Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (15 page)
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Authors: Ted Merwin
Tags: #REL040030 Religion / Judaism / History
Miss Hebrew National Salami
The Movement to the Suburbs and the Decline of the Deli
I
n a classic
Mad
magazine cartoon from the 1960s, a family goes out to eat for the first time at an unbearably crowded, extremely chaotic Chinese restaurant. The meal is a nightmare: they can’t get a table, their uncle can’t decide what to order, the waiter ignores them, they stay so long that the table is removed, and then they tip the wrong amount. They are in a surrealistic environment, in which everything and everybody seems to conspire against them. Yet the very next Sunday night they find themselves once again standing in line at a chop suey joint. While the family is not explicitly marked as Jewish, the cartoon is filled with in-jokes for a Jewish readership; in the background, signs read, “Egg Foo Yong with Gefilte Fish” and “Chow Main Best! Liver Worst.”
1
Jews were indeed developing a particularly intense relationship to Chinese food. The local Chinese restaurant became
the
neighborhood hangout on Sunday night, and going out for Chinese became a Jewish ritual in its own right.
Before long, it was the non-Jewish, ethnic restaurant rather than the delicatessen that served as a more popular gathering place for Jewish New Yorkers. But Jews still repaired to the delicatessen when they wanted to reconnect to their heritage. In the mid-1950s, the shortened form
deli
first came into widespread
use. Joseph A. Weingarten noted in his 1954 dictionary of American slang that although he had never seen the word
deli
in print, it was common for people to say, “I’m having deli tonight” or “Mom, let’s have deli.” (He speculated that perhaps the word should be spelled “dely” or “delly” instead.)
2
Beyond the attraction of Jewish New Yorkers to other ethnic cuisines, especially Chinese food, there were a host of other factors that led to the decline of the deli. While half of America’s Jews still lived in New York City, rising crime rates along with the rapid construction of new highways and middle-income housing developments impelled many to move to the suburbs of western Long Island, southern Westchester, southeastern Connecticut, and northern New Jersey.
3
The Jewish movement to the suburbs, in which Jews were often in the minority, obviated the deli’s role as a neighborhood gathering place. As Jews desired to be viewed on an equal footing with other Americans, they downplayed their ethnicity and culture in favor of Jewish religion. Indeed, Jews began to define their identity in opposition to the foods that had sustained their parents in Brooklyn and the Bronx and to develop a more sophisticated, more multicultural, and more gourmet palate.
When the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team especially beloved by ethnic minorities because of its perennial “underdog” status to the New York Yankees, abruptly decamped to Los Angeles, Jews were among those who felt the most betrayed. As the sportscaster Howard Cosell put it, on a trip back to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, it was a particular shock to see that Radin’s Delicatessen, located for decades near Ebbets Field (where the Dodgers had played) had closed. Radin’s was, he recalled ruefully, “the ‘Stage Delicatessen’ of Brooklyn, the eatery for ballplayers. Hot dogs (crisp, all-beef ones) were always ready on the grill. The hot pastrami was unfailingly lean. You never had to ask, the tongue would be cut from the center. . . . Franklin Avenue without Radin’s had to be like a man without a country.”
4
In 1960, there were still more than five dozen kosher delis in Brooklyn, with names like Schneier’s or Schnipper’s
5
—the
kinds of names that the deli owners’ sons had already changed when they graduated law or business school. But rising crime rates often made running a deli untenable.
6
In a particularly disturbing incident, a partly crippled deli owner on the Lower East Side killed two would-be teenage robbers with a carving knife when they invaded his cash register.
7
Paul Goldberg’s father showed more restraint; when he caught someone trying to reach over the counter to grab a salami, he simply whacked him on the hand with the flat side of a knife. A Jewish lawyer recalled that it was the robbery of a deli in his neighborhood in East New York that was the last straw; his family no longer felt safe in the city.
8
Some delis followed Jews to the suburbs; for example, when the Glen Oaks shopping center in eastern Queens was completed in 1950, Grodsky’s Delicatessen could be found sandwiched among May’s Department Store, F. W. Woolworth’s, Dan’s Supreme Super Market, and a slew of smaller stores.
9
Nevertheless, the historian Edward Shapiro has noted that in a typical postwar suburb, the local stores did not sell Jewish newspapers, there were no kosher butchers, synagogues were few and far between, and, last but not least, “corned beef sandwiches were not readily available.”
10
The few delis that sprang up in suburban shopping malls still served as gathering places for segments of the Jewish population, but the community itself was weakened by dispersion and by the diminution of close ethnic ties. While Jews still sought to maintain a distinct ethnic identity, they did so in the context of a society that valued sameness and unity.
Other delis closed because the owners did not want their children to have to work the long hours that running a restaurant entailed. As the historian Karen Brodkin Sacks has noted, Jews “became white” by taking advantage of the G.I. Bill and federal home-loan guarantees—these programs enabled returning servicemen to go to college and to buy a house. This helped Jews to move squarely into the middle class and become professionals. Given their greater economic opportunities in American
society, many children of deli owners viewed the prospect of taking over the family deli with distaste, if not outright disgust. In the Yiddish-English song “Sixteen Tons,” based on Tennessee Ernie Ford’s coal miner’s lament of the same title, the comedian Mickey Katz changed the shoveling of coal to the piling up of deli meats: “You load sixteen tons of hot salami / Corned beef, rolled beef, and hot pastrami.” He contracts a hernia from the physical strain of shlepping these meats, along with cake, beef intestines, and bagels.
11
Interior of Zarkower’s Kosher Delicatessen in White Plains, New York, in 1962 (Collection of Ted Merwin)
The choreographer Jerome Robbins, whose father owned a kosher delicatessen on the same block as their apartment on East Ninety-Seventh Street, had no interest in going into the family business. As his biographer, Greg Lawrence, put it, “by the time Jerome was born, the inherited dream of success had magnified beyond anything that his lower middle-class father might have imagined.” Along with so many fellow Jews, he
“would embrace the idea of putting as much social distance as possible between himself and his origins.”
12
Susan Thaler, whose father owned Schlachter’s Kosher Delicatessen on 176th Street and Walton Avenue in the Bronx, was mortified by her father’s line of work. “Why couldn’t he take weekends off instead of a school day so we could do things together like a family?” she asked plaintively in an essay in the
New York Times
. “Why couldn’t he learn to speak English without an accent? Why couldn’t he sell the store and get a real job in an office where he could wear a suit and tie and carry a briefcase? Why couldn’t he be witty and tall and dapper like Mr. Anderson on ‘Father Knows Best’?” Only later in life, when she had a child of her own, did she belatedly conclude that her father was “blessed” rather than cursed by his humble occupation.
13
Other daughters of deli owners bedecked themselves in expensive clothes and jewelry in an attempt to conceal their humble origins, of which they had a lifelong sense of shame. As the humorist Harry Gersh conceded, they were simply absorbing the sensibility of their time; it was demeaning to admit that your father worked behind the counter of a store. “A delicatessen store man is different from a candy store man or a merchant, but not much,” Gersh pointed out. “A little of the spice of the pastrami, a little of the fat he didn’t trim off the corned beef enters his soul.”
14
Deli owners were stereotyped as low class; on the jacket of Jackie Mason’s 1962 debut album,
I’m the Greatest Comedian in the World, Only Nobody Knows it Yet!
, the comedian’s heavy Yiddish accent is described as “midway between that of a Bronx taxi driver and a Lower East Side delicatessen proprietor.”
15
With the rise of atomic power and the coming of other scientific breakthroughs during the postwar era, frozen food was widely viewed as more modern and exciting than fresh food. Technology seemed to promise a future in which every food was appetizing, nutritious, and safe to eat. According to the
historian Rachel Bowlby, every product was seen to be merely “awaiting its ideal package, to beautify it and to guarantee its cleanliness.”
16
Many Jews “enjoyed kosher frankfurters, bagels, or a good piece of herring,” the historian Alan Kraut notes, “but they preferred their consumables spotless and packaged for easy storage.”
17
Using technology such as vacuum-packing and freeze-drying—originally developed in order to send food to the troops overseas—frozen food was placed in a waterproof plastic or foil pouch, known as a “hotback,” that could be dropped in boiling water to reheat. “With our quarter-pound hotbacks of corned beef or pastrami that go into boiling water, you can have a hot pastrami on rye in a remote areas of Kansas,” Jack Chase, a sales manager for Hebrew National, boasted to the
New York Times
.
18
When the sales staff of Zion Kosher went to call on supermarkets, they were armed with a laminated green card that showed photographs of their packaged products—everything from kosher frankfurters to liverwurst, kishka (stuffed derma), salami, and bologna.
19
Ironically, these modern technologies were modern analogues of the smoking, salting, drying, and spicing that ancient peoples had used to preserve meat, fish, vegetables, and other foods.
20
By freezing pastrami (which is already twice preserved, given that it is made from brisket that is cured and then smoked), Hebrew National was preserving it yet again, but for modern mass consumption. By 1947, the company was selling cans of stuffed cabbage, meatballs in gravy, spaghetti sauce and meatballs, rice with braised beef, corned beef hash, and potato pancakes. These products, all of which cost less than a dollar a pound, could be found at more than three hundred stores in the New York area.
21
The packaging of Jewish food was, however, nothing new. Since the turn of the twentieth century, matzoh, gefilte fish, and other staples of Jewish holiday fare had been available in boxes, jars, and other containers. As the historian Jenna Weissman Joselit has found, Yiddish newspapers had advertised such products as Uneeda Biscuits, Quaker Oats, and Proctor and
Gamble’s cooking fat Crisco (the availability of which, its makers proclaimed, represented the culmination of four thousand years of Jews waiting for a non-meat-based cooking fat that could be used for the frying of dairy products). In the 1920s, Joselit notes, “white bread, mayonnaise, and satiny-smooth Spry gradually assumed pride of place within the kosher kitchen, transforming it from an island of culinary superstition to a common meeting ground for tuna fish sandwiches and oatmeal cookies.”
22
National consumer products were marketed to a Jewish population that prided itself, as the historian Andrew Heinze has found, on its ability to consume the same products as other Americans.
23
The problem for delicatessens was that supermarkets sold many of the same items that they carried. By 1957, 83 percent of supermarkets sold cooked meats and potato salad, 67 percent sold coleslaw, and 61 percent sold baked beans. And almost two-thirds of these supermarkets prepared these items in the store itself rather than depending on any outside vendors.
24
Sales card with images of packaged Zion Kosher Delicatessen products (Collection of Ted Merwin)
As a result, from 1929 to 1954, the number of delicatessens (of all types, not just Jewish ones) dropped nationwide by more than a quarter from around 11,000 to only 8,000. By contrast, the number of supermarkets, or “combination markets,” rose sharply from 115,000 to 188,000. By 1960, supermarkets sold 70 percent of the nation’s groceries.
25
Waldbaum’s, founded by the Polish Jewish immigrant Ira Waldbaum, catered to a customer base of middle-class Jews. The business journalist Leonard Lewis compared Waldbaum to Moses; Waldbaum led Jews on their exodus from Brooklyn to the Long Island suburbs. By doing so, Lewis noted, Waldbaum’s became the “unofficial supplier to the children of this new promised land.”
26
The historian Mark Zanger has noted that ethnic foods tend to become “softer and whiter” in the process of assimilating to mainstream American foodways.
27
The flabby, bland, light-colored cold cuts sold in supermarket packages bore little resemblance to the chewy, spicy, dark-red slices of meat found in a traditional deli. While the average per capita consumption of meat in New York was more than three pounds a week in the 1950s, the trend was away from the type of meat traditionally served in a deli. According to Jerry Freirich, the owner of a kosher-meat-processing company, New Yorkers had become partial to lean meat that was not too spicy or salty, as compared to the South, where, he said, fattier, spicier, and saltier meats were still preferred.
28
As the historian Marilyn Halter has noted, it was initially assumed by marketers that ethnic shoppers “would seek out local immigrant businesses involved in small-scale food production and retailing rather than consuming the products of corporate giants.”
29
But for the most part, Americans of all stripes, including relatively new immigrants, eagerly embraced “ethnic” products sold by large food corporations. This made it difficult for mom-and-pop delis to compete. Sam Novick, a longtime salesman for a number of kosher meat companies, including Public National Kosher, City Kosher (founded by his father), and Hebrew
National, put it bluntly: “The supermarket was part and parcel of the ruination of the neighborhood deli.”
30
On the other hand, some supermarkets saw delis as a threat and sought to block them from renting space in a shopping center in which the supermarket was an anchor tenant. This attitude reflected long-standing tensions between small retail stores and supermarkets; the attorney Manny Halper recalled that as a child in the Bronx, he once heard his rabbi give a sermon exhorting housewives not to buy meat from the supermarkets but to patronize their local butchers instead. Halper started writing leases in New York in 1960, enabling retail stores, including scores of Jewish delis, to move from city streets to suburban shopping centers. But he insisted that he never prepared a lease for a supermarket on Long Island without including a clause permitting a Jewish deli in the same shopping center. “The deli never posed any kind of threat,” he said, “particularly a kosher deli, which sold different kinds of merchandise than the supermarket did.”
31
Whether the precipitous decline in Jewish deli owners’ business could be attributed to the rise of the supermarket or not, it caused rage among them. In New York, their antagonism toward supermarkets allegedly grew so intense that they committed antitrust violations. If a kosher meat company agreed not to sell to local supermarkets such as Dilbert’s, Kubrick’s, Royal Farms, and Dan’s Supreme, then the Jewish delis in that neighborhood would purportedly band together and buy all their meat exclusively from that company. Companies that sought to sell to the supermarkets anyway, the government claimed, were threatened with violence. Fred Molod, a deli owner’s son who had become a lawyer for the Brooklyn branch of the Delicatessen Dealer’s Association, defended the delis. Molod brought a large map of Brooklyn into the courtroom, pushing colored pins into the map to mark the locations of the delis. He then put the deli owners on the stand to testify that there had been no unlawful cooperation. The government backed down from most of its allegations.