Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  In order to comply with federal guidelines limiting meat consumption, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia requested that no meat be sold on Tuesdays in New York City, with the only exemption being for hot dog and hamburger stands, which were asked to encourage substitute foods like fish.15 While many delicatessens had been open seven days of the week, they almost unanimously decided to close their doors on these “meatless Tuesdays,” with a few remaining open only to sell beer. Irving Krasner, a jobber in the delicatessen business, married his wife, Selma, on a Tuesday and went back to work the next day, while Barbara Solomon’s dad used his precious Tuesdays to take her and her brother for leisurely boat rides up the Hudson or on excursions to the Bronx Zoo.

  Periodic shortages continued, even after the end of the war; about a tenth of the thousand kosher delicatessens in the city shut down in September 1946 for lack of meat. The delicatessen industry associations called a meeting to discuss closing down all of the stores for at least a month, given that the shops had only 10 to 20 percent of their usual merchandise. Kosher delicatessens were especially hard hit, with that reduction in their normal supply and with some meats, such as corned beef and tongue, virtually unobtainable at any price. Louis Schweller, the president of the Bronx Delicatessen Dealers Association, predicted that most of the thousand or so remaining kosher delicatessens would have to close. But also affected were the seven thousand or so delicatessens that were mostly indistinguishable from grocery stores. In all, according to Jack Kranis, attorney for the Joint Council of Delicatessen Store Dealers, as many as ten thousand employees—waiters, countermen, and kitchen help—could be left jobless.16

  Customers shop for meat in Gellis Delicatessen in Manhattan during postwar shortages on October 9, 1946 (Copyright Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Food writers in the press suggested using nonmeat substitutes, canned meat products, or such innovations as “corned beef spread.” Restaurants and hotels were asked to “stretch” their meat by preparing hash and nonrationed meat such as kidney, liver, and tripe. A horse-meat dealer in Newark announced plans to open an outlet in Manhattan, incurring the wrath of former mayor LaGuardia, who called the consumption of horse meat “degrading and humiliating” and pointed out that eating horses had been rejected even by the “peasants of Europe and the coolies of China.”17 Fortunately, the shortages eased before horse meat became a staple of the New York diet.

  That delicatessen food was seen as a special treat was shown by the ongoing efforts of the 52 Association, a group that started in 1945 after a restaurant owner picked up the tab for a group of blind sailors who had dined in his restaurant. The owner and his friends then created an organization in which fifty-two men would each be asked to contribute fifty-two dollars a year to pay for a weekly party for wounded veterans, serving food from delicatessens and gourmet food stores. By the early 1950s, the organization boasted more than two thousand members in New York alone and had expanded its efforts to include not just sponsoring the social events but helping the veterans to find jobs. According to one journalist, the organization’s philosophy was that there is “not much wrong with a man’s spirit that cannot be bettered by large portions of pastrami and cheesecake rendered under warm, friendly conditions.”18

  Murray Handwerker, the son of the founder of Nathan’s, took an indirect path to bringing delicatessen into his store, which initially served only hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, and chow mein. While serving overseas, he became introduced to foreign cuisines, as did many of his fellow soldiers. Upon his return, he decided to experiment with serving different foods. Murray took advantage of his father’s vacation in Florida to start serving shrimp and clams. Only after he started making a profit from seafood did he bring in (nonkosher) delicatessen foods. “The postwar years were a turning point,” he recalled. “Tastes were changing. And I, coming home from the war and going into the business, was part of that scene.”19

  While the war exposed Jews to other types of food, it also provided opportunities for non-Jews to learn about Jewish food. Lieutenant Colonel Harold Dorfman realized how much he missed delicatessen food when he served as navigator in a B-24 bomber on September 12, 1944. As the plane approached its target, the submarine pens of northern Germany, the pilot was ordered to inquire and record what was in each crew member’s mind. Each responded, in turn, that he was thinking about his family back home—each, that is, except for Dorfman, who said that he was consumed with a desire for a hot pastrami sandwich. The response from the pilot: “How do you spell pastrami?” The crew endured an eight-hour attack by enemy gunfire by laughing and joking about the episode. But to actually taste the unfamiliar delicacy, most had to wait until they arrived in New York eight months later on their way back to Fort Dix.20

  The “New York” Jewish Delicatessen, outside New York

  After the Second World War, many Jews migrated out of New York, often in search of the warmer climes that they had discovered during their military service. Bringing their love of Jewish food with them, these newcomers established “New York–style” delicatessens all over the continent. While these delicatessens traded on the idea of “authentic” New York Jewish food, they each developed local variations on the theme. Many imported food from New York or hired delicatessen managers or workers away from New York, but they put the stamp of the local culture on the delicatessen and its menu.

  Many Jewish New Yorkers relocated to Miami and L.A., where they found palm trees and wide-open spaces. By migrating to far-away cities that were known for their “leisure lifestyle,” Deborah Dash Moore has argued, Jews remade themselves “from natives standing on the threshold of security and status into strangers seeking to establish networks to sustain themselves.”21 In the absence of well-developed social, professional, and religious networks, food still connected them to the life that they had left behind.

  In some parts of the country, of course, Jewish delis were few and far between. When the actress Molly Picon returned to the United States from a series of performances in South America in the 1930s, she undertook a tour across the South and Southwest. “We continued driving straight through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the Smokies, and south until we got to San Antonio. For four days, we’d be driving, and not one delicatessen on the whole trip!” she complained.22 But almost every city that had a significant Jewish population had delicatessens, and these eateries were, as in New York, important gathering spots for an acculturating generation of American Jews.

  In Baltimore, “Corned Beef Row” flourished on Lombard Street in Baltimore, with delis such as Weiss’s, Sussman and Lev’s, Awrach and Perl’s, and Nates and Leon’s. Baltimore had boasted delis since the turn of the century, with five delicatessens listed in the Baltimore city directory as of 1905 and seventeen as of 1910. One of the first, H. L. Kaplan & Company, began in 1897; by 1917, it advertised in a New York Yiddish newspaper, the Yiddishes Tageblatt, promoting its “high grade kosher sausage, smoked and corned beef, tongues, and pure chicken fat.”23

  Most of these delicatessens were located in East Baltimore, where the majority of the Jews lived. As in New York, most were strictly take-out stores until the interwar era, when they began to operate full-service restaurants as well. Sussman’s Delicatessen had a separate counter on each side of the store, one for smoked fish and herring, the other for sausages and other meats. In 1926, its owner, Jacob Sussman, went into partnership with Carl Lev, a delicatessen dealer from New York. By the mid-1930s, they had installed seating booths, an Art Deco–style bar, and a ceramic-tile floor. A Viennese baker from New York prepared the bread, pies, and pastries.

  Baltimore delicatessens, many of which, like the kosher delicatessen in Providence, doubled as soda fountains, were known for their variations on traditional sandwiches. The “Broadway Special” at Sussman and Lev’s comprised tongue, spiced beef, corned beef, salami, sweet gherkins, and lettuce, all of which could be washed down with an Almond Smash soda. Over at Ballow’s, Nathan Ballow served the ten-cent Easterwood Special, a
half loaf of rye bread filled with bologna and mustard, as well as a bologna and hot dog combination. Nates and Leon’s, founded by Nates Herr and Leon Shavitz, was known for its combination sandwiches, of which it ultimately developed 120, including an especially popular one of corned beef, coleslaw, lettuce, and Russian dressing. Harry and Seymour Attman, who promoted their deli as the “home of fifty sandwiches,” took ideas for combinations from the Carnegie Delicatessen in New York.24

  Interior of Sussman and Lev’s Delicatessen in Baltimore from the 1930s (Courtesy of the Jewish Museum of Maryland)

  In Boston, the G&G, owned by Irving Green and Charlie Goldstein, was an iconic deli on Blue Hill Avenue, in the heart of the Jewish working-class neighborhood, that, in the 1940s, served a decidedly nonkosher mix of ice-cream sodas, beer, potato pancakes, liverwurst and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, and chopped chicken liver accompanied by bread and butter. The historians Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon describe it as the central gathering place for the Jewish community, the Jewish version of the downtown Algonquin Club, where the Brahmins of Boston carried on their business. Candidates for local and national office knew that they needed to shake hands at the G&G in order to carry the Jewish vote; at the G&G, on every election night, a wooden bandstand was installed just outside the door, where the candidates and their supporters would make their last-minute pitches. Even John F. Kennedy, for example, according to Levine and Harmon, “made eye contact and munched french fries smothered in kishke grease with the best of them.”25

  Other nearby delicatessens were the downtown Essex Food Shop, which boasted the “biggest and best sandwiches in Boston”; the Modern Delicatessen & Lunch in the suburb of Roxbury, which carried three kinds of “solame” and two kinds of “frankforts”; and a chain called Barney Sheff’s, located in Boston, Roxbury, and Revere. Other than Rubin’s, which opened in Brookline in 1928, kosher delicatessens were never very popular in Boston, perhaps because of the centrality of pork and shellfish in the cuisine of New England. Indeed, one specialty of the Boston delis was the Swiss delicacy called cervelat—a mixture of beef, bacon, and pork rind packed into cow intestines and then smoked and boiled.

  Chicago, a city famed for its stockyards and for providing dressed meat to the rest of the country, was also known for its delicatessens—even if they were rarely called by that name.26 Manny’s Coffee Shop and Deli opened in 1942 in the Maxwell Street area in Chicago, where the Jewish ghetto was still emptying out. When the New York Yankees came to town, the players got corned beef sandwiches and pickles from Friedman’s Deli on Western Avenue, an establishment owned by the diehard Yankee fan Oscar Friedman. Friedman had befriended Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson when Friedman was stationed in Sumter, South Carolina, during the Korean War, which happened to be Richardson’s hometown. Friedman’s son, Mark, recalled that each visit by the Yankees occasioned an exciting family outing to the stadium; before the game, they would deliver a paper sack of sandwiches and pickles to the Yankees’ dressing room and get to meet Richardson, Tony Kubek, Elston Howard, Whitey Ford, and new manager Yogi Berra. Another celebrity customer of Friedman’s was Nat “King” Cole, who performed with his trio at a nearby nightclub called the Rag Doll. Cole once insisted, despite the owner’s objections, on ordering—and eating—a corned beef and sardine sandwich.27

  The writer Joseph Epstein, who grew up in Chicago, recalled that Friedman’s, which sported only ten or eleven tables, was a “meeting place after dates or a card game,” a place where he found “older men, bedizened with pinky rings, talking about deals they had cut or bets they had won.” Epstein frequently ended up there at one o’clock in the morning, when he and his friends “might tuck into a bowl of chicken kreplach soup, a corned-beef sandwich, and a Pepsi, maybe a couple of cups of coffee, a slice of cheesecake, possibly pick up a bit of halvah on the way out, a full fourth meal of the day, eating and arguing, before turning in for a perfect night’s sleep.”28

  Delicatessens were particularly important as Jewish gathering places in Los Angeles given that Jews in the sprawling region tended to live much less closely together than they had in New York. Moore quotes a Los Angeles rabbi to the effect that the “sprawling atmosphere militates against the creation of a Jewish climate . . . in a given street or group or streets where people could come together informally and still be with like-minded persons.”29 The delicatessen also became the hangout of choice for the many Jews who worked in the film industry. “There could be no picture making,” the film director Orson Welles flatly declared, “without pastrami.”30

  Canter’s Delicatessen, which had first opened in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1924, relocated to the Jewish suburb of Boyle Heights in 1931 and then moved to Fairfax Avenue—the heart of the Los Angeles Jewish community in the postwar years—in 1953. During the Depression, Canter’s sold so many sandwiches for a dime apiece that a local bank borrowed money from it; by 1946, the deli was raking in a million dollars a year. Cohen’s (also on Fairfax), Woloshin’s (which was one of the few kosher delicatessens on the West Coast), Linny’s, Lax’s, Eat ’n Shop, Joseph’s, and Nate ’n Al’s were also hangouts for Jews in the entertainment industry. Both Lax’s and Joseph’s advertised themselves as offering what they called “choice Eastern delicacies,” which neatly captured the identification of delicatessen food with both New York and eastern Europe.

  In Tough Jews, a history of Jewish gangsters in America, Rich Cohen describes his father’s ritual breakfasts with his friends from childhood (including the television news anchor Larry King) at Nate ’n Al’s, where they act like big shots, call each other by mobster-sounding nicknames in their indelible Brooklyn accents, and act fearless and macho and mean. The deli roots them in a shared ethnic Jewish past, while it feeds their fantasies of machismo. As Cohen writes, “They fled Brooklyn thirty-five, forty years ago and have shed as many outward signs of their heritage as would be shed, yet still retain something of the old world, a final, fleeting glimpse of what their fathers must have been.”31

  Other Jews from New York opened delicatessens in Southern California. The grandmother of Murray “Boy” Maltin operated a restaurant during the Depression on the first floor of their apartment building on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. The family moved to Los Angeles when Maltin’s father bought a hamburger stand on Lick Pier in Ocean Park and soon moved up to owning a delicatessen near the beach. During the Second World War, Maltin recalled, it was quite a scene on weekend nights, when the coins started pouring into the jukebox. A popular song of the day was a Johnny Mercer romantic ballad, “And Angels Sing,” adapted from a klezmer tune by the trumpeter Ziggy Elman (né Harry Finkelman), sung by Martha Tilton, and performed by Elman with a band drawn from Benny Goodman’s orchestra.

  As Maltin remembered it, “The Yehuden [Jews] were slapping the mustard on the pastrami-and-slaw-sands, the corned-beef-with-sauerkraut-sands, the chopped-liver-and-pastrami-sands, the club-sands. On and on went the music; and a hundred conductors behind the deli counter, waving their arms in the air and slapping the rye with mustard spoons.”32 Maltin’s father later bought a kosher butcher shop on Pico Boulevard (in the Jewish section known as Pico-Robertson) and transformed it into a deli called Bonds (since it was bought with war bonds) that was the largest kosher deli west of the Mississippi; it had a seating capacity of 350 people, with its own bakery and a banquet that seated 200 guests.

  As Jews moved to other parts of Los Angeles in succeeding decades, other delicatessens sprang up, including Zucky’s in Santa Monica, the Stage Stop in Arcadia, and Art’s in the Valley. A delicatessen in South Gate called Kosher Murphy’s (trading on the long association between the Jews and Irish in popular culture) served kosher frankfurters and salami along with grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Levitoff’s, the “house of delicacies,” offered “hot corned beef, hot tongue, and hot pastromi” at its two locations, one in Beverly Hills and the other on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

  Jewish delicatessens were also scattered throu
ghout the Deep South. Mazo’s in Charleston, South Carolina, was run by three brothers; the historian Marcie Cohen Ferris has found that there was “one uptown, a more ‘genteel’ operation downtown, and another location on Folly Beach.”33 Rosen’s Delirama opened in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1905; by the early 1960s, it was advertising itself, on its Jewish-star-shaped menus, as “the largest, most modern, and most complete strictly Kosher Food Mart in the country.”34 Other delicatessens in Memphis included Abraham’s (where the specialties included a pastrami Reuben and Hungarian meatballs on an onion roll served with hot slaw), Halpern’s, and Segal’s, which was a restaurant, caterer, and kosher butcher shop.35

  As early as 1881, a grocery store in New Orleans had advertised “kosher smoked and pickled beef, sausages and tongues,” as well as goose grease, New York salt pickles, and Passover cakes. But only after the Second World War did the city boast a number of full-service kosher delis, including Pressner’s, which offered a “kosher smorgasbord” that included pastrami, tongue, salami, liverwurst, bologna, and an assortment of appetizing items such as smoked, fish, herring, and lox.36

  In some southern cities, the delicatessen became a place of pilgrimage for both Jews and non-Jews. Harry Golden, who moved from New York to become the editor of the North Carolina Israelite, recalled the 1953 opening of the Brass Rail, a delicatessen in Charlotte. Church Street, the main business thoroughfare, “began to look like the Red Sea with wave after wave of Israelites crossing over each day for stuffed cabbage with raisin sauce, pumpernickel bread, chicken-in-the-pot, and boiled beef flanken.” As the church bells pealed at noon, “We’re Marching to Zion, Beautiful, Beautiful Zion,” Jews and non-Jews alike began “pouring across Church Street to Izzy and Jack who are already slicing the hot pastrami.”37