Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  One southern delicatessen, however, became a flashpoint for racial animosity during the civil rights era. Charlie Lebedin opened a New York–style delicatessen in Atlanta called Leb’s that refused to serve African Americans; the owner even turned away the singer Harry Belafonte, who came to town to do a benefit concert. In 1964, a series of sit-ins and protests at the delicatessen, along with other eateries owned by Lebedin, induced the Ku Klux Klan to support the owner. But when Lebedin joined the KKK in a protest of a local dinner to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, the delicatessen lost the few remaining Jewish customers that it had.38

  In 1941, when Judith Nelson Drucker’s father retired from the garment business and moved his family to Miami, delicatessen foods were still not readily available there. “So whenever my father would go up to New York, he’d come back with a big box of salamis.” The salami became, like them, a fish out of water. “We identified with the salami,” she ruefully recalled. Nevertheless, Washington Avenue on the southern part of Miami Beach, according to a contemporaneous press account, sported “numerous vegetarian and kosher restaurants, delicatessens, and cafeterias where a bagel with a spot of cream cheese is 30 cents (the charge is 45 cents with lox) and herring and chopped liver are daily items on the menu.”39

  Sissi Perlman Feltman recalled that when her parents opened Joe’s Broadway Delicatessen in the 1930s, it was “one of the few places to go besides Joe’s Stone Crab,” which was a famous seafood restaurant that was also owned by Jews. As in New York, Sunday was delicatessen night for many Jewish patrons. “It wasn’t kosher, but it was an authentic deli,” Feltman noted. “We had our own bakery in the back where we made our rye bread, and we cured our own pickles in big wooden barrels. We cooked big pots of brisket, and my brother was always stationed in the front window, carving a big roast beef.”40

  By the postwar era, the “Shtetl by the Sea,” as Miami Beach was nicknamed, increased its population significantly, with many elderly Jewish “snowbirds” who wintered in Florida and returned to New York in time for the spring holiday of Passover. Other famous Miami Beach delis included Pumpernik’s and Raphil’s. One writer waggishly called Miami Beach “an extension of Lindy’s, the Copa, Toots Shor’s and the Gaiety Delicatessen, with sand.”41 The idea that others besides Jews might want to inhabit Miami during the winter months angered one Jewish hotel operator, who barked, “I’m sick of hearing that. We made Miami Beach a corned beef and dill-pickle stand and that’s the way it’s going to be!”42

  Wolfie’s, opened in Miami Beach in 1947 by Wolfie Cohen, sported a laid-back atmosphere with a singing waiter. The genial host, like his counterparts in New York, was known to approach a couple sitting at a table in stony silence; he would joke with them until they laughed and began conversing with each other. Jerry Cohen, the contractor who built Wolfie’s, issued a challenge: “Find me a Jewish person in Miami Beach who didn’t go to Wolfie’s. . . . The Jewish culture of Miami Beach was all about eating. Even if you went out to dinner, you stopped off at Wolfie’s before you went home. The way that New York had Lindy’s, Miami Beach had Wolfie’s.”43

  The delicatessens in Miami Beach were, like their counterparts in New York and L.A., known for their celebrity clientele. Barbara Raichlen (the wife of the barbecue guru Steve Raichlen) told me that her father’s deli, Raphil’s, was the “place to see and be seen,” with luminaries such as the gangster Meyer Lansky and the movie star Marlon Brando eating in the restaurant and its walls plastered with pictures of famous people. Al Jolson was known to frequent Joe’s Broadway Deli. And it was in Pumpernik’s, which was eventually bought by Wolfie Cohen and renamed Rascal House, that the future CNN host Larry King (né Zeiger) first started doing live radio interviews with celebrities.

  Exterior of Wolfie’s Delicatessen in Miami Beach in the late 1950s (Courtesy of Brian Merlis / Brooklynpix.com)

  The Delicatessen Summers in the Catskills

  Playing a Viennese authority on mountain climbing on the pioneering 1950s television variety show Your Show of Shows, the New York Jewish comedian Sid Caesar proudly recalled climbing Mount Everest in 1935 with five other climbers and an ample supply of corned beef and pastrami sandwiches. Actually, he admitted, his group didn’t reach the summit—or even the mountain. “How far did you get?” his interlocutor inquired. “About as far as Twenty-Third and Broadway,” Caesar replied, before they got caught in such terrible traffic that they could proceed no further.

  Those Jews who stayed in New York did often succeed in bringing delicatessen sandwiches on trips with them, especially when they summered in the Catskills Mountains. Jews who could not afford to stay in Borscht Belt hotels—known for their gargantuan meals of traditional Jewish foods, including many deli-type delicacies—made do with rented bungalows called kochaleins (Yiddish for “cook for yourself”). Husbands would typically work during the week and come up to the mountains for the weekends. Each family, the satirist Harry Gersh recalled, arrived with a paper bag containing a dozen rolls, a loaf of pumpernickel bread, and a pound each of pastrami and corned beef. These were accompanied, according to Gersh, by pickles, mustard, sauerkraut, sour tomatoes, bagel, lox, cheese, and a whole white fish. While the women of the family took over the cooking from then on, everyone looked forward to the weekend, when the men would come bearing more delicatessen food. The fathers, Gersh disclosed, packed their clothes in loose packages and filled their suitcases with food from the delicatessen and appetizing stores. This was to keep the landlord, who profited from selling food to the tenants, in the dark.44 The New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, whose family summered in the Catskills when she was a girl, recalled that when weekend visitors arrived, “the customary gift was delicatessen,” along with “towering boxes of cake.”45

  There were also Jewish delicatessens that opened up in the Catskills, including Kaplan’s in Monticello, Singer’s in Liberty, Cousin’s in Ellenville, and Frank and Bob’s in South Fallsburg.46 The best known was Kaplan’s on Broadway, famed for its immense sign with ten thousand flashing lightbulbs; performers were introduced in the hotels as “Broadway entertainment” only because they had eaten at Kaplan’s just before the show.47 Opened by Moe and Annie Kaplan in the years following the Second World War, the kosher-style deli got meat from Hebrew National and bread from local bakeries. (It also served cheese blintzes and cheesecake, but only with separate silverware and on separate dishes.) Among the waitresses were Ricki and Sari Kaplan, the nieces of the owners; their only other option for work, given limited opportunities for women, was the job of telephone operator. Celebrities such as Perry Como and Neil Sedaka ate at Kaplan’s after performing in the local hotels. The comic Mac Robbins recalled that the entertainers from the hotels would take guests to a nearby delicatessen in exchange for a free lunch.48

  Postcard image of Kaplan’s Delicatessen in Monticello, New York (Collection of Ted Merwin)

  In the summer, the bulk of the clientele at Kaplan’s were those who lived in the bungalow colonies, along with parents visiting their children in the many summer camps in the area. But some customers would drive up from the Bronx on a lark to have a sandwich. The tables were large; strangers were often seated next to one another. The place got so busy that Sari Kaplan recalled that her sister would slip her a “potato chip” sandwich so that she could have a bite to eat in between serving tables. The one rule of family life, she said, was that “no one gets married, gives birth, or dies during the summer”—there was simply no time to do anything but take care of the business. In the winter, college students stopped at Kaplan’s on their way to and from upstate universities such as Cornell and the state university campuses at Cortland and Binghamton. The entire front room of the store was decorated with college pennants; you got a free salami if you brought in a pennant that was not already up on the wall. The “college banner special” was chopped liver and roast beef on a seeded roll.49

  Corned Beef in Space

  Whi
le Jews went “up the mountains” and all over the country, often bringing delicatessen sandwiches along for the ride, it was a corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s Delicatessen in Cocoa Beach, Florida, that traveled the farthest distance of any delicatessen sandwich in history. In 1965, at the height of the space race with the Soviet Union, there was a fierce competition to be the first country to land a man on the moon. Gemini 3 was manned by John Young and Virgil Grissom; a fellow astronaut named Wally Schirra, who was known to be a prankster, had given Young the sandwich to smuggle aboard. This violated numerous rules of space travel because NASA was testing out various kinds of food to see if they could be safely consumed in space without either flying into the astronauts’ windpipes or into the mechanical controls of the spacecraft.

  The Russians, by contrast, believed that it was important for astronauts to experience some pleasure and relaxation through having good food on board and had already experimented with giving their astronauts toothpaste tubes of pâté, cheese, chocolate, and coffee, along with tiny pieces of bread, candied fruit jelly, and bits of salami. Indeed, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, on his first voyage in space, gobbled a bite-sized salami sandwich.50 (It was important for astronauts to be supplied with high-quality food because, as the historian Jane Levi has noted, the shift of fluid to the head tends to hamper the senses of both taste and smell, and American astronauts, as opposed to Russian cosmonauts, had been noticeably skinnier and weaker, with less of their food eaten, when they returned to Earth.)51

  In the middle of the Gemini flight, Young suddenly inquired if his partner was interested in a corned beef sandwich. After the astonished Grissom took a bite, he noticed nervously that crumbs of rye bread were starting to float around the cabin and that the smell of the beef was beginning to permeate the ship. “It became instantly obvious,” he later recalled, “that our life-support system wasn’t prepared to cope with the high powered aroma of genuine kosher corned beef.” He reluctantly stowed the sandwich away.52

  After the spacecraft landed, the astronauts were called on the carpet for their breach of the gastronomic rules of space. Representative George Shipley of Illinois complained that the sandwich incident was “disgusting.” Comparing the spacecraft to a surgeon’s operating room, he was appalled that the sandwich was permitted to pollute the sterilized space. George Mueller, the director of the Gemini Program, responded with a straight face that NASA frowned on “unauthorized objects such as sandwiches going aboard the spacecraft” and assured the congressmen that the agency had “taken steps, obviously, to prevent recurrence of corned beef sandwiches in future flights.”53

  In the end, the sandwich incident was not so much overstuffed as overblown. But it showed how iconic the delicatessen sandwich had become. What if the Gemini 3 had ended up on another planet, and aliens had picked up the corned beef sandwich and concluded that it was the staple food of earthlings?

  The Second World War changed the relationship that Jews had to their own traditional fare, exposing them to other types of food and opening up new vistas for Jewish life in other parts of the country. Even as the delicatessens that Jews imported to other parts of the country enabled them to continue to gather and to connect to their heritage, wartime rationing taught Jews that they could do without delicatessen food. In the next chapter, we will see how upward mobility—of the social and economic kind, rather than the mountain-climbing or space-travel varieties—changed the relationship of Jews to delicatessen food even more, ultimately leaving the delicatessen in the dust.

  4

  Miss Hebrew National Salami

  The Movement to the Suburbs and the Decline of the Deli

  In a classic Mad magazine cartoon from the 1960s, a family goes out to eat for the first time at an unbearably crowded, extremely chaotic Chinese restaurant. The meal is a nightmare: they can’t get a table, their uncle can’t decide what to order, the waiter ignores them, they stay so long that the table is removed, and then they tip the wrong amount. They are in a surrealistic environment, in which everything and everybody seems to conspire against them. Yet the very next Sunday night they find themselves once again standing in line at a chop suey joint. While the family is not explicitly marked as Jewish, the cartoon is filled with in-jokes for a Jewish readership; in the background, signs read, “Egg Foo Yong with Gefilte Fish” and “Chow Main Best! Liver Worst.”1 Jews were indeed developing a particularly intense relationship to Chinese food. The local Chinese restaurant became the neighborhood hangout on Sunday night, and going out for Chinese became a Jewish ritual in its own right.

  Before long, it was the non-Jewish, ethnic restaurant rather than the delicatessen that served as a more popular gathering place for Jewish New Yorkers. But Jews still repaired to the delicatessen when they wanted to reconnect to their heritage. In the mid-1950s, the shortened form deli first came into widespread use. Joseph A. Weingarten noted in his 1954 dictionary of American slang that although he had never seen the word deli in print, it was common for people to say, “I’m having deli tonight” or “Mom, let’s have deli.” (He speculated that perhaps the word should be spelled “dely” or “delly” instead.)2

  Beyond the attraction of Jewish New Yorkers to other ethnic cuisines, especially Chinese food, there were a host of other factors that led to the decline of the deli. While half of America’s Jews still lived in New York City, rising crime rates along with the rapid construction of new highways and middle-income housing developments impelled many to move to the suburbs of western Long Island, southern Westchester, southeastern Connecticut, and northern New Jersey.3 The Jewish movement to the suburbs, in which Jews were often in the minority, obviated the deli’s role as a neighborhood gathering place. As Jews desired to be viewed on an equal footing with other Americans, they downplayed their ethnicity and culture in favor of Jewish religion. Indeed, Jews began to define their identity in opposition to the foods that had sustained their parents in Brooklyn and the Bronx and to develop a more sophisticated, more multicultural, and more gourmet palate.

  When the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team especially beloved by ethnic minorities because of its perennial “underdog” status to the New York Yankees, abruptly decamped to Los Angeles, Jews were among those who felt the most betrayed. As the sportscaster Howard Cosell put it, on a trip back to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, it was a particular shock to see that Radin’s Delicatessen, located for decades near Ebbets Field (where the Dodgers had played) had closed. Radin’s was, he recalled ruefully, “the ‘Stage Delicatessen’ of Brooklyn, the eatery for ballplayers. Hot dogs (crisp, all-beef ones) were always ready on the grill. The hot pastrami was unfailingly lean. You never had to ask, the tongue would be cut from the center. . . . Franklin Avenue without Radin’s had to be like a man without a country.”4

  In 1960, there were still more than five dozen kosher delis in Brooklyn, with names like Schneier’s or Schnipper’s5—the kinds of names that the deli owners’ sons had already changed when they graduated law or business school. But rising crime rates often made running a deli untenable.6 In a particularly disturbing incident, a partly crippled deli owner on the Lower East Side killed two would-be teenage robbers with a carving knife when they invaded his cash register.7 Paul Goldberg’s father showed more restraint; when he caught someone trying to reach over the counter to grab a salami, he simply whacked him on the hand with the flat side of a knife. A Jewish lawyer recalled that it was the robbery of a deli in his neighborhood in East New York that was the last straw; his family no longer felt safe in the city.8

  Some delis followed Jews to the suburbs; for example, when the Glen Oaks shopping center in eastern Queens was completed in 1950, Grodsky’s Delicatessen could be found sandwiched among May’s Department Store, F. W. Woolworth’s, Dan’s Supreme Super Market, and a slew of smaller stores.9 Nevertheless, the historian Edward Shapiro has noted that in a typical postwar suburb, the local stores did not sell Jewish newspapers, there were no kosher butchers, synagogues were few and far between,
and, last but not least, “corned beef sandwiches were not readily available.”10 The few delis that sprang up in suburban shopping malls still served as gathering places for segments of the Jewish population, but the community itself was weakened by dispersion and by the diminution of close ethnic ties. While Jews still sought to maintain a distinct ethnic identity, they did so in the context of a society that valued sameness and unity.

  Other delis closed because the owners did not want their children to have to work the long hours that running a restaurant entailed. As the historian Karen Brodkin Sacks has noted, Jews “became white” by taking advantage of the G.I. Bill and federal home-loan guarantees—these programs enabled returning servicemen to go to college and to buy a house. This helped Jews to move squarely into the middle class and become professionals. Given their greater economic opportunities in American society, many children of deli owners viewed the prospect of taking over the family deli with distaste, if not outright disgust. In the Yiddish-English song “Sixteen Tons,” based on Tennessee Ernie Ford’s coal miner’s lament of the same title, the comedian Mickey Katz changed the shoveling of coal to the piling up of deli meats: “You load sixteen tons of hot salami / Corned beef, rolled beef, and hot pastrami.” He contracts a hernia from the physical strain of shlepping these meats, along with cake, beef intestines, and bagels.11

  Interior of Zarkower’s Kosher Delicatessen in White Plains, New York, in 1962 (Collection of Ted Merwin)