by Ted Merwin
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.”)28 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.”29
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.”30 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.”31 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.32 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.
Cover of Rialto Delicatessen menu from 1945 (Collection of Ted Merwin)
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.33
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.34 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.35
Advertising card from 1926 silent film version of Kosher Kitty Kelly (Collection of Ted Merwin)
But Jewish delicatessen food did not automatically help to build bridges to non-Jews. In an early short talkie, The Delicatessen Kid, produced in 1929, the comic Benny Rubin plays the starstruck son of a delicatessen owner (Otto Lederer) who imitates the different singing and dancing styles of the various (non-Jewish) entertainers who patronize the store, who are modeled on such luminaries as Eddie Leonard, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Pat Rooney. Much of the humor comes from the fact that these non-Jewish customers do not seem as appreciative of Jewish food as the father would like; one refuses to buy pickles along with his sandwiches, while another—the Bojangles character—asks in vain for pork chops.36
The Jewish Delicatessen Waiter
Even as delicatessens became both setting and theme for popular culture, they took on a highly theatrical vibe of their own. Beyond the celebrity atmosphere, one of the most entertaining aspects of the Jewish delicatessen was provided by the stereotypically snooty Jewish waiters, many of whom were former actors from the Yiddish or vaudeville stage. Jewish delicatessen waiters were frequently
bossy and obnoxious to the customers; they told them where to sit, what to order, and how to behave. They acted, in other words, more like the famously snooty waiters in high-class Parisian restaurants than the servers that one would expect in a New York sandwich shop.
The short-tempered, sarcastic delicatessen waiter was always ready with a cynical remark that cut the customer down to size like an expert tailor taking a swipe at a garment. He expressed the resentment, always bubbling above the surface like the froth on a glass of seltzer, that the Jewish laborer felt for those who were starting to put on airs. The waiter was also left behind in a backbreaking occupation, serving his social betters with food that symbolized upward mobility.37 As Diane Kassner, the bewigged and heavily-made-up waitress who worked for decades at the Second Avenue Deli, intoned with a mixture of stoicism and regret as she dumped matzoh ball soup from a tin cup into a customer’s bowl, “You’ll be the richer; I’ll be the pourer.”38
Many waiters labored for decades in the same restaurant; it was not uncommon for the waiters at Ratner’s (which was a well-known dairy restaurant) to work into their eighties or nineties. It is no wonder that the waiters at Lindy’s joked about writing a book about their experience, under the title “I’ve Waited Long Enough.”39 The Jewish waiter was, in Alan Richman’s words, “as much as an American original as the workingmen who drove herds of cattle, laid railroad tracks, built skyscrapers.” The only difference, he conceded, was that the waiter “just moved a lot slower.”40
Why did customers want to be insulted or treated jocularly when they ate in Jewish delicatessens? Most Jews were probably able to discriminate between what was truly nasty or inattentive treatment and what was essentially an appeal to a common “language” or way of interacting, in which raised voices and sarcasm were a shared inheritance from Yiddish immigrant culture. Who else could talk to you so obnoxiously other than a close friend or family member? “A waiter in Lindy’s,” it was said, “is not only your servant. He’s also your relative.”41 The waiter was a kind of surrogate uncle or grandfather for the duration of the meal; he paradoxically made you feel at home by treating you with undisguised contempt.
Furthermore, the hostile-seeming server was nothing new in American culture. An anonymous New York waitress, quoted in 1916, was asked about the effect of the work on her physical and emotional state. “Sore feet and a devilish mean disposition,” she responded.42 In the early years of the twentieth century, when women were first being hired in significant numbers as waitresses (until then, the idea of having women serve male customers carried awkward sexual connotations), the stereotype of the ill-mannered “hasher” developed. “Almost everyone agreed that the ‘hasher’ (girl who waited table) of a generation ago was an untidy, uneven-tempered, unpredictable creature,” noted one observer during the Depression. “She didn’t have charm.” But by the 1930s, an important change had occurred, in that “pulchritude and personality are just as necessary to the food-dispenser as pork chops and pastrami.”43
Many non-Jews also enjoyed being ribbed by the waiters, despite the disparity between the way in which they were treated in non-Jewish restaurants and the delicatessen waiters’ brusqueness. The sociologist Harry G. Levine recalled that his Irish and Scotch-Irish mother, who hailed from Hibbing, Minnesota, after she saw a Broadway show made a beeline for the Stage or Lindy’s, where she could look forward to an equally diverting performance from a different breed of entertainers, the “bossy, know-it-all waiters,” whom Levine said were no less salient in his memory than “the Formica tables, the walls lined with pictures of celebrities [he’d] never heard of, the glass cases filled with enormous cheesecakes, and the multimeat sandwiches named after comedians.”44
Tuxedoed waiter at the Rialto Restaurant and Delicatessen, along with chef and two countermen (Courtesy of Ziggy Gruber)
The Jazzy “Delicatessen Wife”
Outside the theater district, the appeal of the delicatessen spread rapidly, as take-out food suddenly jumped in popularity. While the immigrant Jewish wife was expected to cook for her family, the second-generation Jewish wife began to pay others to cook for her and her family. A Yiddish song recorded in the late 1920s by Pesach Burstein, “Git Mir Di Meidlach Fun Amol” (Give Me the Girls from Yesteryear), lamented that modern Jewish women danced to jazz music, smoked cigarettes, and fed their men with gassy food from the corner delicatessen. If only, the singer fantasized, he could find one of the virtuous old-time girls—non-Jewish girls, it seems—with blond hair, beautiful braids, and the inclination to prepare home-cooked meals for her beau.45
Even after marriage, it seemed, Jewish women continued to take food out from the local delicatessen. As the homemaker Ethel Somers complained in 1927, “In this age of delicatessen lure, simple home dinners are becoming all too uncommon. . . . They are commonly shunned.”46 Sometimes it fell to the husbands to do the delicatessen shopping, perhaps because their wives were out of the house. “Already some of the young men who married last June are dropping in at the delicatessen about dinner time to get a few sandwiches,” a humor column in Life magazine noted sarcastically in 1929.47
At a time of expanding freedoms for women, many conservative commentators viewed delis as enabling women to evade their household responsibilities. What would women do if they no longer had to spend the afternoon shopping and cooking for dinner? Either they could keep working after marriage, or they could use their afternoons for leisure pursuits such as playing cards, going to film and theater matinees, clothes shopping, reading novels, and attending meetings and classes. As a Brooklyn Jewish mother in Daniel Fuchs’s proletarian novel Homage to Blenholt noted sarcastically, “all the young ladies, they don’t cook like the older generation. Lunch they eat in the delicatessen stores with the baby carriages outside, and in the night when the husbands come home from work, they throw together pastrami, cole slaw, potato salad, and finished, supper.”48
These New York housewives were, to some extent, following in the footsteps of the feminist and social reformer Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house with a heavily Jewish clientele. As early as 1904, Addams had advocated the ordering of all food from take-out stores in order to release women from “domestic servitude.” As Everybody’s Magazine reported, “She would have your meals delivered at the house-door, just as the returned washing is. Your beefsteak would be ‘done’ as your linen is. Cooking is drudgery and should be ‘done’ on the outside. . . . [She] [f]ound great bake, soup, meat, delicatessen shops.”49
Women could join the workforce and still, through taking out food, have dinner on the table when their husbands walked in the door. This, according to the journalist L. H. Robins, helped to create the “beehive” nature of the New York economy, which generated greater wealth than any other city on earth. But it was not just that the wives were earning money that made the husbands tolerant of all the take-out dinners they ate from the delicatessen. Robins insisted that most husbands would rather keep their wives from toil, thus preserving their beauty, than sit down to a home-cooked repast at the end of each day.50
The effect of delicatessen food on customers’ marriages was a matter of heated debate. One deli owner reported in 1925 that his interaction with his customers gave him intimate knowledge of what was going on in their homes; he boasted that he was a greater expert in marital relationships than were Brigham Young, King Solomon, and the local family court judge put together! The secret of a good marriage, he disclosed, was to live near a delicatessen, speculating that if the range were stolen from some of his customers’ kitchens, it would take a month before they would notice the theft.51
Others, by contrast, viewed the delicatessen as destroying marriages and disrupting family life. At an annual convention in Baltimore of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, its president, Mrs. John D. Sherman, claimed that the “delicatessen wife,” a term that she evidently coined, gave her husband grounds for divorce. She linked the buying of prepared food to participation i
n other “jazzy” activities, coupled with an alarming tendency to shirk the housework.52 As Agnes V. Mahoney of the Industrial Survey and Research Bureau put it, it was precisely the reliance of many wives on the corner delicatessen and its “ready-cooked tin-can food” that had increased the incidence of broken homes.53
Cover of the New Yorker from March 28, 1936 (Courtesy of Condé Nast / The New Yorker)
Florence Guy Seabury’s satirical essay “The Delicatessen Husband” took up the situation of a man who “lives from can to mouth.”54 Since his wife works long hours as a chemist, he is delegated to do the household shopping. But he feels emasculated by the shopping experience, viewing delicatessens in particular as home wreckers and “emblems of a declining civilization.” In short, he concludes, they are “generations removed from his ideals.”55 Nevertheless, by the turn of the twenty-first century, Seabury predicted, everything from clothing to newborn babies would arrive wrapped up in neat delicatessen-type packages. Seabury suggested that the proliferation of delicatessens represented a degree of progress since while a delicatessen husband might be “cursed with the task of bringing into his walled apartment his share of the canned tongue and chicken wings,” he at least did not have to slaughter the animal himself or split the wood to make the fire for his own dinner and coffee.56
Delicatessen stores were also viewed as the unfortunate byproducts of powerful new technologies that were rapidly reshaping American culture. One prominent critic, Silas Bent, assailed the toll on the mind and body that the “mechanized” way of living was beginning to take. Bent viewed the speed with which food could be produced and circulated as symbolic of the drastic changes in modern life. In a chapter titled “From Barbecue to Delicatessen Dinner,” Bent traced these developments from primitive man’s way of eating to the modern methods by which foodstuffs were circulated around the globe. The almost instant availability of an astonishing variety of food, Bent believed, caused a host of both physical and emotional problems. “The machine,” Bent lamented, “is sending more and more of us out of the home into restaurants, cafeterias, clubs and hotels; it is making us soft and dyspeptic, hurried and worried.”57