Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (9 page)

The owners of these delicatessens were colorful and obsessed with public attention. By promoting the image of their restaurants as filled with stars of every description and a general air of comic mayhem, they seemed to have themselves missed their calling to be on the stage. Arnold Reuben, for example, was described as having an “aggressive, brusque appearance” with a twitching face, from which “words roll out of his mouth in a spitting, swishing thick torrent. . . . Intonations mixed Yiddish, Broadway wise guy, clipped executive style, and big-man, really boy-at-heart, petulant, lisping, ain’t-I-charming manner.”
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Max Asnas, who opened the Stage Delicatessen in 1937 after a stint as a counterman at the Gaiety, was a short, rotund man with a waddling gait and deep voice overlaid with a thick Yiddish accent. The “sage of the Stage” was known for his quick comebacks. When the comic Jack E. Leonard accused one of the waiters of spilling mustard on his expensive coat, Asnas retorted, “You think this is cheap mustard?” An elderly female patron who asked if the establishment was kosher was told that it
was so nonkosher that even when Asnas bought kosher meats, he sold them as nonkosher. “And where did you get the accent?” she pursued. “This I got from the customers,” he rejoined.
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Asnas, who spent much of his time at the racetrack, was, despite his diminutive height, larger than life. The former Hollywood press agent Leon Gutterman called Asnas a “philosopher, philanthropist, comedian, gag expert, show business critic, psychologist, psychoanalyst, and ‘pastrami pundit’ all in one man.”
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Everybody who was anybody, it seemed, knew him. In “When Mighty Maxie Makes with the Delicatessen,” a song written by the Broadway composer Martin Kalmanoff, Asnas is proclaimed the “toast of the town,” and the Stage, it is noted, is where “you’ll find debutantes with poodles eatin’ hot goulash and noodles” and where the “corned beef and pastrami can keep them all fressin’ [gobbling] till it’s time to close down.”
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The length of a delicatessen menu was matched by the extravagance of the dishes. A sample menu from Reuben’s Delicatessen from the 1920s begins with a selection of oysters, clams, and other shellfish, then proceeds to a section on hors d’oeuvres that features beluga caviar and pâté de foie gras. After a “Steaks and Chops” section that lists pork chops along with lamb chops and chateaubriand, the menu offers various kinds of ham and rarebit. Even a humble Jewish favorite such as
matzoh brei
(a matzoh and scrambled egg combination, traditionally eaten during the week of Passover, when the consumption of leavened bread is forbidden) was gussied up as Matzoth Pancakes with Jelly a la Reuben, while chopped liver was reinvented as Chopped Chicken Livers with Truffles and Mushrooms. In addition, more than two dozen “named” sandwiches are also listed on the menu, each costing about a dollar. Beginning with the Al Jolson Tartar Sandwich, which paid tribute to the greatest Jewish star of the era, the menu includes sandwiches named after the playwright Sammy Shipman, the silent film star Lina Basquette, and the orchestra leader Paul Whiteman.

Reuben claimed that when he created a sandwich, he tried “to make it fit the character and temperament of the celebrity”
after whom the sandwich was named. The custom began, he said, when a showgirl named Annette Seelos, who had just been hired for a small part in a Charlie Chaplin film being filmed in New York, came into his “shtoonky delicatessen store” on Broadway and Seventy-Third Street and asked him for a free sandwich; he obliged by putting Virginia ham, roast turkey, Swiss cheese, and coleslaw on rye bread. But although she wanted to have the sandwich named after her, he decided to name it after himself.
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It was Reuben’s exuberant, enticing ambience that made it into a key place for Jews to show off their rising economic and social position in America. An ad for Reuben’s in a program of the Ziegfeld Follies from the early 1930s urges theater patrons to dine at the restaurant after the show, since “no evening’s entertainment is complete without a visit to Reuben’s—where delectable food is served in charming atmosphere—where persons who have ‘arrived’ foregather to meet their friends.” The ad suggests that the restaurant is extremely high class and caters to an affluent customer base; it contains silhouettes of upper-class men in top hats and wealthy women in fashionable mink coats.
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This was the mirror that the delicatessen reflected to its largely lower-middle-class Jewish customers; it showed them not as they were but as they desperately, urgently desired to be. The window of the nonkosher delicatessen store provided a glimpse into an intensely Jewish space, but one that held the promise of magical, almost mystical, transformation. It reassured Jews that they had begun to “make it” in America.

Using the slogan “where a sandwich grew into an institution” (later replaced, by the early 1930s, by the even more exalted “from a sandwich to a
national
institution”), Reuben’s thus walked a thin line between proclaiming the overt Jewishness of its milieu and projecting an enticing image of acculturation. By claiming that it had become “institutionalized” in American life, the delicatessen implicitly suggested that Jews themselves were beginning to join the framework of American society, to become
part of the very structure of American life by downplaying their religion in favor of a more secular way of being Jewish.

Perhaps the most showbiz-style delicatessen of them all was Lindy’s, which was opened on August 20, 1921, by the German immigrant Leo Lindemann and his wife, Clara, who had met when he worked as a busboy in her father’s restaurant, the Palace Cafe at Broadway and Forty-Seventh Street. Lindemann and his wife attended the opening night of Broadway shows, and the stars reciprocated by patronizing his restaurant. By the end of the decade, the enterprising deli owner opened a second location across the street and two blocks uptown. (By the late 1930s, he expanded the second restaurant to serve 344 people, with tables turning over ten times a day.) The delicatessen also captured a lot of business during the dinner break between the two parts of Eugene O’Neill’s
Strange Interlude
at the nearby John Golden Theatre. Lindy’s was famous for making sandwiches with entire loaves of rye bread sliced lengthwise and for serving huge slices of strawberry-topped cheesecake.

Lindy’s was immortalized in a series of interwar short stories by the journalist Damon Runyon, later adapted into the 1950 Broadway musical
Guys and Dolls
, in which a delicatessen called Mindy’s was the gathering spot for a collection of colorful gangsters. Runyon’s genius was to realize that the theater-district delicatessens were places where lower-middle-class Jewish men went to feel more successful, masculine, and American. (Runyon rarely strayed from this milieu in his work, once noting, “As I see it, there are two kinds of people in this world; people who love delis, and people you shouldn’t associate with.”)
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Take, for example, the opening of “Butch Minds the Baby,” about a gangster’s comical struggles in looking after an infant: “One evening along about seven o’clock, I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefilte fish.”
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Putting on
the gefilte fish? Where, in heaven’s name, was he putting it? Actually, the expression “putting on the gefilte fish” is a play on the expression “puttin’ on the ritz,” meaning to assume upper-class airs. Irving Berlin’s famous song “Puttin’ on
the Ritz” asks, “Have you seen the well-to-do / Up and down Park Avenue / On that famous thoroughfare / With their noses in the air.”
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But it is also a play on an earlier expression, “puttin’ on the dog,” which refers to the practice of cradling a poodle or other small dog on one’s lap as an emblem of a luxurious lifestyle free from physical exertion; many prosperous Victorian women, including Queen Victoria herself, had their portraits done with dogs on their laps. The expression was current in America during the Victorian period; Lyman Bagg, who graduated from Yale in 1869, used the expression in describing how students showed off at his alma mater: “To put on the dog, is to make a flashy display, to cut a swell.”
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The elevation of gefilte fish helped Jews to enter the American mainstream, to swim with the changing tides of American social and economic life.

In line with the desire of Jews to become more American, delicatessens often promoted an image of upscale dining that was quite incongruous with their actual fare. The cover of a blue-and-white 1945 menu from the Rialto Restaurant and Delicatessen displays a pen-and-ink drawing of an elegantly dressed couple being served by a tuxedo-clad waiter holding a covered chafing dish; the man and woman sit under an immense fern as they drink their cocktails and gaze at each other in the light of a small, shade-covered lamp on their table. However, the Rialto’s offerings were considerably less lofty than such an image of fine dining might suggest; the menu items ranged from tongue and cheese sandwiches to pastrami omelets. It seems unlikely that any of this food was served from chafing dishes! The exterior of the menu represented how Jews wanted to be seen on the outside; the interior revealed how they actually felt and operated on the inside, still tied tightly to their ethnic origins.

This contradictory self-image may have led, in some ways, to the growth of Jewish popular culture. The burgeoning Jewish audience, as well as the many Jewish members of the entertainment industry, led to an increasing number of plays and films that centered on New York Jewish life and that showed the travails—both external and internal—that Jews faced in becoming
American.
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Because it was almost de rigueur for comedy sketches and scenes that centered on Jewish life to take place in delicatessens, the Jewish eating establishment often became the place for the working out of these conflicts.

For example,
Kosher Kitty Kelly
, a 1925 Broadway musical that was turned into a silent film in 1926, showed the Jewish eatery as a place for different ethnic groups to come together. The Yiddish-accented deli owner Moses Ginsburg is friendly but disreputable; he secretly peddles alcohol in milk bottles. Ginsburg’s “stricktly” kosher delicatessen store has a diverse customer base that includes African Americans, Greeks, a Swede (who turns out, unluckily for Ginsburg, to be a Prohibition agent), and a Chinese laundryman. Ginsburg also tries to serve the Jewish community by playing matchmaker; he attempts to get a Jewish girl named Rosie Feinbaum to give up her Irish beau, Pat O’Reilly, for a Jewish doctor named Morris Rosen. Unfortunately, Morris already has a girlfriend, Kitty Kelly, the Irish girl of the title.

Despite the characters’ camaraderie, almost all of them are so intensely xenophobic that they believe that foreigners should be either kept out of the country or killed. Rosie fantasizes about marrying Pat in order to “get into a different atmosphere, away from [her] own people,” where she could bleach her hair blond and stop being identifiably Jewish. Morris’s mother, Sarah, goes to a meeting to find out how New York can be purged of “foreigners”—when she gets there, she is shocked to learn that they want to get rid of all immigrants, including the Jews! Meanwhile, the Chinese laundryman, Lee, whom the other characters call “the Chink,” attends a gathering of the tongs, the Chinese gangs that aim to “kill all foreign devils” and take over the drug trade in the city. Everyone seems to get along fine only as long as they’re all buying food—and drink—in the delicatessen, the all-purpose symbol of racial and ethnic harmony.
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Jews and Irish also encounter one another in the 1926 silent film comedy
Private Izzy Murphy
, which marked the debut of the director Lloyd Bacon. George Jessel plays an enterprising
Jewish delicatessen owner who opens two stores, one in a Jewish neighborhood and one in an Irish section. In order to impress his Irish girlfriend, Eileen, with his bravado, Goldberg enlists in the army disguised as an Irishman. When his all-Irish regiment wins a big battle, the Jewish doughboy shares in the victory. The word “private” in the title is a pun; Izzy hides his true identity until he can demolish the stereotype that attaches to it, the stereotype of the Jew who is accomplished in business but not on the battlefield.
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Both films, like the long-running film series
The Cohens and the Kellys
and the film
Clancy’s Kosher Wedding
, capitalized on the popularity of Anne Nichols’s
Abie’s Irish Rose
, a record-breaking Broadway play that combined the ethnic humor of stereotypical Jewish and Irish characters.
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