by Ted Merwin
Fred Molod’s father sold his delicatessen on the Lower East Side and moved to the Bay Parkway section of Brooklyn, where he bought another delicatessen in partnership with his father-in-law, who had been a presser in a garment factory. Molod recalls that since they lived across the street from the store, his father did not even own a suit. “The only time that we closed early was at eight p.m. on Friday night,” noted Molod. “We broke the fast of Yom Kippur by going back to the store and reopening for business.”93
The Delicatessen as a “Secular Synagogue”
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.94
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,”95 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.”96
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.”97 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.98 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.)99
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.”100 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.”101
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.102
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.”103
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.104 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.105
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.106 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.107
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.”108
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.
3
Send a Salami
Delicatessens during the Second World War and the Postwar Exodus from New York
The 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.1 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.”)2 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.”3
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 day4—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)5 to the civilian populations of Europe. One soldier’s wife admitted that she fantasized about eating steak more than she did about having sex.6
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.7 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.8 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.9 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 R
uth 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.10 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.11
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.12 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.)13 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.14