Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  Readers of Harper’s “Facts about New York City” tongue-in-cheek statistics column learned in 1998 that while there were no fewer than thirty-one branches of the Astoria Federal Savings Bank at which automatic-teller transactions could be conducted in Yiddish, the number of kosher delis in the city had declined by 88 percent since 1965. While the continued vitality of the immigrant Jewish language might seem to go hand-in-hand with a continued appetite for eastern European Jewish food, the magazine failed to point out, however, that the Yiddish-speaking ATM machines were concentrated in Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, where few delicatessens were located.124

  In the Bronx, a hundred delicatessens had dwindled to no more than three. Closed were the delis near the county courthouse, the delis near the movie theaters on the Grand Concourse (themselves also boarded up), and the delis underneath the pool halls. Even Schweller’s, which had been a neighborhood fixture on Jerome Avenue, shut its doors after sixty-five years in business. As the journalist Jonathan Mark put it, “Kid, we’re not talking about little groceries that call themselves delicatessens. We’re talking about the ma and pa fleishig restaurants with seven or eight tables, where you sit down like a human being and have some soup, flanken in the pot, a pastrami on rye the size of your fist with a side of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray; delis where grilled franks and knishes are crackling just inside the steamed windows, and neon Hebrew letters shine into the night.” Before Greek diners, pizza parlors or hamburger joints, Mark noted, “a kosher frank was what passed for fast food in this city.”125

  As Jewish waiters and countermen who retired or passed away were replaced by non-Jewish employees, the very nature of the deli-going experience changed; few waiters did a vaudeville act in the course of serving a bowl of soup and a sandwich. In some delis, according to David Sax, waiters from such far-flung places as Egypt, China, and Mexico “took on the role with aplomb,” learning “the shtick and the banter that’s passed down almost like Talmudic knowledge.”126 But in most delis, the waiter was trained to be just like a server in any other restaurant—unfailingly helpful and polite, a far cry from the obnoxious but highly entertaining Jewish waiter of old.

  As the Jewish population of New York declined substantially, falling from two million in 1950 to about half that number by the early 1990s, many formerly Jewish neighborhoods saw new immigrant groups become dominant. The last kosher delicatessen in Flushing, Flushing Delight on Union Street, closed in 1995, ending a four-decade-long presence of a kosher deli at that location. Instead of Jewish stores and restaurants, Chinese, Korean, and Indian businesses proliferated, catering to the needs of those immigrants. The Jewish population was aging, with very few younger Jews moving in to replace those who died or moved away. “With the neighborhood changing the way it is, there just wasn’t enough business,” Flushing Delight’s owner, Paul Reilly, told the New York Times. “More and more people, when they go to Florida, they aren’t coming back.”127

  Even Hebrew National had moved out of New York by the late 1980s; its relocation to Indianapolis was widely viewed as the end of an era. The announcement of the move sparked a labor dispute in which two hundred employees walked out of the company’s factory in Maspeth, Queens, and in which a small bomb was placed in the car of one of the company’s managers. It led to a pitched legal battle between Hebrew National and Schulem Rubin, the senior rabbi for New York State’s kosher compliance division, who was accused by the company of waiting two years after a governmental inspection to give the company a failing grade on its kashrut standards; the company insisted that the state was retaliating against it for moving to the Midwest. The move showed that deli meats were just like steel, fabric, and other consumer products that used to be made in New York; they would increasingly come to be manufactured in places where companies could find cheaper labor and lower taxes.128

  Hebrew National never recovered its reputation in the Orthodox community. Before long, most Orthodox Jews eschewed eating the company’s products. Even many Conservative Jews did not eat Hebrew National meats for years, until in 2004, the company finally obtained a new certification, Triangle K. But even though Triangle K is actually under the supervision of an Orthodox rabbi, it is not glatt—the strictest standard of kosher—and thus not suitable for Orthodox Jews themselves.

  By the early years of the twenty-first century, then, the deli was widely seen as a throwback to an immigrant or second-generation way of life, in which different values had held sway. Jews could not flatter themselves on their success in American society by eating the food of their parents and grandparents. Their nostalgia for that way of life was still present, but it was indulged on particular family occasions rather than on a frequent, regular basis. At the same time, Jews had discovered the cuisines of other cultures and had turned their back on their own style of cooking, which was perceived, in the main, as unhealthy, low class, and unappetizing.

  As we shall see in the next and final chapter, the deli in the twenty-first century plays a sharply diminished role in Jewish culture, even as nostalgia for the delis of the past has become in itself an important part of Jewish identity. At the same time, Jewish food is mutating in unexpected ways, and those delis that still exist are trying a plethora of strategies, including focusing on sustainability and attempting to attract a customer base of non-Jews, to keep themselves afloat.

  The changes in Jewish aspirations are summed up by a late twentieth-century advertising campaign by Manischewitz; the company printed a fictional letter written by Mrs. Manischewitz to her grandmother, in which she recalls her upbringing in the Bronx and kvells (expresses her pride) over her son’s graduation from Brown. “Who would have believed,” she asks in amazement, “from a shtetl to the Ivy League?”129

  Conclusion

  The Contemporary Jewish Deli—Whistling Past the Graveyard

  A couple goes out to eat one evening at the neighborhood kosher deli. They are amazed when a suave Chinese waiter, speaking perfect Yiddish, comes up to their table to take their order. On their way out, they ask the owner how he ever managed to train a Chinese waiter to speak Yiddish. “Shh,” he tells them, “he thinks I’m teaching him English!”

  The setting for this revealing joke is the Lower East Side, where most Jews (and Chinese) settled when they first arrived in the United States. Only in that neighborhood, where so many Jews lived in such close proximity to one another, could a non-Jewish immigrant possibly confuse the language spoken by everyone around him with the language of the American people. To think that anyone could confuse Yiddish and English—this was hilarious to Jews, given how much outside the mainstream Jews knew themselves to be. If only Yiddish and English were the same, then Jews might not suffer so acutely their exclusion from American society. The waiter believes that he is on the way to becoming an American—wait until he finds out the truth! The only nation that he is assimilating into is the Jewish one.

  And yet that is precisely it: the deli does represent America for the clueless Chinese waiter. It is, after all, the only “America” he knows outside his own community. In this sense, he is not so unlike the immigrant Jews themselves, for whom the deli was to become a place in which they began to erect the framework for an American identity. The waiter was to get his revenge when his own cuisine trumped that of the delicatessen. (And of course, Asians have been recently dubbed the “new Jews” for their success in American society; they are viewed as achieving this success in much the same way that Jews did, through a combination of intellect, sacrifice, hard work, and determination.)

  It seems appropriate, then, that in Ben’s, a deli that boasts an Art Deco–style interior (“Who said a nosh can’t be posh?” reads the sign behind the deli counter that lists the hors d’oeuvres), the well-heeled, mostly Jewish patrons are literally surrounded by the words of this joke, as if embraced by a past in which the deli truly was the central institution in Jewish life. By reading—and perhaps even telling to each other—the joke in English, the patrons of Ben’s remind themselv
es how far they have come, how much they have transcended their own ancestors’ immigrant origins, how much they have succeeded in becoming American.

  z l z

  When the Second Avenue Deli reopened in midtown Manhattan in late 2007 after having closed two years earlier in the East Village, it did so with much fanfare. Even though a thousand new restaurants open in New York every year, it would be difficult to think of another restaurant opening that generated quite so much excitement and anticipation. Almost every media outlet in the city descended on the deli to cover what was trumpeted, in messianic terms, as the “second coming” of the Second Avenue Deli, which is arguably the most famous kosher deli in America—and also one of the last.

  The drama of the story was inescapable. Abe Lebewohl, the beloved deli owner, was murdered in broad daylight in 1996 (in a still-unsolved crime) while taking the deli’s receipts to the bank, leaving the business in the hands of his brother, Jack, who ran the deli until its demise, which he blamed on the skyrocketing real estate prices in the rapidly gentrifying East Village.

  Now Jeremy Lebewohl, Jack’s twenty-five-year-old son, had emerged like a dark-horse candidate to take over the family business. Since when did the younger generation want to take over a deli? Hadn’t so many children of the owners of small ethnic businesses, including countless kosher delis, turned their back on the family business in order to become doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers? Would Jeremy be like his uncle—if he knew you were sick, would he show up in person at your apartment or dorm room with a bowl of chicken soup in his hand? Or would the new Second Avenue Deli be just a restaurant like any other? The story of the Second Avenue Deli encapsulated so many aspects of life in New York. Like a once-glorious sports team that had suffered a string of losing seasons but now had a scrappy new manager who was determined to win a pennant, the Second Avenue had a fighting chance once again. It had, you might say, a shot at redemption.

  In fact, the Second Avenue Deli had for a long time worn the defiant, slightly pugnacious air of a survivor. It had opened originally in 1954, a good four decades after most Jews had moved away from the Lower East Side neighborhood, the immigrant ghetto known for its overcrowded, disease-ridden tenements and horrific sweatshops.

  But the kosher deli, with its flashy lightbulb-bordered sign with faux-Yiddish letters, had insisted on serving the foods beloved of these same immigrants and their children, in the hopes of bringing them back for a taste of the old neighborhood. Both Jews and non-Jews made pilgrimages to the deli to soak up the atmosphere of the Jewish past. And Lebewohl was a well-known figure, given to outlandish publicity stunts such as creating busts of famous people in chopped liver, giving out free sausages when a baseball player hit a home run, and maintaining public friendships with a range of characters from Mayor Ed Koch to the pornographer Al Goldstein and pretty much everyone in between. From the handprints on the Walk of Fame outside the door to the Molly Picon room inside, the place glittered with the aura of celebrity while still trading on its down-at-the-heels East Village chic. It saw itself as having nurtured the growth of the downtown arts scene and particularly the emergence of off-Broadway in the 1960s.

  The Second Avenue Deli had become a quintessential part of New York, its appeal extending to many non-Jews, including tourists from all over the world. I dined one evening in the old Second Avenue Deli when a group of Jewish artists and scholars whom I knew from New York University was replaced at the same table by a family wearing traditional African garb, as if they had just come from a meeting at the nearby United Nations. I regretted not having brought a camera; I would have liked to take pictures of the successive groups of people who occupied the same table at the deli over the course of a single evening. The photos would have said a lot not just about the deli but about the polyglot nature of the city.

  Over time, then, the deli had come to stand for a whole host of places and experiences that New Yorkers (and others) felt had become endangered: for the Jewish Lower East Side, for the counterculture of the East Village (the demise of the Second Avenue Deli was compared by some observers to the recent shuttering of the punk music club CBGB’s), for immigrant Jewish culture (Yiddishkeit), for mom-and-pop businesses, for fatty Jewish food. Its closing seemed to mark the end of an era in more ways than one.

  It is little wonder that when the deli closed on Tenth Street, a disappointed blogger sighed, “Sic transit gloria matzoh balls.”1 The comic Jackie Mason, a Second Avenue Deli regular, joked, “It’s almost like wiping out Carnegie Hall. . . . A sandwich to a Jew is just as important as a country to a gentile.”2 Its closing truly seemed to mark the end of an era, just as its rebirth two years later seemed nothing short of miraculous. But can any new deli bring back the days of yore? Or does it inevitably have what the journalist Ron Rosenbaum, writing for Slate, calls a “theme-park vibe, a whistling-past-the-graveyard-schmaltzy nostalgia for schmaltz”3—a cardboard-cutout version of the past?

  The essayist Adam Gopnik has traced what he calls the “drying up” of Jewish comedy in New York to the period between the release of Annie Hall and the release of Broadway Danny Rose, in which the “black-and-white world of the comics shpritzing at the Carnegie Deli is frankly presented as a Chagall world, a folk-tale setting, the whole thing vanished.” Gopnik connects this transition to the fading of New York ethnic life in general, from the Asian countermen slicing fish at Zabar’s—the iconic gourmet Jewish food shop—on the Upper West Side to the lack of overt Jewish references on Seinfeld, where the “Jewish situations are mimed by rote, while the real energy of the jokes lies in the observation of secular middle-class manners.”4

  For years, part of the experience of going to the Carnegie Deli in New York was watching a wacky promotional video, What a Pickle: The World’s Greatest Deli Musical, that played on a loop at the restaurant to divert those who were waiting on line. The video starts with the late owner, Milton Parker, shlepping around an immense pickle. It then switches to a black-and-white silent-movie format with intertitles and background music, in which one of the deli waiters is shown walking home after work and slipping on a pickle on the sidewalk, where he is helped up by a beautiful woman. He romances her by taking her for a picnic in Central Park with sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli. The video then shows the customers and waiters singing and dancing at the Carnegie, with a big-band theme of everyone “swinging” at the “Deli King.” The waiter disastrously juggles the food in a rapid-paced patter song, showing off the immense portions, including the “world’s biggest sandwiches” and “world’s biggest matzo ball.”5

  Parker drops some names of celebrities and their favorite sandwiches, and then the video again switches modes, with “Barry Whitefish” (Wayne Lammers, who also codirected the video and wrote the lyrics), a Barry White look-alike clad entirely in white, who sings a mellow song about pastrami, kasha, and other deli specialties to his leggy blond date as they enjoy a candlelight dinner in the deli and go for a horse-and-buggy ride. After showing a brief segment on how the pastrami and cheesecake is prepared at the deli’s plant in New Jersey, the scene returns once more to the deli, where customers around the dining room yell out their hometowns, states, or countries (everywhere from New Jersey to India and Japan), and the video ends with a sing-along (complete with a bouncing ball) to the tune “Till We Meet Again,” including the words “Till We Eat Again / I’ll be thinking of food until we meet again.” Interposed in the middle of the song is a sequence of obviously non-Jewish waitresses, trying to insult the customers in stereotypically obnoxious fashion.

  One of the most striking aspects of the video, which was produced in 1999, is how non-Jewish the Carnegie Deli seems. Other than the owner and manager, and perhaps the waiter who plays the main role, there is nary a Jewish person in the place—the waiters and customers almost all appear to be non-Jews. The clearly nonkosher food nevertheless does represent a link to Jewish tradition, but it is used either for Jews to romance non-Jews or for non-Jews to romance each other. The
quality of the food seems much less important than the quantity, and the humorous aspects of the dining experience—the ridiculously huge portions, the funny-sounding names of the foods, the nasty waitresses, the boisterous fellow customers, the attempts of both staff and customers to be comedians, and the obsessive mock-seriousness with which the food is treated—come to the fore.

  Thus, not only is it possible to find yourself in a video if you eat in the deli, but eating in the deli is like being on television—or in the movies. You are surrounded by pictures of celebrities, you eat the same foods that celebrities eat, and the entire atmosphere is one that performance theorists would call “ludic”—the playfulness is not incidental to the experience but constitutive of it. Rather than merely being a pleasant diversion while you wait on line, watching the video helps to create the frame for the dining experience, by giving the viewer a set of expectations and understandings that will condition the experience of the meal, which is tied up with notions of celebrity (and fantasies of being a celebrity), vaguely Jewishly coded foods (the pastrami, matzoh balls, etc.), and an overall sense of excess (the “world’s biggest sandwiches”). But unlike Sammy’s Rumanian Restaurant on the Lower East Side, a place that actually does incorporate comedy and music into the dining experience—a meal there is like a meal at a Jewish wedding or bar/bat mitzvah—the nonkosher Carnegie Deli seems to cater more to non-Jews than to Jews.