexus of history, sociology, ethnicity, and culture.
41
“Food,” as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously put it, “is good to think.”
42
One might add that food is especially “good to think” about in terms of ethnic identity; for the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, food is a “marvelously plastic kind of collective representation.”
43
Indeed, the pastrami sandwich was a kind of palimpsest—a blank screen onto which succeeding generations of Jews projected different images of themselves and their group as they became progressively more acculturated into American society.

Scholars tend to focus not just on the food itself but on “foodways”—the
social context
in which food is prepared, served, and consumed—as well as the historical and sociological meaning with which food is endowed. Thus, at a time when Jews were stereotyped as uncouth and uncivilized, it is significant that they created an unusual type of eatery, one that in some ways fulfilled the very ideas that other Americans had of them. The deli was a place where they could eat with their hands, talk with their mouths full, fill their bellies, and enjoy the pleasure of each other’s company in a raucous and convivial setting.
44
The historian Barry Kessler sums this up in the title of his article on the tumultuous delicatessens of Baltimore: “Bedlam with Corned Beef on the Side.”
45

The most significant recent academic works about Jewish food include the historian Hasia Diner’s chapters on eastern
European and immigrant Jewish food in her exemplary, cross-cultural study
Hungering for America
and David Kraemer’s wide-ranging survey
Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages
. But there has been no full-length study of the Jewish delicatessen. Historians have given the towering deli sandwich—and the place in which it was consumed—surprisingly short shrift. As the historian Michael Alexander declared, “It’s about time historiography took serious notice of deli life.”
46

The deli has fared far better in popular writings. Nick Zukin and Michael Zusman’s
The Artisan Jewish Deli at Home
(based on Kenny and Zuke’s Deli in Portland, Oregon) and Noah and Rae Bernamoff’s
Mile End Cookbook
(based on the Mile End Deli in Brooklyn and Manhattan) have joined earlier, anecdote-filled recipe books from the Second Avenue Deli and Junior’s. Also worthy of note are Sheryll Bellman’s lavishly illustrated coffee-table book on classic American delis, Arthur Schwartz’s tantalizing guide to eastern European Jewish dishes, the journalist Maria Balinska’s well-rounded history of the bagel, Laura Silver’s foursquare history of the knish, Jane Ziegelman’s enticing “edible history” of immigrant life in one New York tenement building on the Lower East Side, and the travel writer David Sax’s edgy elegy
Save the Deli
.
47

The publication of these volumes, along with popular food columns in Jewish newspapers such as the
Forward
and the
Jewish Week
and cover articles on Jewish food in
Moment
magazine, the
Baltimore Jewish Times
, and other Jewish publications, testify to the continuing interest in Jewish gastronomy and a growing sense that Jewish food connects Jews—and also appeals to non-Jews—in a way that few aspects of Judaism continue to do.
48

Social scientists have adopted three main approaches to the study of food and foodways. The first is a functional approach, which looks, in part, at the role of food preparation and consumption in the formation and maintenance of group identity. The second is a structuralist approach, which treats food as a signifying system, as a “language” of its own and which, especially
in the work of Roland Barthes, also theorizes a semiotics of media images of food and food advertising.
49
(The structuralist approach also emphasizes the fact that foods are arranged hierarchically within a culture, with particular foods eaten to mark special occasions.) The third is a developmental approach, which investigates how certain foods became part of the diet of specific peoples (and how other foods were shunned), examining the history of each group and the evolutionary and environmental processes that helped to determine its diet.

The approach in this book is eclectic; it borrows from each of these perspectives in analyzing the changing place of the delicatessen in American Jewish culture. In line with the functional approach, I view the deli as playing a crucial role in American Jewish life, one that helped to facilitate Jews’ joining the American mainstream. Vis-à-vis the structuralist approach, I see the foods and foodways associated with Jewish delicacies as helping to organize the reality of Jewish life, both through the actual consumption of deli meats and also through the—often comedic and heavily eroticized—-images and representations of the deli in popular culture. Finally, with regard to the developmental approach, I view the passionate embrace of the deli as tempered over time as other social and economic factors led Jews away from the deli and toward other, more exotic-seeming, “gourmet” and healthier kinds of food. In each case, I see many layers of cultural and social meaning crammed into the overstuffed deli sandwich.