by Ted Merwin
Those men who brought delicatessen food home without first requesting permission of the lady of the house risked becoming the target of considerable wrath. In Arthur Kober’s short story “You Can’t Beat Friedkin’s Meats,” published in 1938 in the New Yorker, Mrs. Gross is enraged when her husband brings home a large paper bag of cold cuts from the local kosher delicatessen for their Saturday lunch. “Mine cooking is no good, ha?” she explodes, before rushing out to throw the food in the face of the hapless delicatessen owner.58 Similarly, in Jo Sinclair’s major work of postwar fiction, Wasteland, a Jewish mother is horribly insulted when her grownup son purchases corned-beef sandwiches for his Friday-night repast rather than eat her cooking.59
Yet, by the interwar era, the delicatessen had become the quintessential urban store, preserving denizens from having to cook for themselves whenever they found it impractical or inconvenient to do so. By 1921, according to an advertising-industry trade publication, there were already 319 delicatessens in the Bronx, even though Jewish migration to the neighborhood had not yet reached its peak.60 The humorist Montague Glass jokingly suggested that a “booster” sign be erected at the entrance to the city reading, “New York: Gateway to Westchester County,” with the “information” that “New York City Contains 9,622,849 Delicatessen Stores (Estimated) and Over 38,658,031 Miles of Electric Railroad.”61
Nor was the popularity of delicatessens limited to New York. As one journalist in Baltimore put it, a “studio apartment, with a cocktail shaker and a dinner furnished by the nearest delicatessen store, usually represents the sum total of standardized living among thousands of city dwellers in these modern times.”62 Tracing the history of the delicatessen store from its modest beginnings as a purveyor of “Swiss cheese and pickled lambs’ tongues” to its gussied-up modern incarnation with its menu of “broiled guinea hen and mushrooms under glass to alligator pear salad and petit fours,” she found that the delicatessen had come a long way in the sophistication of its fare and the elegance of its window displays. Indeed, she noted, delicatessen stores in America were judged superior to their European counterparts, given the greater variety of foods available in this country—“tomatoes, peaches, alligator pears and pineapples are rare and expensive luxuries abroad, while they are plentiful and comparatively cheap here.”63
Just as before the First World War, Sunday night remained the delicatessen’s busiest time of the week. Calling the delicatessen the “urbanite’s pantry-keeper,” Robins dubbed those delicatessens that were open on Sundays “oases in a desert of locked-up plenty.” The delicatessen was, he noted, nothing short of a “life saver” for those who were entertaining unexpected guests, for families whose cook had walked out, for travelers who came back from vacation to an empty larder, for people who decided on the spur of the moment to have a picnic, for those who had planned to go the beach but whose plans were foiled by rain—actually “for almost any kind of New Yorker there is.”64
Heyday of the Kosher Delicatessen
Meat was a mainstay of the Jewish diet throughout the Depression. According to Louisa Gertner, writing in the Yiddish Daily Forward in 1937, even in the summertime New Yorkers ate “more meat than [the population of] entire nations.”65 Much of this meat was sold in delicatessens. In S. J. Wilson’s 1964 novel Hurray for Me, set in the early 1930s, a Jewish mother confesses to her family that she has not had time to make dinner. One of her sons suggests delicatessen “for a change.” The mother scoffs at the suggestion, noting sarcastically that he eats deli every day for lunch. The son asks how she knows. Her tart reply: “Because I ate deli five times a week when I went to high school . . . and your father did, and so did everyone else. What else is there to eat when you go to school?”66
The number of kosher delicatessens alone was staggering. According to a list compiled in 1931 by Thomas Dwyer, commissioner of public markets, there were 1,550 kosher delicatessens in New York City, in addition to 6,500 kosher butchers, 1,000 kosher slaughterhouses for poultry, 575 kosher meat restaurants, and 150 dairy restaurants. All in all, he stated, there were more than 10,000 kosher food dealers in the city.67 Two years later, Koenigsberg used the list as the basis for a plan submitted to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia for the hiring of seventy inspectors to enforce the kosher laws.
Furthermore, according to a study conducted by Samuel Popkin for the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine, there were more than twenty-three hundred delicatessens—both Jewish and non-Jewish—in New York in the 1930s, representing almost a quarter of all those in the United States at the time.68 Popkin found that the total volume of sales in the delicatessen industry had reached $40 million. But he asserted that only the last eight months of each year were profitable for the delicatessen business, at least in the Northeast, since in these seasons there is a tendency for people to eat outdoors; “many people go to nearby parks and beaches and in all cases the most convenient and relatively appetizing lunch is delicatessen.” Indeed, the best season for delicatessen food is summer, when “jaded appetites demand some spicy food,” pointing them straightaway to the local delicatessen.69
In upscale neighborhoods, such as the Upper West Side (where, by the mid-1920s, more than half of the Jewish heads of household were garment manufacturers), ethnic Jewish businesses of all types helped prosperous Jews to resist lingering feelings of vulnerability in American society and to maintain a powerful sense of ethnic solidarity. As David Ward and Oliver Zunz have noted of second-generation Jews, “The physical attributes of the upper-class neighborhood they fashioned catered to their sense of urbanity and style, while its ethnicity, visible in the solid synagogues, kosher butcher shops, bookstores, delicatessens and bakeries, nourished a sense of cohesion despite their minority status.”70 The Jewish labor leader David Dubinsky had only to be glimpsed on one of his frequent jaunts to a kosher delicatessen in order to seem genuinely like one of the union rank-and-file.71
Interior of Morris Wepner’s Delicatessen in Upper Manhattan in 1920 (Courtesy of Paul Lewis)
Jewish delicatessens, Daniel Rogov has noted, tended to be located in older buildings and to have worn furnishings, tarnished silver, chipped plates, an antique cash register (and an even more antique person sitting behind it), and an overall down-at-the-heels atmosphere. As he put it, “Some maintain the mood, if not the actuality, of sawdust on the floors and nearly all feature large plate glass windows with no trace of draperies.”72 In Brooklyn, many of the delicatessens were constructed by Murray Hager, who was a well-known builder. The salamis hung in an arc in the window, the neon signs flashed the name of the deli and the company that supplied the meat (e.g., Hebrew National, Zion Kosher, 999), and there were towers of canned beans. They had light oak chairs with pink vinyl seats, wood-grain Formica on the tables, and a decoration over the entrance to the kitchen that typically featured plastic flowers overflowing from a plastic flower pot. As the restaurant designer Pat Kuleto recalled in 1990, “Until recently, there was no such thing as deli design. They were always started on a budget, so you’d simply buy the cheapest restaurant equipment. Then you’d put a few sandwich signs up on the wall, a few pictures of the owner, a couple of notices from the government and a few posters supplied maybe by the RC Cola Company or something. You’d turn the lights up real bright, hang a bunch of sausages around. . . . And that was it—they called it a deli.”73
The main feature was, of course, the delicatessen counter, with the row of meats on display and hand-lettered signs on the walls advertising the prices. As the historian Ruth Glazer pointed out in the 1940s, delicatessens would “hide demurely behind window displays of dummy beer cans. But for those who have eyes to see there are steaming frankfurters and knishes on the grill and untold delights behind the clouded glass and shredded colored cellophane.”74 Some delicatessens were larger and more elaborately decorated than others. The larger, more famous kosher delicatessens—Grabstein’s, George and Sid’s, and the Hy Tulip—were in Brooklyn, with smaller, storefront-type delicatessens more typical of
the Bronx.
Paradoxically, the number of kosher delicatessens grew even as fewer Jews kept kosher. An especially large decline of kosher observance, that of close to 30 percent, occurred between 1914 and 1924, as the second generation came to the fore. Ironically, this was at a time when almost half of the entire city’s meat supply was slaughtered according to the kosher regulations, as government reports from 1920 show.75 A survey done in 1937, after the publication of The Royal Table, the first popular guide in English to the Jewish dietary laws, found that the proportion of Jews keeping kosher had decreased even further than in preceding decades. It concluded that no more than 15 percent of the Jews in the United States kept strictly kosher, while 20 percent observed the kosher laws inconsistently and the other 65 percent—most of whom belonged to the Conservative or Reform branches of Judaism—scarcely bothered to keep kosher at all.76 As a review of the guide put it, the American Jew has “seen the tempo and flow of America’s modern industrial life break down the rigid barriers between Jews and Gentiles [and] kick his cumbersome dietary rituals into a cocked hat. To keep up the pace, it is easier to go Reformed with its worship of Judaism adapted to eight-cylinder cars, subways and cafeterias.”77
Nevertheless, the kosher delicatessen remained essential for those Jews who did continue to keep kosher, who still identified “kosher” with authentically Jewish, or who had more observant relatives with whom they dined on a regular basis. An investigator for a study of New York foodways by the Works Progress Administration concluded that the success of Rosenblum’s Delicatessen on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was based largely on its reputation as a place where religious laws were followed to the letter. He reported that the elder Rosenblum, who wore a skullcap and beard, ran the cash register but seemed present “more for decorative than business purposes, giving the place an air of religious orthodoxy.” This was important, given that his two sons did not appear to be religiously observant.78
However, while some delicatessens stopped selling kosher meat, others became kosher for the first time in the 1930s. Herb Rosenberg, whose father owned a deli in Brooklyn, recalled that as more Jews moved to Coney Island, the demand for kosher delicatessen products increased significantly. Not all the clientele kept kosher, and many were not Jewish. For example, the black actor Lou Gosset was a regular at the deli; his grandmother cleaned houses in the neighborhood to support her extended family. But in order to compete with the six other Jewish delicatessens on the twenty-three-block stretch of Mermaid Avenue where Herb’s father’s store was located, his father decided to make his store kosher. Pressure from religious authorities was also a factor; Herb remembers the local rabbi, who was preparing the boy for his bar mitzvah, trying to convince his father both to close on Saturdays (which they did not end up doing) and to sell only kosher meats.79
Some Jews strove mightily to convince their coreligionists to maintain the dietary laws. “Borrowing heavily from anthropology to zoology,” the historian Jenna Weissman Joselit has noted, “its defenders alternately sanitized, domesticated, aestheticized, commodified, and otherwise reinterpreted the practice of keeping kosher.”80 But they had little effect on the majority of their fellow Jews, for whom living in America largely meant eating what other Americans ate. Many Jews developed a workable compromise; they kept kosher at home but relaxed their standards when they ate out, thus making a distinction between their private and public lives. Indeed, Mordechai Kaplan, a Conservative rabbi who founded the Reconstructionist Movement, sanctioned the practice of keeping kosher at home but eating out in nonkosher restaurants as a way of balancing Jewish particularity with the need to live in the larger society.81
The kosher delicatessen thus symbolized ethnic community and continuity. According to Deborah Dash Moore, second-generation Jews “continued to endow the urban environment with ethnic attributes” such as food stores and restaurants.82 While she does not write about delicatessens in particular, Moore notes that “even middle-class neighborhoods would transmit a Jewish tinge to secular activities pursued within their boundaries.”83 It is little wonder that, according to the historian Elliot Willensky, garlic was the “common gastronomic denominator” for most of the ethnic cuisines of Brooklyn and was the basic ingredient in the food used in the kosher delicatessens, which advertised their presence all the way down the street. Even the sidewalks, he said, had a “translucence that could be attributed only to regular—if unintentional—saturation with well-rendered chicken fat.”84
Pulling Together through the Depression
Many who worked in the delicatessen industry characterize it as a mishpoche, using the Yiddish word for “family.” As one storekeeper, Isidore P. Salupsky, told his fellow delicatessen owners in 1932 in the pages of the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine, “With the present unemployment and bad times in general, some of our stores are hardly able to exist, many of the stores can hardly pay their bills; some of them are hardly making a living.” The owners needed to band together, Salupsky implored, rather than undercutting each other with their prices.85
Among the hard-and-fast rules given to delicatessen owners in the pages of the Mogen Dovid were to avoid “knocking” a competitor’s products, to maintain a neat appearance, to beware of becoming “too familiar” with the customer, to avoid displaying any “excitement,” to refrain from shouting at the clerk or sweeping the floor when customers were present, to open the store on time in the morning, and to make periodic changes in the window displays.86 It was essential, deli owners realized, to distinguish their products from ordinary groceries. Only if delicatessen meats could continue to be viewed as delicacies would the industry have a future, given the higher prices of prepared meats. An industry expert, writing in the pages of another trade publication, called Voice of the Delicatessen Industry, noted that these products were a “necessary luxury” for consumers and insisted that delicatessen “must not follow in the footsteps of groceries with their emphasis on volume and lower prices.” The loyal customer, he explained, “looks upon delicatessen as choice food, as special relishes, and does not mind if he has to pay a bit more.”87
Nevertheless, the work was backbreaking. Eighteen-hour days were routine, with unceasing physical labor. Herbert Krupp, who supplied kosher delicatessens in New Jersey, recalled having to reach into barrels of meat so cold that his hands almost froze, grabbing the fifteen- to twenty-pound slippery pieces of corned beef by a nub or flap of fat, called the deckle, and schlepping them into the store, where he flung them onto the scale to be weighed. (Owners were always suspicious that the meat had been “pumped,” or filled with water to increase the weight.) Delicatessen owners who cured their own meat had to rotate the huge pieces of meat through basement barrels filled with brine and spices. Only after several days of curing could the meat finally be cut into manageable sections, cooked, and prepared for slicing.
In the wake of Prohibition, one almost guaranteed money maker was alcohol, so many delicatessens started selling beer. The future delicatessen owner Phil Levenson recalls standing on a Coca-Cola box as a young teenager selling hot dogs and beers for a nickel apiece in his father’s deli in the Bronx. The hothouse (flower) workers in the Bronx Park neighborhood were so thirsty after work, he said, that he once sold two half barrels of beer from a four-foot bar in just a couple of hours.88
Delicatessen owners often enlisted their children to help in the store. The parents of Murray Lefkowitz, a powerful union organizer who represented deli employees, met because the older Lefkowitz mistook his future wife for her sister, whom he had recommended for a job in a meat-processing plant scrubbing dirt off beef tongues. Another job that was often given to children was to produce what was variously called a “poke,” “toot,” or “toodle,” a small piece of wax paper twisted into a cone, filled with mustard, and crimped on the bottom. As Ruth Glazer noted, “As soon as the youngsters of the family are old enough to hold two ‘toots’ of mustard in one hand and a ladle of mustard in the other, they are pressed into service
.”89
Irving Goldfried’s father had sold shoes in Poland before coming to the United States before the First World War. A friend recommended the deli business because the food sold fast: “You order your merchandise before the weekend, and already on Monday you have your money.” So in 1932, he bought a sixty-seat delicatessen (including an apartment in the back of the store) on Saratoga and Livonia Avenues in Brooklyn for $5,000. The waiters were college students from the neighborhood who needed money for tuition; the family worked behind the counter while Irving’s wife did the cooking. A hot dog, an order of french fries, and a soda each cost a nickel, and customers drifted in on their way to the bus stop or public school nearby. The elder Goldfried did not drive, so he walked a mile to the factory to pick up ten or twelve briskets in a baby carriage. Irving learned to work long hours as well, peeling potatoes in the backyard while listening to swing-band music on the Victrola.90
Exterior of Gottlieb’s Delicatessen on Myrtle Avenue on the Brooklyn-Queens border in 1950s (Collection of Ted Merwin)
Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins also got into the act. Marty Grabstein, whose parents owned the popular Grabstein’s Delicatessen in Brooklyn, told me that it was really his grandmother who ran the place. He recalled her as a tiny woman wielding a carving knife. She would bang on the table and shout, “Morris, it’s getting busy!” when she felt that her son wasn’t moving fast enough to seat the long lines of customers.91 It made sense to hire—or simply rely on—family members, since finding good employees was often a struggle. Levenson quipped that his chef was “whoever walked in the door and stayed sober for two weeks.” Family members were always assured of a free meal, known as putting the bill “on the cuff.”92