Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  As the delicatessen continued to gain traction in the culture of New York, different orientations toward Jewish religion and culture would produce not just different kinds of kosher delicatessens but a “kosher-style” type of delicatessen as well that reflected the desire of many Jews to create a new balance between their Jewish and American identities, one in which the nature of Jewish food itself would be redefined to serve the purpose of acculturation into American society.

  2

  From a Sandwich to a National Institution

  Delicatessens in the Jazz Age and the Interwar Era

  In the Marx Brothers’ first Broadway show, I’ll Say She Is!, which catapulted the vaudeville performers to stage (and later film) stardom, the delicatessen played a starring role. The 1924 revue was about a bored rich girl who promises her hand in marriage to the suitor who gives her the greatest excitement. The climax featured Groucho as a famous French hero. Playing Napoleon to Lotta Miles’s Josephine, Napoleon was surprisingly, anachronistically, and quite bizarrely fixated on Jewish delicatessen foods:

  Napoleon: Get me a bologna sandwich. Never mind the bologna. Never mind the bread. Just bring the check. Get me a wine brick.

  Josephine: Oh! It’s you. I thought you were at the Front.

  Napoleon: I was, but nobody answered the bell, so I came around here.

  Josephine: Well, what are you looking for?

  Napoleon: My sword—I lost my sword.

  Josephine: There it is, dear, just where you left it.

  Napoleon: How stupid of you. Why didn’t you tell me? Look at that point. I wish you wouldn’t open sardines with my sword. I am beginning to smell like a delicatessen. My infantry is beginning to smell like the Cavalry.1

  What makes this skit deliciously ironic is its presentation of a “Jewish” Napoleon. After all, it was the great French leader who helped to emancipate the Jews, offering them French citizenship in return for their promise to keep their religion to themselves. This enabled the rapid assimilation of most of the Jews of France and also served as a model for other European governments in their approach to the “Jewish Question”—the problem of how to integrate Jews into European civil society. In return, Napoleon became a staple of Jewish folklore.2

  By contrast to this victorious bigwig, the demasculinized Groucho Marx version of Napoleon can’t keep track of his sword, and he doesn’t seem to know where he is going. Even when he finds his sword, he discovers that his presumably unfaithful lover has been using it, quite promiscuously, as a can opener. He’s “hot” for Josephine, but his body smells like a delicatessen. He is sinking inexorably back to his “Jewish” roots, which put him at odds with his role as a French hero and lover. The call of the delicatessen is ultimately too strong; after this repartee, he gestures to the band leader to strike up the famous French song “The Mayonnaise”—a joke, of course, on the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”

  The call of the delicatessen likewise reverberated stentoriously for the children of Jewish immigrants who acculturated into American society during the Jazz Age and for whom the Jewish eatery and its fare became symbols of success. Rising prosperity after the First World War led to the pell-mell exodus of Jews from the Lower East Side. Newer Jewish neighborhoods sprang up in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn—neighborhoods in which the delicatessen became a crucial gathering space for a generation of lower-middle-class Jews who were eager to participate in American society while still maintaining loyalty to their ethnic roots.

  Even as the membership of the Ku Klux Klan peaked, Henry Ford fulminated against Jewish “control” of American banking and entertainment, and stringent new immigration restrictions were passed that essentially ended the influx of eastern European Jews, second-generation Jews found a congenial gathering place in the delicatessen, a place where they could feel, in Deborah Dash Moore’s influential phrase, “at home in America,”3 and where they could congratulate themselves on having transcended their immigrant origins. The ability to consume meat was, as we saw for the bourgeoisie in late eighteenth-century Paris, a visible index of upward mobility. The sandwich-making business, in particular, appeared to be a quick route to riches. “There are sandwich impresarios in every city in the country,” the drama critic George Jean Nathan asserted, “who—up to a few years ago poor little delicatessen dealers—now wear dinner jackets every evening and own Packard Sixes.”4

  The serving of “overstuffed” sandwiches in theater-district delicatessens presaged the contemporary hot-dog-eating contests sponsored annually by Nathan’s on the Fourth of July, which, like the Thanksgiving feast, are a celebration of American bounty and excess.5 The anthropologist Robert Abrahams has suggested that American holidays are typically marked by taking ordinary things and “stylizing them, blowing them up, distending, or miniaturizing them”—he lists the “lowly firecracker, the balloon, the wrapped present, the cornucopia, the piñata, the stuffed turkey, and Santa’s stuffed bag.” The overstuffed delicatessen sandwich could certainly be added to that catalogue of cartoonish items that burst their boundaries, release repressed energies, and create a carnival atmosphere of raucous celebration.6

  The exaltation felt by second-generation Jews that they had finally “arrived” in America was spurred by the very atmosphere of the nonkosher, theater-district delicatessens, which were imbued with the glitz and glamor of celebrity—as shown in everything from the showbiz pictures on the walls to the sandwiches that were named after the theater and film stars of the day. Allan Sherman and Bud Burtson’s unproduced 1947 musical The Golden Touch satirizes the stardust atmosphere of these delis; it revolves around a nonkosher delicatessen in the theater district called Cheesecake Sam’s that caters to “upscale” customers such as “the most important shipping clerks and celebrated soda jerks! A boulevardier from Avenue A! The distingue of Rockaway! A furrier from Astoria.”7

  The Stage Delicatessen, which opened in 1935, was thus aptly named; it was the Jewish customers who used it as a platform to display, through conspicuous consumption of large quantities of pickled meat, their own growing visibility in American society; the Stage Delicatessen’s unofficial slogan was “Where Celebrities Go to Look at People.”8 Its clientele imbibed the show-business atmosphere like slabs of brisket soaking up barrels of brine on their way to becoming corned beef and pastrami. As the vaudevillian Joe Smith joked in one of his routines, “Max’s Stage Delicatessen,” the food was “so high-class that if you get an ulcer from eating here, it’ll have on a tuxedo.”9

  At these vibrant, humming eateries, ordinary New Yorkers hobnobbed with the rich and famous. Harpo Marx described the lively crowd at Lindy’s and Reuben’s as a mix of the down on their luck with the very successful—“cardplayers, horseplayers, bookies, song-pluggers, agents, actors out of work and actors playing the Palace, Al Jolson with his mob of fans, and Arnold Rothstein with his mob of runners and flunkies. The cheesecake was ambrosia. The talk was old, familiar music.”10 Second-generation Jews dined amid that lively “music” in order to have some of the stardust rub off on themselves.

  It may seem odd that the humble sandwich epitomized life in New York during the opulent, ostentatious Jazz Age. But sandwiches were all the rage. The drama critic George Jean Nathan reported in 1926 on the “sandwich wave” that had “latterly engulfed the Republic.” He found 5,215 stores in New York City alone that specialized in sandwiches, which he discovered had become “one of the leading industries of the country, taking precedence over soda-water, candy, chewing gum, and the Saturday Evening Post.” Furthermore, the sandwich appealed, in one form or another, to everybody, in every social class and occupation in society, including, Nathan noted, to “the shopgirl and the lady of fashion, the day-laborer and the Brillat-Savarin.” As a result, Nathan found no less than 946 different kinds of sandwiches, made from ingredients ranging from snails to spaghetti.11

  Cover of Reuben’s menu with caricatures of stage and film stars—note the slogan in the lower lefthand corner. (C
ollection of Ted Merwin)

  The menus in the theater-district delicatessens were typically very long, with hundreds of items available every night. As Jim Heiman pointed out in his history of twentieth-century American menu design, “being handed an oversized bill of fare became an event in itself, subtly suggesting a restaurant’s importance by the seemingly endless choices offered to a customer.”12 It made the customer feel important too, to know that his or her options were so vast; the composer Oscar Levant once jokingly asked a waiter at Lindy’s if he could take a delicatessen menu home, in order to give him something to read.13

  During the 1920s, which the novelist and historian Jerome Charyn calls the “delicatessen decade,”14 Jewish eateries participated in this culture of conspicuous consumption. “If you take a glance into the plate-glass window,” noted the humorist Montague Glass of a delicatessen in downtown Manhattan, “you will see such a display of food, tastefully decorated with strips of varicolored paper,15 as Rabelais might have catalogued for one of Gargantua’s heartier meals.” The turkeys, he added, are “interspersed with spiced beef, smoked tongue, plump kippered white fish, and festoons of frankfurters.” Glass compared the decor to that of an old-fashioned Pullman railroad car, which employed such expensive materials as inlaid mother of pearl, stained glass, satinwood, and mahogany.16

  Some delicatessen exteriors were even more attention grabbing and ostentatious. Arnold Manoff, a worker for the Federal Writers’ Project who interviewed Arnold Reuben in 1938, compared the interior of Reuben’s with the opulent lounge of the Radio City Musical Hall, noting that as the pedestrian strolls up Fifty-Eighth Street toward Fifth Avenue,

  suddenly the wall of brick to your left is ended and the periphery of your eye catches a huge pane of glass curtained in cream folds and shrubberied formally at the bottom. A red blazing neon sprawls over the window REUBENS. Typical. This is REUBENS! Who is Reuben that his name should stand alone without a word of explanation, without even a first name, without a Company or Inc after it? What the hell! You don’t mind GENERAL MOTORS; Money! Power! Industry. Well, all right, REUBEN. Twenty Five feet long, five feet high on 58th Street, Right next to the Savoy Plaza, the Sherry Natherland [sic]. Nearby Central Park, the old Plaza, Fifth Ave. Nearby Park Ave. A ritzy restaurant, if you judge by what you can’t see from the outside.17

  The immense neon sign connoted brashness and brazenness, opulence and ostentation; it joined in the nightly visual symphony of the lights of the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The delicatessen’s location among the iconic hotels that surround Central Park also places it in the most august company imaginable—old-money, Protestant New York society. To the writer, there was evidently something incongruous about such an obviously Jewish name being so prominently emblazoned on the midtown Manhattan scene, at a time when Jews were still viewed by many as grasping, ill-mannered interlopers in American society. Yet the sign still suggested that a Jew and his restaurant had, however improbably, reached the pinnacle of American society.

  During the Jazz Age, Broadway was itself at its zenith. The number of new shows more than doubled from 126 in 1927 to 264 in 1928—the all-time peak.18 Theater tickets were relatively inexpensive; many New Yorkers attended theater on a weekly basis, and they also patronized the palatial movie theaters that were also located near Times Square.

  No ethnic group was more involved and invested in popular culture than were the Jews, who provided the lion’s share of the creative talent, financial backing, and real estate for the entertainment business.19 And no New York eateries were more emblematic of show-business culture than were the theater-district delicatessens, which transformed the ordinary sandwich into a fancy meal. According to Rian James, who penned a popular dining guide to New York in 1930, Reuben “raised the in-elegant dime sandwich to a wholly elegant dollar status!” James noted that in Reuben’s, you can “see all Broadway parade before you.”20

  After his performances at the Winter Garden Theater, the famous Jewish singer Al Jolson, the most popular Jewish entertainer of his day (best known for his 1927 film The Jazz Singer), would invite the entire audience to accompany him to Lindy’s for a pastrami sandwich. The bootlegger Arnold Rothstein, infamous for fixing the 1919 World Series, did all his business at delicatessen tables at Lindy’s, where he was such a fixture that when he was gunned down outside the restaurant in 1928, many people thought that he had been an owner of the restaurant. By controlling the city’s underworld from his table at Lindy’s, the historian Michael Alexander has noted, Rothstein demonstrated that a Jew could be influential and admired, despite being a criminal, while remaining squarely within his own ethnic milieu.21

  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.”22

  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.23

  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.”24 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.”25

  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 f
or 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.26

  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.27

  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.