Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  One sees this shift in the Academy Award–winning 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement, in which Gregory Peck plays a journalist who pretends to be Jewish in order to write a magazine article on anti-Semitism; he adopts none of the cultural or ethnic aspects of Judaism but simply announces that he is Jewish by religion.44 The rise of religion preempted Jewish ethnicity by substituting the social life of the synagogue for that of the delicatessen. True, as the sociologist Will Herberg noted, this newfound religiosity was often void of true meaning; it was a “religiousness without religion, a religiousness with almost any kind of content or none, a way of sociability or ‘belonging’ rather than a way of reorienting life to God.”45 But it sped the acculturation of Jews into American society by putting Judaism on an equal footing with other religious groups. This was summed up in the title of Herberg’s influential book Protestant–Catholic–Jew, in which he argued that Jews had become part of Christian America by emphasizing the religious rather than cultural aspects of their identity.

  In order to find a specifically Jewish means of fitting into a society that placed a premium on morality and public religious behavior, Jews built palatial suburban synagogues as fortresses against assimilation. (Some people jokingly referred to this as an “edifice complex.”) While relatively few members—including, surveys showed, the congregational lay leaders—were interested in attending services more than a few times a year, the synagogue could generally muster a good turnout with a Saturday-night cultural program or Sunday-morning bagel brunch.

  Even as Jews downplayed their ethnicity, then, Jewish food remained a central component of postwar Jewish identity. In Treasury of Jewish Humor, published in the early 1950s, the folklorist Nathan Ausubel used the term “Culinary Judaism” to refer to a food-based Jewish identity and detailed the lengths to which Jews went to devour their favorite dishes, including delicatessen meats.46 As the sociologist Seymour Leventman put it, a “gastronomic syndrome” could be diagnosed among Jews, one that “lingers on in the passion for bagels and lox, knishes, blintzes, rye bread, kosher or kosher-style delicatessen, and good food in general.”47

  In order to survive the transformed gastronomic landscape in which the relatively few Jewish delicatessens that opened in the suburbs found themselves, they needed to appeal to non-Jews as well as Jews. But they also did not want to alienate their base of Jewish customers by serving food that was so nonkosher that it would offend them. It was this balancing act, the historian Ruth Glazer (who later became Ruth Gay, when she married the historian Peter Gay) recalled, that her father engaged in when he opened an “unreconstructed” delicatessen at the end of a subway line in Queens. A kosher delicatessen sporting a sign with Hebrew letters, he was informed, would turn these non-Jews against him from the beginning. And most of the Jews no longer kept kosher or wanted to be seen eating in a kosher establishment.

  So he opened a “kosher-style” delicatessen, in which traditional Jewish foods were served but the meat was not kosher. Jewish women felt free to come in to ask for advice on how to prepare Jewish food, while increasing numbers of non-Jews, who originally viewed the deli as a “curiosity,” submitted to the entreaties of Jewish friends to come in and order pastrami, a word that they often mispronounced in amusing ways. Nevertheless, according to Glazer, the store became for Jews and non-Jews alike a “symbol of traditional Jewish living,” despite its departures from fidelity to Jewish dietary law.48 If the fare at Glazer’s father’s delicatessen created such harmony between the Jews and non-Jews of the town, the New Haven attorney Samuel Persky joked, perhaps anti-Semitism could be combated if, rather than “distributing educational pamphlets dedicated to the truth about the Jew, we can so manage it that every rock and rill in this land of liberty be permeated by the gracious aroma of hot corned beef and pastrami.”49

  The Rise of Ethnic Food

  With the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the rise of the civil rights movement, and the involvement of the country in Vietnam, the carefree ethos of the early 1960s began to dissipate. The burgeoning interest in multiculturalism, however, meant that ethnic food rose in popularity; the food historian Warren Belasco has insightfully compared the rise of ethnic food with the popularity of oak furniture—both spoke to consumers’ desire for the sense of security that they identified with traditional ways of life.50 Belasco attributes the interest in ethnic food to a host of factors, including the spread of foods from one ethnic group to another (for example, “in-migrating blacks [who] sampled out-migrating kosher foods”), the growth of tourism, and the presentation of ethnic foods in the mass media—especially in relation to ethnic movie and television stars.51

  Indeed, people in the 1960s counterculture who resisted the “cultural imperialism” that was destroying local foodways around the globe and replacing them with standardized American foods founded a “countercuisine” based largely on ethnic foods. As Belasco puts it, while the first generation had made food from scratch, the second generation sought “old-style sauces to put on American meats and vegetables,” and the third generation purchased “fully processed convenience foods with an Old World aura that could be supplied with a few spices and a picturesque aura.”52 Many ethnic foods were produced by large corporations, including the Pizza Hut chain and R. J. Reynolds’ Chun King line of Oriental food; Chun King trumpeted a “new mood in food” as the impetus for the spread of Chinese food throughout the land.53

  Delicatessen foods were no exception to the commodification of ethnic foods; in 1968, Hebrew National was sold to Riviana Foods, which was itself acquired by Colgate-Palmolive, a soap and toothpaste company.54 (The Pines family bought it back in 1980; by 1986, the company was producing half a million frankfurters a day in its plant in Maspeth, Queens.)55 Savvy young entrepreneurs who founded smaller ethnic-food companies could make a quick profit by selling out to bigger companies.56 Jewish foods, like other ethnic foods, were commodified and torn from their original social context. The pastry-wrapped “deli sandwiches” sold under the Campbell’s Pepperidge Farm and Nestlé’s Stouffer’s brands had as much relationship to a real New York delicatessen sandwich as frozen burritos did to authentic Mexican cuisine.

  But it was Chinese food that most captivated American Jews. According to the blogger Peter Cherches, Chinese food was a “birthright” for Brooklyn Jews of his generation; he recalls being “weaned on chicken chow mein.”57 And if a rabbi needed to find ten Jews for a minyan (prayer quorum), what better place to look than in the local Chinese restaurant? In an updating of the phenomenon of “cross-over eating” found by Donna Gabaccia at the turn of the twentieth century, one ethnic group began to define itself through the consumption of another ethnic group’s food.58 The critic Neil Postman recalled that the shopping district in Flatbush, where he grew up during the Depression, boasted appetizing stores, two kosher delicatessens, three candy stores, and a “very popular” Chinese restaurant. On Friday nights, he and his older siblings had a ritual of bringing a dollar to the Chinese restaurant to buy three dinners for thirty cents each, which included egg drop soup, an egg roll, and chow mein.59

  Many theories have been propounded to explain the intense Jewish fondness for Chinese food. Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine, the authors of a landmark study on the subject of New York Jews eating Chinese food, noted that Chinese food was appealing to Jews who, while not keeping strictly kosher (or keeping kosher at home but not away from home), avoided the overt consumption of pork and shellfish. Tuchman and Levine dubbed it “safe treyf”—food that was so thoroughly diced and chopped that it was not recognizable as nonkosher. Chinese food thus, according to Tuchman and Levine, became a “flexible open-ended symbol, a kind of blank screen on which [Jews] projected a series of themes relating to their identity as modern Jews and as New Yorkers”60—one that replaced the equally blank screen or palimpsest of the pastrami sandwich. Through the consumption of Chinese food, Tuchman and Levine suggest, Jews were able to perceive themselves as more sophisticated and urbane,
despite the fact that the food was inexpensive and relatively simple. As the British social anthropologist Allison James notes, in writing of magazines and television programs about foreign cuisines, such cultural products paved the way to a “culinary, expatriate, cosmopolitanism.”61

  Others have speculated that Jews felt an affinity to the Chinese, since both were ethnic outsiders in Christian America. The Chinese are often called the “Jews of the East,” and in America they became even more marginalized. Tuchman and Levine note that eating in Chinese restaurants “did not raise the issue of Jews’ marginal position in a Christian society” because the Chinese were even more marginal than the Jews were.62 Indeed, Jewish patrons could feel superior to the Chinese. They could even insult the waiter, turning the tables on the treatment they received in Jewish delicatessens.

  As Philip Roth put it in his 1967 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, “Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because, one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white—and maybe even Anglo-Saxon.” The idea that Jews could be actually taken for Protestants by the Chinese was especially appealing: “Imagine! No wonder the waiters can’t intimidate us. To them, we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP!”63 Both the Jews and the Chinese operated on a different calendar than Christians did; this was why the biggest night of the year for Jews to eat out in Chinese restaurants was Christmas Eve, a night when most other restaurants were closed. But in addition to serving as this once-a-year gathering place, the Chinese restaurant to some extent also displaced the deli as the weekly Sunday-evening gathering spot for Jewish families.

  Of course, Jews still knew, as much as they tried to pretend otherwise, that they were eating forbidden foods. As the old Yiddish saying goes, Az men est chazzer, zol rinnen iber der bord—“If you’re going to eat pork, you might as well eat it until it runs over your beard.” In other words, if you are going to sin, you should enjoy it! Guilt, according to a Canadian rabbi, is a “terrific condiment.”64 On the other hand, as the food scholar Miryam Rotkovitz has noted, the very fact that Chinese food was taboo made the experience of eating in a Chinese restaurant more exciting; it “contributed to the exoticism of the experience.”65

  The craze among Jews for Chinese food led to the first cookbook of kosher Chinese food, written by Ruth and Bob Grossman; it presented whimsical recipes that mingled Jewish and Chinese ingredients, such as Foh Nee Shrimp Puffs, which were fried balls of gefilte fish served with hot mustard and plum sauce.66 Furthermore, the opening of kosher Chinese restaurants made it possible for observant Jews—many of whom had grown up in nonkosher households in which Chinese food was a staple and only later embraced Orthodox Judaism—to enjoy Chinese food as much as their less religious coreligionists did.

  The marriage of delicatessen and Chinese food had been solemnized on the Lower East Side at Schmulka Bernstein’s (later Bernstein on Essex), a kosher delicatessen that was opened in 1932 by Sol Bernstein, who adopted his father’s name—his father was a butcher and meat manufacturer—as the name of the restaurant. Starting with a small seven-table establishment on Rivington Street between Essex and Ludlow, he moved to 110 Rivington Street, with a factory in the same building, the factory entrance being on Essex Street. The deli expanded in the 1950s by breaking through the wall and taking over the factory space, pushing the factory out to Utica Avenue in Brooklyn.

  Bernstein’s daughter, Eleanor, was brought up in an apartment over the store. “My mother never forgave my father for going into the deli business,” she recalled. “When they got married, he was planning to be a doctor, but once he got to medical school, the cadavers upset him. But he joked that he was still an M.D.—a meat dealer!” The deli became known for its specially spiced Romanian pastrami, which other delis tried to copy. It also smoked a lot of geese for the winter holidays; smoked goose was popular among Germans for Christmas and had thus become a favored Chanukah dish for German Jews. In 1960, Eleanor’s father realized that Jews liked Chinese food, and he called an agency that sent him a Chinese chef one day a week. “The Chinese chef came in like a doctor with a little case,” she said. “He wanted to use his own knives, but the rabbi told him that everything had to be kosher; he gave the chef a lesson about all the special rules. My father took the chef to the restaurant supply stores on the Bowery and bought him whatever he needed.” As demand grew, the restaurant hired more Chinese chefs, until the fateful day when, as Eleanor put it, “a war broke out in the kitchen between the Shanghai and the Cantonese, and my father had to fire everyone—-which wasn’t easy, because they were in a union—and start over.” Over time, the restaurant grew to the point that there were 52 people working in the kitchen and a total of 220 in the store.67

  The delicatessen had two different menus—one for the traditional Jewish offerings and one for the Chinese ones. A sample Chinese menu from Bernstein’s on Essex St. from the early 1960s (“Where West Meets East for a Chinese Feast and Kashruth Is Guaranteed”) trumpets the fact that “for the first time,” the “Orthodox Jew or Jewess can taste the food specialties of the Orient,” advising patrons to begin with soup before proceeding to appetizers—egg rolls, spare ribs, or “sweet and pungent” veal—and then on to the main course and dessert. The menu also suggests that each party order a variety of dishes to share, a practice that became so popular that later generations would take it for granted.68

  Bernstein hired Chinese waiters and gave them tasseled skullcaps to wear, so they looked like Chinese Jews. He sent his chefs to famous Chinese restaurants such as Pearl’s to try their dishes and adapt them to a kosher menu. Although Bernstein would never eat in a nonkosher restaurant, he would occasionally accompany his staff on these spying missions; he would order one of the restaurant’s signature dishes and poke through the food with his chopsticks until he figured out the ingredients so that he could create a kosher version. Even in the Chinese menu at Bernstein’s, the dishes frequently melded Chinese food—or at least the Americanized versions of Chinese food—with eastern European Jewish food. Among the specialties of the house were salami fried rice, egg foo yung with chicken livers, and Stuffed Chicken Bernstein—a half chicken stuffed with bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and pastrami. Israeli beers and wines were on the drinks menu, along with German beers and domestic kosher wines.

  Customers eating at Bernstein’s on Essex, the first kosher delicatessen to offer Chinese food (Copyright Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Jews and Italian Food

  Italian cuisine was also extremely popular in Jewish communities. Jews and Italians, who often looked similar, both arrived on these shores in large numbers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The Jewish section of the Lower East Side was right next to Chinatown, but it was also adjacent to the immigrant Italian section, known as Little Italy, which had a large Sicilian and Neapolitan population. Italians and Jews went to school together, played on teams together, and occasionally ate in each other’s apartments, as in the chapter in Henry Roth’s classic Lower East Side Jewish immigrant novel Call It Sleep, in which the main character, David Schearl, is served crabs by his new Italian friend, Leo. David is afraid to eat the unfamiliar, clearly nonkosher delicacy, but Leo, sucking on a claw, boasts, “We c’n eat anyt’ing we wants,” adding, “Anyt’ing that’s good.”69 At the turn of the century, according to Philip Taylor, “a Jewish boy . . . could easily recognize an Italian district into which he had strayed, by the sight of certain sausages and cheeses in shops.”70

  Italians in Red Hook and Canarsie were not far from the Jewish neighborhoods in Brownsville, Bensonhurst, and Brighton Beach. Jews and Italians were known for getting into conflict over religion, with frequent street fights between the children of the two groups. But by the 1950s, Daniel Rogov recalls, the Italian kids would tag along when the Jewish kids went on quests to eat a hot dog in each of
the six delicatessens in the Brooklyn Heights area; if they got into a fight, it was “more like playing stickball” than actually fighting, in the days before gang wars with tire chains.71

  Both Jews and Italians loved to eat, and both groups were enraptured by, and obsessed with, the sheer quantity of food that was available in America—the meat, the fish, the coffee, the rich desserts. They also both enjoyed a highly theatrical approach to dining. Mamma Leone’s, the Italian restaurant in the theater district, had extravagant decor, nude statues, singing waiters, and huge quantities of highly Americanized Italian food including spaghetti and meatballs, veal Sorrentina, clams casino, and shrimp scampi. Jewish and Italian families both prized dinnertime as the most important daily occasion.

  The historian John Mariani could be writing equally about Jews in noting that in Italian households “the dinner table, not the living room, was the center of political and social discourse that raged on for hours and into the night, until one or another family member collapsed on the couch.”72 Rabbi Eric Cytryn recalled that while there was a kosher deli right around the corner from his house in Westbury, Long Island, his family usually gravitated to a local Italian restaurant instead, even though since they kept kosher, they could not eat any of the meat or shellfish on the menu.73

  Beginning in the 1970s, Italian restaurants became increasingly fashionable in New York. Mimi Sheraton, the New York Times restaurant critic who happened to be Jewish, relentlessly championed restaurants such as Il Nido and Il Monello that served upscale Northern Italian cuisine, which was a far cry from the pasta and red-sauce-based Southern Italian cuisine that was familiar to most Americans. Even the typical neighborhood Italian restaurant with the red checkered tablecloth and bottle of olive oil on the table was getting rid of its pizza oven and expanding its veal and chicken offerings.74 Sheraton interviewed the comedian Alan King at Il Nido; he talked about growing up in a kosher home but later developing a taste for many different kinds of food, from Italian to Japanese.75