Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  By the 1980s, fashion industry executives, or “fashionistas,” many of whom were Jewish, patronized Tuscan restaurants, where they shook hands on deals to import high-end Italian silk garments and leather shoes made by Prada, Ferragamo, Versace, and other companies. One Italian restaurant in particular, Da Silvano, was a hangout of the crowd from Vogue magazine, where the nation’s fashion styles were set.76 By comparison, Jewish delis never developed into “white tablecloth”–type restaurants where important business deals would be struck. But despite the attraction of other ethnic cuisines, many Jews often felt themselves irresistibly pulled back to a deli. The Jewish sculptor Louise Nevelson, for example, favored Italian food (particularly lobster, veal, or angel’s hair pasta with pesto sauce), although she also often sought out Mexican, Indian, and Japanese restaurants. But when she felt sad, she headed straight for a deli, where she enjoyed “mounds of sour pickles, pickled green tomatoes, rye bread and even pastrami if it’s good and spicy.”77

  Multiculturalism and the Deli

  With the 1976 publication of Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, the first comprehensive history of immigrant Jewish life in New York, Jewish tourism to the Lower East Side boomed with suburban Jews trying to recapture their roots. This nostalgia- and heritage-based tourism was part of a larger multicultural movement within society that also boosted the popularity of the television miniseries Roots (about African American history). World of Our Fathers was published at the same time as the bicentennial of the United States, as the whole country was celebrating its past.

  That past, for many Jews, led back to the Lower East Side. As Ari Goldman of the New York Times noted in 1978, the immigrant ghetto “has always been famous for its Sundays. The wares from the shops on Orchard Street spill out onto the sidewalks, the delicatessens on Essex Street can’t make the pastrami sandwiches fast enough, and the smell of pickle brine is heavy in the air.”78

  New York Jews’ “tourism” to the Lower East Side dates back to the 1920s, when the children of Jewish immigrants who had grown up in the neighborhood first turned the ghetto into a place of pilgrimage, converting, in the words of Jenna Weissman Joselit, a “slum” into a “shrine.”79 In 1954, the nineteen-year-old Polish Jewish immigrant Abe Lebewohl had gotten his first job working as a soda jerk in a Coney Island delicatessen. Eager to learn the business, he volunteered to spend his lunch breaks working behind the counter. Before long, he became a counterman. He then saved up enough money to buy a ten-seat luncheonette on East Tenth Street, which, by dint of years of labor and more than one major expansion, eventually blossomed into the Second Avenue Deli, the landmark delicatessen on the Lower East Side, complete with a room that paid tribute to Molly Picon (the beloved Yiddish actress) and a “Walk of Fame” outside in which Yiddish actors had stars imprinted on the sidewalk.

  But the Lower East Side faded as a part of Jewish life as new immigrants, especially Puerto Ricans and Asians, moved in and the city redeveloped the district with high-rise buildings. By the 1970s, it was the grandchildren of Jewish immigrants who began this process anew, rediscovering the Lower East Side as a source for nostalgia. Especially on Sunday afternoons, Hasia Diner has written, Jews made the stores and restaurants of the Lower East Side into pilgrimage sites, places to take their children and to recapture their childhoods.80 The humorist Calvin Trillin confessed in 1973 that he often repaired on Sundays to Katz’s, where the countermen “always maintain rigid queue discipline while hand-slicing a high quality pastrami on rye.” He described the forbidding sandwich makers as appearing practically to “loom over the crowd—casually piling on corned beef, keeping a strict eye on the line in front of them, and passing the time by arguing with each other in Yiddish.”81

  For the Second Avenue Deli’s twentieth-anniversary celebration in 1974, the restaurant rolled back its prices to what they had been when it first opened. Customers flocked in for the fifty-cent corned beef sandwiches, thirty-cent bowls of matzoh ball soup, and nickel cups of coffee. Lebewohl kept coming up with new ways to get publicity. In 1975, with the city on the verge of bankruptcy, Lebewohl gave all the proceeds from two days of salami sales to the municipal coffers. And he ignored the late-1970s gasoline shortages by hiring a horse and buggy—covered with signs promoting the delicatessen—to make deliveries.82

  The less that Jews and non-Jews consumed pastrami sandwiches on a regular basis, the more that delicatessen food became special—it was transformed back into a “delicacy” in Jewish culture. Which pastrami sandwich was the “best” became a topic of heated debate; in 1974, New York magazine held a Pastrami Olympics in which the height of each sandwich was carefully measured, along with the weight of the bread, weight of the meat, and cost of the meat per pound; the winning deli was Pastrami ’n Things in Manhattan. And the New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton bought 104 corned beef and pastrami sandwiches in 1979 to discover her own favorite, in both taste and construction (she dubbed Pastrami King in Queens, the Carnegie Deli, and Bernstein on Essex the best of the lot; Katz’s was at the bottom of the list).83 But these competitions underscored the fact that pastrami had come full circle; it had become, as originally both in eastern Europe and on the Lower East Side, a special-occasion food—to be savored as an occasional treat rather than as a regular part of one’s diet.

  Cover of Pastrami ’n Things menu, showing New York magazine poster of the 1973 Pastrami Olympics (Collection of Ted Merwin; rights courtesy of New York magazine)

  Nevertheless, the delicatessen sandwich remained an all-purpose, universally recognizable symbol of the city, as shown in a 1970 magazine advertisement for Coca-Cola in which a smiling cab driver leans out the window of his yellow cab, holding an overstuffed corned beef sandwich along with his bottle of soda. The tagline, “It’s the real thing. Coke,” in the context of the ad implies that the corned beef sandwich is “the real thing” as well—that it is an authentic symbol of New York.84

  Samurai Deli

  In John Belushi’s classic 1976 “Samurai Deli” skit on Saturday Night Live, Belushi plays a delicatessen counterman as a Samurai sword-wielding lunatic. A customer, played by the Jewish comedy writer Buck Henry, is concerned that the corned beef sandwich that he has ordered will give him heartburn and high cholesterol, but the owner, who speaks only Japanese, is a purist; he threatens to commit hara-kiri when the customer asks him to trim off the fat.85 The customer withdraws his request, but when he asks the counterman to break a twenty-dollar bill, the counterman does so with his sword, demolishing the counter in the process.

  The stereotypes of the deli are neatly inverted in this parody. The deli is no longer viewed as a haven; the deli owner, rather than being kindly and talkative, is homicidal and inarticulate. (He speaks no English, like the immigrant delicatessen owners who spoke only Yiddish a century before.) The deli is a place of violence and fear, and the food that it serves is so unhealthy as to be downright poisonous. It is difficult to see which is more dangerous, the food itself or the lunatic who serves it. Alan Zweibel, who wrote the skit, told me that his idea was to invert the idea of the friendly local delicatessen, turning the act of ordering food there into a terrifying experience.86

  The episode, which was one of many Samurai spoofs that Belushi and Henry did, spoke to the mushrooming anxiety about health and fitness that characterized the 1970s; it also ran just as reports of mercury contamination in supermarket products caused widespread alarm about the nation’s food supply. A skepticism about the efficacy of modern medicine, along with a developing focus on self-improvement and self-fulfillment, left many people feeling more responsible for maintaining their own bodies. As Peter N. Carroll has written, the spread of terrifying new viruses and bacterial infections in the 1970s led to what he calls a “thorough reevaluation of the relationship of the human body to the natural environment.”87

  A huge diet and fitness industry developed, centered around providing health clubs, exercise equipment, nutritional supplements, and low-calorie foods.
By the 1980s, according to the sociologist Barry Glassner, the fit body held a “signal position in contemporary American culture—as locus for billions of dollars of commercial exchange and a site for moral action.”88 As Jews, including the Orthodox, jumped on the health and fitness bandwagon, they looked to develop healthier, more gourmet versions of traditional Jewish dishes.

  In line with Americans’ newfound “duty” to their own bodies, an estimated one hundred million of them were dieting. Companies began marketing low-fat, low-cholesterol, and low-sodium foods; by the middle of the decade, these “diet foods” were a $700 million business, compared to a $250 million business in the late 1950s. While “reducing salons” first became popular in the 1950s, they had been marketed primarily to women. The new emphasis on fitness extended to men as well. It was recommended that both men and women “exercise in qualitatively the same ways (with the same movements, using the same equipment or games) and in the same quantities, they should eat the same healthful foods, and subscribe to the same values, such as naturalness, self-control, and longevity.”89 Athletic equipment was a $2-billion-a-year industry, while Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running was a runaway best-seller.

  In such a climate, delicatessen foods were considered the opposite of what both men and women needed to eat in order to preserve their health. Six of the ten leading causes of death—including heart disease, cancer, obesity, and stroke—were linked to diet.90 For those who were on a salt-restricted diet, the Consumers Union recommended, foods to be avoided included smoked or prepared meats such as bacon, bologna, corned beef, ham, liverwurst, luncheon meats, pastrami, pepperoni, and smoked tongue.91 For those who insisted on continuing to eat deli meats, experts recommended switching to pastrami, salami, and bologna made from turkey. Putting delicatessens in the same category as fast-food eateries, the food columnist Barbara Gibbons called on both kinds of restaurants to “shape up!” reporting that the “disenchanted are staying away in droves after a decade of bad-mouthing from nutritionists, consumerists and food critics.”92

  Robert Atkins, who first introduced his high-protein, high-cholesterol, low-carbohydrate diet in 1972, bucked the trend by proclaiming that fatty foods were good for you. Atkins was in many ways simply adapting Dr. Irwin Stillman’s high-protein diet from the late 1960s, which Stillman touted both in a best-selling book and on late-night television. But Atkins lauded Jewish deli food in particular, explaining that his diet permitted not just lox and eggs but “cold cuts galore—brisket, tongue, corned beef, pastrami, turkey.” He warned that dieters “avoid the coleslaw; it’s made with sugar,” but he invited them to “make free with those crisp, fragrant new dill pickles.”93

  Beef consumption, which had increased every year until 1975, suddenly took a nosedive, as men between the ages of nineteen and fifty cut their intake of beef, including deli meats, by a third. Francis Moore Lappe’s best-selling book Diet for a Small Planet, published in 1971, argued that by feeding grain to animals, whose meat contains far fewer nutrients than the feed does, the United States wasted tremendous natural resources and perpetuated world hunger. Nor was this wholesale destruction limited to this country’s borders; the cutting down of the rain forests in Brazil was blamed on the need to graze cattle to satisfy the fast-food market in America. And cows were also blamed for producing so much methane gas, mostly from belching and farting during rumination, that the greenhouse effect was dramatically intensified.94

  Some people argued that at least the deli food sold in supermarkets was healthier than that traditionally purveyed by delis. For example, while delis sold frankfurters with natural casings (made from sheep intestines), the supermarkets offered the healthier, skinless variety. “You got a snap from a deli hot dog that you couldn’t get from a skinless one,” Skip Pines of Hebrew National admitted, even as he banked on the supermarkets for his company’s future. Pines himself stayed healthy through portion control; he ate a single hot dog every day for lunch and then snacked in the late afternoon on a slice of salami, which he tested for the three essential qualities of “flavor, grind, and nuance.”95

  In addition to marketing their deli products on the basis of health, supermarkets also continued to advertise them on the basis of quality, convenience, and price. In the late 1970s, a newspaper ad by the Stop & Shop Supermarket in the local newspaper in Norwalk, Connecticut, urged consumers to “set aside a special ‘get out of the kitchen night’” on a weekly basis. “Everything we make in our kitchens is just as good as the best New York Deli, but a lot less expensive.” The ad suggested a Reuben sandwich with corned beef, coleslaw, and pumpernickel with Russian dressing or a jumbo club sandwich of roast turkey breast, baked ham, and Swiss cheese on rye—with the meat sliced “fresh to order” by its “deli people.”96

  As the twentieth century wore on, humor about the unhealthiness of Jewish deli food took on a sharper, more satiric edge. In Leonard Bernstein’s short story “Death by Pastrami,” a funeral salesman named Fleishman markets his services to deli patrons just after they polish off six-inch-high sandwiches; he bribes the waiters to tell him who ordered pastrami. But as more salesmen discover the scheme, the people eating in the delis begin to feel too self-conscious to eat in the restaurants, and his business takes a nosedive.97

  Finally, concerns about the deleterious effects of Jewish food on the body animate a Seinfeld episode in which George’s father, played by the comedian Jerry Stiller (who earned an Emmy Award for his performance in the episode), panics that he has poisoned the members of a singles group by serving them spoiled kreplach, which triggers traumatic memories of his serving contaminated meat to his platoon during the Korean War.98 The stereotype of delicatessen food as unhealthy, which had dogged it as far back as the immigrant period, now dominated most Jews’ perceptions of this type of food.

  “Comin’ through the Rye”: Delis in Popular Music

  By creating Jewish parodies of popular songs, Jews fantasized that the whole world had become Jewish. The masters of this form of comedy, both of whom referred almost obsessively to deli food in their work, were Mickey Katz and Allan Sherman.

  Katz began his career as a clarinetist in Cleveland but soon found work with the Spike Jones orchestra, which was known for its send-ups of popular songs. Katz first invented a klezmer-inspired, Yiddish version of “Home on the Range,” which he followed with “The Yiddish Mule Train,” “Kiss of Meyer,” and “Duvid Crocket,” all of which sold tens of thousands of copies. Much of his success came from the quality of his orchestra, which included Mannie Klein (later replaced by Ziggy Elman) on trumpet, Si Zentner on trombone, and Sam Weiss on the drums.

  Jewish food was a constant theme of Katz’s Rabelaisian humor. Josh Kun has noted that Katz’s parodies are invariably based on the “‘substratum laughter’ produced by food—gribbenes, matzoh, schmaltz, pickles, kishka, bagels, latkes—and its digestive impact on those who consume it.”99 What could Jewish humor be based on, at a time when many Jews were not well versed in their own tradition? Even if they no longer spoke Yiddish and had never learned much Hebrew, they could speak deli—the universal language of American Jewishness. Kun views Katz as resisting Jewish assimilation by insisting on the Jew as outsider, as on the cover of one of his albums, Borscht Jester, in which the musician is shown in cap and bells, holding a salami.

  Katz seemed unable to resist incorporating references to Jewish food in almost every song, no matter how incongruous the reference. In his recordings and performances, including a short-lived 1951 Broadway show called Borscht Capades, Katz performed songs such as “Halvah Hilarities,” “Matzoh Ball Jamboree,” “Farfel Follies,” and “Chopped Liver” (based on “Moon River”). In his version of the end of Al Jolson’s “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” he substituted “I’ll send you some pickles and rye” for Jolson’s famous extended warble “Goodby-y-ye.” Katz combined klezmer with swing, calypso, polka, mambo, opera, and rock music. Katz’s music provided what must have felt like an easy fix, a quick detour into mem
ory lane before getting back on the road to success in American society.

  Katz’s successor in the business of Jewish song parodies, the aforementioned Allan Sherman, was born Allan Copelon in Chicago in 1924, the son of the racing-car driver and automobile-garage owner Percy Copelon and his wife, a flapper named Rose Sherman. Sherman’s parents divorced when he was six years old; he lived with his mother and eventually adopted her maiden name. Expelled from the University of Illinois for breaking into a sorority (for the purpose, he said, of using the phonograph player), Sherman ended up performing song parodies at a bar in Chicago, before finding work in New York writing jokes for various radio and stage comedians, including Jackie Gleason and Jack E. Leonard. In the early days of television, he was also a writer for variety shows such as Cavalcade of Stars and Broadway Open House.

  Sherman’s first album, My Son, the Folksinger, took the nation by storm; it became the fastest-selling album in recording history, eventually selling more than a million copies. When this short, obese man with heavy glasses with a raspy voice took American folk or Broadway songs and set them to lyrics about deli food, he showed that Jews still maintained an ethnic consciousness even while Jewish culture appeared to be increasingly subsumed under the overarching Judeo-Christian ethos. In his song “Shticks of One Kind and Half a Dozen of the Other,” on his 1962 album My Son, the Celebrity, he sang, “Do not make a stingy sandwich / Pile the cold cuts high / Customers should see salami / Coming through the rye.” The salami (read: Jewishness) erupted through the rye (read: American society), bringing Jewish culture to the fore.