by Ted Merwin
9. John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (New York: Jason Aronson, 1993), 77.
10. David L. Gold, “When Chauvinism Interferes in Etymological Research: A Few Derivations on the Supposed Vulgar Latin Derivation of Rumanian Pastrama—Pastrama, a Noun of Immediate Turkish Origin (With Preliminary Remarks on Related Words in Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Judezmo, Polish, Russian, SerboCroatian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Yiddish),” in Studies in Etymology and Etiology, ed. F. Rodríguez González and A. Lillo Buades (Alicante, Spain: University of Alicante, 2009), 271–375.
11. Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied, 169.
12. Diner, Hungering for America, 164–165.
13. Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987), 14.
14. Molly Pulver Ungar, “From Zetz! to Zeitgeist: Translating ‘Rumenye, Rumenye,’” in Pierre Anctil, Norman Ravvin, and Sherry Simon, eds., New Readings of Yiddish Montreal / Traduire le Montreal Yiddish (Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 2007), 118.
15. Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 115.
16. Phyllis Glazer and Miriyam Glazer, The Essential Book of Jewish Festival Cooking (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 243.
17. Yeskheskl Kotik, Mayn Zikroynes (My Memories) (Warsaw, 1913).
18. See Glenn Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Marni Davis, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 6.
19. Aharon Rosenbaum, “Memories of the Past,” trans. Jerrold Landau, in M. Yari-Wold, ed., Rzeszow Community Memorial Book (Kehilat Raysha sefer zikaron) (Tel Aviv, 1967), available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/rzeszow/rzeszow.html.
20. Phyllis Kramer, ed.,1891 Galician Business Directory (New York: JewishGen, 2000), http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Poland/galicia1891.htm.
21. Gavriel Lindenberg, “Our Town as I Remember It,” trans. Yehudis Fishman, in Sh. Meltzer, ed., The Book of Horodenka (trans. of Sefer Horodenka) (Tel Aviv, 1963), available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/gorodenka/gor117.html.
22. David Shtokfish, Jewish Mlawa: Its History, Development, Destruction (trans. of Mlawa Ha-Yehudit; Koroteha, HitpatKhuta, Kilyona Di Yidishe Mlawe; Geshikte, Oyfshtand, Unkum) (Tel Aviv, 1984), available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/mlawa/mla429.html/.
23. Ida Marcus-Kerbelnik and Bat-Sheva Levitan Kerbelnik, eds., Kelme—An Uprooted Tree (trans. of Kelm—‘Ets Karut) (Tel Aviv, 1993), available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/kelme/Kelme.html.
24. Referenced in Condon, And Then We Moved, 115.
25. Edwin Brooks, “The Romantic Origin of the Delicatessen Foods,” Chicago Jewish Food Merchant (4/1936), 32.
26. “Love, Sausages, and Law,” New York Times (3/27/1875), 3.
27. “Christmas Dainties: The German-American Must Have the Old Familiar Things That Come from the Fatherland,” New York Tribune (12/16/1900), 3.
28. L. H. Robbins, “Rest for the Delicatessen Man?,” New York Times (8/15/1937), 117.
29. “Klein Deutchland: Glimpses of Daily Life in the Recognized Little Germany of This Metropolis,” New York Herald (11/11/1894), 2.
30. Edward Eggleston, “Wild Flowers of English Speech in America,” Century 47.6 (1894): 853.
31. H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1921), 103n36. Among other English words that derived from German, Mencken listed pumpernickel, lager-beer, wienerwurst, bock-beer, and schnitzel. Mencken idealized German culture and was known, in other books, for making virulently anti-Semitic statements, such as that “the case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go in the world.” H. L. Mencken, introduction to The Anti-Christ, by Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Sharp, 1999), 14.
32. H. T. Webster, “They Don’t Speak Our Language,” Forum and Century 90.6 (1933), 62. For a list of contemporary deli terms, including pistol for pastrami, CB for corned beef, and Coney for hot dog, see Milton Parker and Allyn Freeman, How to Feed Friends and Influence People: The Carnegie Deli (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 59.
33. Brooklyn Daily Eagle (3/29/1885), 12.
34. Wong Chin Foo, “A Chinese Delicatessen Store,” reprinted in Bismarck (ND) Daily Tribune (8/7/1891), 3.
35. “Queer Dishes in Shops,” New York Tribune, illustrated supplement (12/12/1897),12.
36. Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Foods and the Making of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 95.
37. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat, 10–35.
38. George E. Walsh, “Queer Foreign Foods in America,” American Kitchen Magazine 16 (11/1901): 65.
39. Walsh made an exception for German sausages, which he insisted “have no meaning whatever except to German-born people,” since he averred that each type of sausage—such as schinkenwurst, zugenwurst, blutwurst, and lieberwurst—came from a particular German district and appealed mainly to those who hailed from that region. Walsh, “Queer Foreign Foods,” 66.
40. Walsh, “Queer Foreign Foods,” 67.
41. Forrest Chrissey, The Story of Foods (New York: Rand McNally, 1917), 463–472.
42. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 56.
43. By 1917, according to a Jewish communal survey, it was estimated that one million Jews in the city were buying meat from kosher butchers and that the average consumption of meat was 156 pounds per capita. See The Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917–1918 (New York: RareBooksClub, 2012), 319.
44. In 1886, baked beans also first became popular in London, after Henry John Heinz sold five cases of samples to Fortnum & Mason, the gourmet food store famous for its wide selection of canned goods.
45. Patricia Volk, “Deli,” American Heritage Magazine 53.1 (2002), http://www.americanheritage.com/content/deli. See also Patricia Volk, Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family (New York: Vintage Books, 2002). Volk’s descendants also went on to become inventors in their own right; his son developed the wrecking ball, while his equally entrepreneurial grandson, also named Sussman, concocted double-ended cigarette lighters and trash-can cleaners.
46. Marcus Ravage, An American in the Making (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), 88. D. H. Hermalin, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, estimated that throughout the city, Rumanian Jews—who numbered twenty-four thousand in New York—owned 150 restaurants, 200 wine cellars, and 30 coffeehouses. Hermalin described the fashion by which the Rumanians, “over a cup of black coffee and through the blue smoke curling up from their cigarettes . . . indulge in a game of cards or chess.” D. H. Hermalin, “The Roumanian Jews in America,” American Jewish Yearbook 3 (1901–1902): 101–102.
47. Esther Levy, Jewish Cookery Book (Philadelphia: W. S. Turner, 1871), 40. The first Jewish cookbook ever auctioned, it sold at Swann Auction Galleries in 2010 for $11,000. Gabriela Geselowitz, “Jewish Cooking, 19th Century Style,” New York Jewish Week (3/24/2010). The first Yiddish cookbook in the United States was not published until the turn of the twentieth century; it was Hinde Amchanitzki’s Lehr-bukh vi azoy tsu kokhen un baken (Cooking and Baking Textbook), first printed in New York in 1901. African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress.
48. Levy, Jewish Cookery Book, 39.
49. See Paula Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70 (1980): 91–105.
50. See Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
51. Sammy Aaronson and Albert Hirshberg, As High as My Heart (New York: Coward-McCann,
1957), 18–19.
52. Rischin, Promised City, 80.
53. Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 16.
54. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York: Persea Books, 1999), 165.
55. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 34.
56. The sociologist Shlomo Katz was reminded, he wrote, of the “distasteful and indelicate superabundance of Jewish restaurants, the staggering mounds of food in delicatessen stores in Jewish neighborhoods, the endearing diminutives applied to a gut shtickele (‘fine piece of’) something or another.” Katz suggested that the parents, by making their children fat, could make them “sufficiently buttressed against the hostile world.” Shlomo Katz, “Heritage,” in Elliot Cohen, ed., Commentary on the American Scene (New York: Knopf, 1953), 5–6.
57. David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 13.
58. Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 5.
59. Maurice Hindus, Green Worlds (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), 94–95.
60. Susan J. Matt, “A Hunger for Home: Homesickness and Food in a Global Consumer Society,” Journal of American Culture 30.1 (2007): 13.
61. Quoted in Matt, “A Hunger for Home,” 13.
62. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 209.
63. Benjamin Reich, “A New Social Center: The Candy Store as a Social Influence,” Year Book of the University Settlement Society of New York, 1899.
64. Bella Spewack, Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side (New York: Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 1995), 43.
65. Jillian Gould, “Candy Stores and Egg Creams,” in Ilana Abramovitch and Seán Galvin, eds., Jews of Brooklyn (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 204.
66. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 237.
67. David Freedman, Mendel Marantz (New York: Langdon, 1925), 80.
68. Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal had imported their way of deep frying fish—pescado frito—to England, prompting Thomas Jefferson to mention in a letter that he had eaten “fish fried in the Jewish fashion.” See Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York (New York: Knopf, 1996), 113. See also Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food (New York: Penguin, 2002), 359.
69. “Stalls for Fried Fish,” New York Times (11/12/1899), 12.
70. John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 29.
71. Darra Goldstein, “Will Matzoh Go Mainstream? Jewish Food in America,” in The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, vol. 4 (Los Angeles: Casden Institute, 2005).
72. See Harold P. Gastwirt, Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness: The Controversy over the Supervision of Jewish Dietary Practice in NYC, 1881–1940 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974).
73. See Maria Diemling, “As the Jews like to Eat Garlick: Garlic in Christian-Jewish Polemical Discourse in Early Modern Germany,” in Leonard J. Greenspoon, Ronald A. Simkins, and Gerald Shapiro, eds., Food and Judaism (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2004), 218.
74. Sara Evans, Born for Liberty (New York: Free Press, 1997), 163.
75. Samuel Chotzinoff, A Lost Paradise: Early Reminiscences (New York: Arno, 1975), 184.
76. Isaac Reiss (Moishe Nadir), “Ruined by Success,” translated from the Yiddish by Nathan Ausubel, in Ausubel, Treasury of Jewish Humor (New York: Doubleday, 1951), 36–39.
77. Classified section, New York Herald (2/19/1888), 19.
78. Annie Polland, Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 96–97. Kosher meat is produced from biblically permitted animals (those that have cloven hoofs and that chew their cud), which are slaughtered with a single stroke of a sharp blade across the carotid artery, cut into pieces with a knife that has had no contact with dairy products, and then soaked and salted to remove any traces of blood.
79. Sholem Aleichem, Motl Peyse dem Khazns Zun (Motl Peyse, the Cantor’s Son) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1997). The translation is mine.
80. Ad for Barnet Brodie Genuine Kosher Meat Products, Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (8/1931), 18.
81. “Court Is Mystified by Delicatessen,” New York Times (4/29/10), 3.
82. Hyman Lipman v. Max Parker, et al., in M. E. McDonald, ed., Lackawanna Jurist 16 (1/29/1915–1/21/1916): 82–86.
83. Batya Miller, “Enforcement of the Sunday Closing Laws on the Lower East Side, 1882–1903,” American Jewish History 91.2 (2003): 269–286.
84. Soon v. Crowley, 113 U.S. 703, 710.
85. Miller, “Enforcement of the Sunday Closing Laws,” 278.
86. “Will Obey the Law,” New York Herald (7/7/1895), 6. One wonders how many of the delicatessen owners were Jewish and likely closed their stores on Saturdays.
87. “Grew Eloquent on Delicatessen,” New York Herald (7/30/95), 4.
88. “Overzealous on Excise,” New York Times (8/27/1895), 8.
89. “‘Delikatessen’ on Sunday,” New York Times (2/8/1899), 6.
90. “Sunday Delicatessen,” New York Times (3/28/1899), 6.
91. May Ellis Nichols, “Exit the Maid,” Outlook 125 (5/12/1920): 79.
92. “Raines Law Delicatessen,” New York Times (2/7/1899), 5.
93. “Delicatessen Men’s Festival,” New York Times (7/31/1899), 7.
94. “Then and Now,” Life (11/18/20), 921.
95. Chotzinoff, Lost Paradise, 182.
96. Kazin, Walker in the City, 34.
97. Ella Eaton Kellogg, Science in the Kitchen (Chicago: Modern Medicine, 1893), 29–31.
98. See Harvey Levenstein, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 32.
99. Sonia Kochman Davis, “A Dietician Looks at the Kosher Delicatessen Store and its Customers,” Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh, PA) (3/30/28), 59–62. For more on the perceived link between kosher food and poor health during the 1920s, see Kochman Davis, “The Kosher Diet—What It Is,” Jewish Criterion (11/18/27), 41–42.
100. “To the White Coat and Apron Brigade,” Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (6/1931), 7.
101. Barnett Brodie ad, Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (8/1931), 18.
102. Theodore Krainin, “‘Kosher’ and the Jewish Dietary Laws,” Jewish Forum (1/23), 79.
103. Chelsea Delicatessen advertising card, collection of the author.
104. Diane Janowski, Our Own Book—A Victorian Guide to Life—Homespun Cuisine, Health, Romance, Etiquette, Raising Children and Farm Animals (Elmira, NY: New York History Review Press, 2008), 46; originally published by Weekly Gazette and Press (Elmira, NY), 1888. Delicatessen customer Bernard Cooper, who grew up in Los Angeles, recalled, “the glass bottles gave no clue as to the identity of Dr. Brown,” but “I pictured him as a kindly white-coated man not unlike my dentist. In a pristine laboratory filled with bubbling test tubes and beakers, Dr. Brown concocted the amber elixir that washed away the saltiness of corned beef, cut the peppery after-burn of pastrami or kept me from choking on a throatful of brisket.” Every swig of the beverage, he noted, was a “toast to the future, each bottle a triumph of science.” Bernard Cooper, letter to the New York Times (3/10/1996).
105. Leah Koenig, “Cel-Ray Soda Grabs New Fans,” Forward (7/18/2012).
106. LeRoy Kaser, “In the Delicatessen Shop, a Jewish Monologue,” in Dialect Monologues: Readings and Plays (Dayton, OH: Paine, 1928), 146–147.
107. For more on Hebrew comics, see Ted Merwin, In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006). The Yiddish accent sounds more German than Yiddish—very few non-Jewish comics strove to reproduce a bona fide Yiddish accent. Most of their audiences couldn’t t
ell the difference anyway.
108. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
109. Quoted in Ronald T. Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Back Bay, 2001), 188.
110. See Gastwirt, Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness.
111. Gastwirt, Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness, 122–123.
112. “Kosher Meat Man Held in High Bail,” New York Times (4/20/1933), 25.
113. People v. Jacob Branfman & Son, 263 NYS 629, 147 Misc. 290 (City Court, 1933).
114. “The New Kosher Law,” Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (6/1936), 1.