Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (12 page)
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Authors: Ted Merwin
Tags: #REL040030 Religion / Judaism / History
The critic Alfred Kazin, who grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, famously described going to a kosher deli as a quintessential secular Jewish ritual. As he memorably recalled,
But our greatest delight in all seasons was “delicatessen”—hot spiced corned beef, pastrami, rolled beef, hard salami, soft salami, chicken salami, bologna, frankfurter “specials,” and the thinner, wrinkled hot dogs always taken with mustard and relish and sauerkraut. . . . At Saturday twilight, as soon as the delicatessen store reopened after the Sabbath rest, we raced into it panting for the hot dogs sizzling on the gas plate just inside the window. The look of that blackened empty gas plate had driven us wild all through the wearisome Sabbath day. And now, as the electric sign blazed up again, lighting up the words
JEWISH
NATIONAL
DELICATESSEN
, it was as if we had entered into our rightful heritage.
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Before he had even taken a bite, the illumination of the sign closed a powerful emotional and spiritual circuit for Kazin, connecting him with his tradition. Where (and, we could add, with whom) Kazin ate affected him profoundly. There was also
something almost sacred about the neon delicatessen sign itself. The mystical glowing letters, connected by the tubes carrying the phantasmically colored gas, held a kind of kabbalistic fascination for Kazin and his peers. Just as medieval rabbis called the letters of the Torah “black fire written on white fire,”
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the shining letters of the sign hung in the air with the dazzling radiance of supernal energy.
The delicatessen became the seat of many of Kazin’s deepest and most important memories. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has insightfully pointed out, Kazin’s innovative form of storytelling is “not a map of the neighborhood, although the streets and landmarks and borders are duly and precisely recorded, but rather a map of a consciousness. . . . We are, Kazin seems to say, not so much what we eat but
where
we first ate, and slept, and walked; geography, in other words, is destiny.”
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Nostalgia for the delicatessen became, in the decades after the Second World War, an essential feature of secular Jewish life for the second generation of American Jews, who grew up at a time when a third of the population of Brooklyn was Jewish and almost one-half of the overall Jewish population of New York lived in that borough. The delicatessen was where this secular Jewish identity, in large measure, took root; it was where the Jewish community came together and nurtured its relationship to Jewish heritage.
Like the lighted delicatessen sign, the illuminated movie screen also held great fascination for secular Jews in the outer boroughs. Going to a Saturday movie matinee, at a time when talking movies (“talkies”) were still a relative novelty, was a cherished ritual for many Jewish children; there was seldom any contest between spending the Sabbath in the synagogue and spending it in the cinema. As Kazin noted, comparing the two, “Right hand and left hand: two doorways to the East. But the first led to music I heard in the dark, to inwardness; the other to ambiguity. That poor worn synagogue could never in my affections compete with that movie house, whose very lounge looked and smelled to me like an Oriental temple. It had Persian
rugs, and was marvelously half-lit at all hours of the day.”
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And just as one could scarcely attend a Broadway show without also eating in a deli, a trip to the cinema typically involved a delicatessen lunch.
Delicatessens were often located near the movie theaters; for example, the RKO Movie Theatre in Ridgewood, Queens (on the border of Bushwick, Brooklyn), was across the street from Gottlieb’s, a kosher delicatessen that stayed open late to serve the crowd streaming out of the cinema. Similarly, the Ambassador Theatre in Brooklyn was next door to Goldfried’s; when the movie operators were hungry, they lowered a bucket from four floors up, and sandwiches were sent up on a rope and pulley.
Another movie theater, called People’s Cinema (formerly, The Bluebird), was located diagonally across the street; a former patron of the People’s recalled that kids would come in on Saturday afternoons with salami sandwiches, bottles of Pepsi, and cake and watch cartoons, westerns, and the installments in the “Little Tough Guys” or “East Side Kids” series about lower-class children and their adventures in the New York slums.
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Barbara Solomon’s father, who owned a deli in Sheepshead Bay, got four free movie passes a week because her father advertised the local movie houses by putting posters in the window. (Her father also provided the sandwiches for her dates.)
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Louis Menashe, a Sephardic Jew who learned to love Ashkenazic cooking, spent Saturday afternoons with friends at a movie theater on Broadway in Williamsburg, and then the group repaired to Pastrami King on Roebling Avenue and South Second Street, a block from his home. The hand-sliced pastrami was smoked with cedar (not the usual hickory) and flavored with fresh garlic (rather than the typical garlic salt). As Menashe recalled, “Press, the harried waiter, would ignore us kids—our tips weren’t so good—but the long hungry wait was worth it.”
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Some customers sneaked deli sandwiches into the movie theater itself. While waiting on a long line to get into
Gone with the Wind
in 1939, a group of young people “got hungry”: “so we bought hot pastrami sandwiches and pickles
to take inside. The entire movie house stank of deli. An usher came up and said you can’t do that, but what could we do? We ate it anyway.”
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On summer weekends, beachgoers would stop at a deli to buy sandwiches for their picnic baskets. Paul Goldberg worked in his father’s delicatessen in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He remembers that customers would come in carrying beach chairs and hampers. “We hoped that the food wouldn’t turn green before they ate it,” he admitted. When the beachgoing traffic dropped off, Goldberg’s father hired a teenager to take sandwich orders from women waiting for their hair to dry in the local beauty parlor.
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Sunday night, in particular, was “delicatessen night” for many secular Jewish families, when extended families gathered for dinner in a kosher deli—or took food home. On the white dining-room tablecloth in the Bronx apartment in which the author Kate Simon grew up, she recalled, “appeared the traditional Sunday night company meal: slices of salami and corned beef, a mound of rye bread, pickles sliced lengthwise, and the mild mustard the delicatessen dripped into slender paper cones from a huge bottle. . . . The drinks were celery tonic or cream soda, nectars we were allowed only on state occasions, in small glasses.”
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Nevertheless, the relationship that the kosher delicatessen had with Jewish religion was a complicated one, and one that bespoke the myriad ways in which American Jews attempted to balance their Jewish and American identities. Many of these establishments were open on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, despite the prohibition in Jewish law against handling money or doing business on such occasions. This reflected a schizophrenic attitude toward religious observance, in which it became comfortable for Jews to observe the Sabbath selectively, picking and choosing the rules that they wished to follow.
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Delicatessens did the same; Poliakoff’s, an upscale kosher eatery that included deli sandwiches on its menu, and Lou G. Siegel’s, a landmark kosher deli in Manhattan’s theater district, transgressed Jewish
law by opening for business on Friday nights but requested, by putting notices on their menus, that patrons refrain from smoking (also forbidden by religious law on the Sabbath).
The historian Jeffrey Gurock recalls that when he was growing up in the East Bronx, his parents, who belonged to an Orthodox synagogue, would take their sons to kosher delis whenever the family chose to eat out. “However,” Gurock notes, “unlike their more scrupulous synagogue friends, my folks gave no thought as to whether the delis that we more generally frequented were open on Saturday. Nor did they ever peek into the back room to see if there was a
mashgiach
[kosher supervisor] on the premises.” As long as the Hebrew phrase
basar kasher
(kosher meat) was displayed in the window along with the logo for Hebrew National, his family felt comfortable eating in the restaurant.
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For some Jews, eating in a delicatessen became almost a religion unto itself. The sociologist Harry Levine noted that his father, Sid, a self-described “gastronomic Jew” who grew up in a family of poor socialist Jews in Harlem, “worshiped only at delicatessens,” where his “most sacred objects” included stuffed cabbage, chopped liver, salami, frankfurter, tongue, corned beef, and hot pastrami. Levine heard his father call himself a “gastronomical” Jew so frequently that the boy thought that it was a denomination of Judaism.
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Susan Stamberg, a host of National Public Radio’s
All Things Considered
, remembered, “Growing up in Manhattan in the 1950s, I thought the whole world was Jewish,” particularly when her father took her and her siblings to the Lower East Side every weekend for knishes at Schmulka Bernstein’s or Yonah Schimmel’s. “We were ethnic Jews more than observant ones,” she concluded.
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For some Jews, perhaps even nonkosher delis were too religious for comfort. In Jay Cantor’s 2003 novel
Great Neck
, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Richard Hartman, patronizes an empty German delicatessen named Kuck’s (in Great Neck), where he takes out a roast beef sandwich with mayonnaise
every night. “
I’m not a Jew of faith
, he thought, on the way back to his room, as he imagined the suburban householders who crowded Squire’s Jewish delicatessen were,
or rather my faith
is
culture
, like (he liked to think) Freud’s faith, or Kafka’s or Proust’s or Walter Benjamin’s, all the old Talmudic fervor now focused on secular texts.”
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During the interwar era, then, the delicatessen consolidated its hold on Jewish life—and on the overall culture of New York, at a time when gender roles were in flux and take-out food was starting to become popular. The nonkosher delicatessens in the theater district, which had been spawned as a way for Jews to eat mostly traditional food but to free themselves from the stringency of the kosher dietary laws, used their showbiz atmosphere to flatter Jews’ sense of their growing importance in American society and to provide a secular avenue to Judaism. In the following decade, at a time when many small businesses were closing because of the ravages of the Great Depression, the outer-borough kosher delicatessens also continued to thrive and even to multiply. But even as the delicatessen became the Jewish hangout par excellence, it quickly lost its hold on Jewish life with the coming of another world war, which led to meat rationing and exposed Jews to other types of food, both at home and abroad. The delicatessen—and Jewish Life—would never be the same.
Send a Salami
Delicatessens during the Second World War and the Postwar Exodus from New York
T
he entrance of the United States into the Second World War in December 1941 ultimately transformed the relationship of many Jews to their religion. Obliged to eat army rations, Jewish soldiers found it almost impossible to keep kosher on a regular basis. In
G.I. Jews
, Deborah Dash Moore’s book about Jews in the army, Moore discusses the ways in which many Jewish soldiers, especially those raised in kosher homes, were compelled to modify their eating patterns in order to survive on army rations. “Eating ham for Uncle Sam” became, Moore has found, a patriotic act of self-sacrifice. But not all servicemen were obliged to subsist on nonkosher food; the practice soon developed of sending hard salamis, which keep for a long time without refrigeration, to sons who were serving abroad. For the most part, however, Jews learned that they could do without familiar foods and still maintain their Jewish identity.
Louis Schwartz, a waiter in the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen who was famous for selling more than $4 million worth of war bonds, claimed to have invented the famous slogan “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army,” which became a permanent catchphrase at Katz’s Delicatessen and other delicatessens in the city. The slogan seems to have originated with Hal David, a lyricist whose Austrian Jewish parents owned a kosher delicatessen
in Brooklyn; David is best known for a string of 1960s hit songs with the Jewish composer Burt Bacharach.
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David penned it while serving in the army in the Central Pacific Entertainment Section, based at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu; the unit developed songs, sketches, and musicals to be performed for the troops throughout the Central and South Pacific. (The lyric continued, “Don’t just send him things to wear / Send him something he can chew.”)
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The slogan carried a potent unconscious thrust; given the phallic associations that salamis have, sending one to one’s son was perhaps unconsciously attempting to give him a boost of virility in order to enable him to win the war and return safely to the bosom of his family.
At a time when all things identified with Germany were suspect, the German origin of delicatessen food was potentially problematic. As the
New York Times
pointed out, the word
delicatessen
was “of Axis origin,” along with frankfurters, hamburgers, and bologna. However, the
Times
added reassuringly, the situation was not one to fret about. After all, even King George and Queen Elizabeth had recently feasted on Nathan’s hot dogs at a picnic in Hyde Park given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When the filler in the sandwich was a luncheon meat of foreign origin, it became happily domesticated—no longer a foreign intruder but a “perfect symbol of the American melting pot.”
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Jews at home learned, however, that they could maintain their ethnic identity without corned beef and pastrami. The need to send large quantities of food overseas to feed the soldiers led to severe shortages on the home front. The government’s Office of Price Administration (OPA) initially limited the supply of rubber and gasoline before moving on to food items, beginning with sugar and coffee. In 1942, the government instituted a “Share the Meat” campaign in which American were asked to limit their consumption of meat. But rationing still became inevitable, given the fact that up to 60 percent of the nation’s meat supply was reserved for consumption by the military—the average consumption of meat by each soldier was a pound per
day
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—and by the Lend Lease Program that shipped enormous quantities of food (in the first half of 1943, forty-five million pounds of beef alone)
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to the civilian populations of Europe. One soldier’s wife admitted that she fantasized about eating steak more than she did about having sex.
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Jews were heavily represented in the meat-processing industry in New York, both kosher and nonkosher; indeed, of the five thousand employees in this business, one expert estimated, more than a quarter were Jewish.
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But with the advent of meat rationing on March 29, 1943, both butcher shops and delicatessens no longer had access to much of their product. The major associations of kosher delicatessens calculated that the selling of meat products accounted for about 90 percent of their overall business, with about 75 percent of their sales in the form of sandwiches and 15 percent in the form of cooked dishes.
Beef rationing was instituted with an initial limit of twenty-eight ounces a week per person; it was estimated that the wealthiest third of the population consumed an average of five pounds of meat a week and the poorest third an average of only about one pound a week. Red stamps, issued by the government, were required to buy meat, fish, and dairy products; blue stamps were needed for canned fruits and vegetables. Each citizen, including children, received two ration books a month, containing forty-eight blue points and sixty-four red points.
Delicatessen items carried a premium above the point value of raw meat—two additional points per pound if unsliced and three additional points per pound if sliced.
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If a patron bought cured meats from a delicatessen to make his or her own sandwiches, the red stamps were required. A meal consumed in a restaurant or prepared for take-out did not require stamps, so many delicatessen customers bought complete sandwiches.
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Many citizens hoarded these stamps so that they could make a single large purchase. However, the numbers of points needed to buy particular foods fluctuated on a daily basis. As the memoirist Ruth Corbett recalled, it was cause for celebration when
the number of stamps was reduced for a particular item, such as when thirteen kinds of kosher meats were taken down by one point.
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Frankfurters were in such short supply that meat packers were enjoined to stretch their filling by using beans, potatoes, or cracker meal; they suggested substituting bread and gravy for meat.
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A Brooklyn Jewish boy’s rationing card from World War II (Collection of Ted Merwin)
Nevertheless, the government recognized that the consumption of red meat by the citizenry was essential in order to maintain wartime morale. The historian Amy Bentley has argued that beef, long a symbol of status and wealth, increased in symbolic value during the war partially because of both governmental and private-industry propaganda.
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The government instituted price ceilings on meat in order to prevent inflation, but this led to a decrease in supply and triggered an extensive black market. That black market was particularly pronounced in delicatessen meats, especially corned beef and tongue; the following year, four of the major kosher sausage companies in
New York—Zion Kosher, Real Kosher, Brownsville Kosher, and Benjamin Rachleff—were convicted. (Leo Tarlow of Zion Kosher was sentenced to a forty-day jail term, although the jail time was suspended.)
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In May 1945, the delicatessen manufacturers, distributors, and retailers all threatened to strike in order to try to compel the OPA to make more meat available.
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In order to comply with federal guidelines limiting meat consumption, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia requested that no meat be sold on Tuesdays in New York City, with the only exemption being for hot dog and hamburger stands, which were asked to encourage substitute foods like fish.
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While many delicatessens had been open seven days of the week, they almost unanimously decided to close their doors on these “meatless Tuesdays,” with a few remaining open only to sell beer. Irving Krasner, a jobber in the delicatessen business, married his wife, Selma, on a Tuesday and went back to work the next day, while Barbara Solomon’s dad used his precious Tuesdays to take her and her brother for leisurely boat rides up the Hudson or on excursions to the Bronx Zoo.
Periodic shortages continued, even after the end of the war; about a tenth of the thousand kosher delicatessens in the city shut down in September 1946 for lack of meat. The delicatessen industry associations called a meeting to discuss closing down all of the stores for at least a month, given that the shops had only 10 to 20 percent of their usual merchandise. Kosher delicatessens were especially hard hit, with that reduction in their normal supply and with some meats, such as corned beef and tongue, virtually unobtainable at any price. Louis Schweller, the president of the Bronx Delicatessen Dealers Association, predicted that most of the thousand or so remaining kosher delicatessens would have to close. But also affected were the seven thousand or so delicatessens that were mostly indistinguishable from grocery stores. In all, according to Jack Kranis, attorney for the Joint Council of Delicatessen Store Dealers, as many as ten thousand employees—waiters, countermen, and kitchen help—could be left jobless.
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Customers shop for meat in Gellis Delicatessen in Manhattan during postwar shortages on October 9, 1946 (Copyright Bettmann/CORBIS)
Food writers in the press suggested using nonmeat substitutes, canned meat products, or such innovations as “corned beef spread.” Restaurants and hotels were asked to “stretch” their meat by preparing hash and nonrationed meat such as kidney, liver, and tripe. A horse-meat dealer in Newark announced plans to open an outlet in Manhattan, incurring the wrath of former mayor LaGuardia, who called the consumption of horse meat “degrading and humiliating” and pointed out that eating horses had been rejected even by the “peasants of Europe and the coolies of China.”
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Fortunately, the shortages eased before horse meat became a staple of the New York diet.
That delicatessen food was seen as a special treat was shown by the ongoing efforts of the 52 Association, a group that started in 1945 after a restaurant owner picked up the tab for a group of blind sailors who had dined in his restaurant. The owner and his friends then created an organization in which fifty-two men would each be asked to contribute fifty-two dollars a year to pay for a weekly party for wounded veterans, serving food from delicatessens and gourmet food stores. By the early 1950s, the organization boasted more than two thousand members in New York alone and had expanded its efforts to include not just sponsoring the social events but helping the veterans to find jobs. According to one journalist, the organization’s philosophy was that there is “not much wrong with a man’s spirit that cannot be bettered by large portions of pastrami and cheesecake rendered under warm, friendly conditions.”
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Murray Handwerker, the son of the founder of Nathan’s, took an indirect path to bringing delicatessen into his store, which initially served only hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, and chow mein. While serving overseas, he became introduced to foreign cuisines, as did many of his fellow soldiers. Upon his return, he decided to experiment with serving different foods. Murray took advantage of his father’s vacation in Florida to start serving shrimp and clams. Only after he started making a profit from seafood did he bring in (nonkosher) delicatessen foods. “The postwar years were a turning point,” he recalled. “Tastes were changing. And I, coming home from the war and going into the business, was part of that scene.”
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While the war exposed Jews to other types of food, it also provided opportunities for non-Jews to learn about Jewish food. Lieutenant Colonel Harold Dorfman realized how much he missed delicatessen food when he served as navigator in a B-24 bomber on September 12, 1944. As the plane approached its target, the submarine pens of northern Germany, the pilot was ordered to inquire and record what was in each crew member’s mind. Each responded, in turn, that he was thinking about
his family back home—each, that is, except for Dorfman, who said that he was consumed with a desire for a hot pastrami sandwich. The response from the pilot: “How do you spell pastrami?” The crew endured an eight-hour attack by enemy gunfire by laughing and joking about the episode. But to actually taste the unfamiliar delicacy, most had to wait until they arrived in New York eight months later on their way back to Fort Dix.
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