Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  99. Interview with the author, 4/2/2007.

  100. Louis Menashe, “Sephardic in Williamsburg,” in Ilana Abramovitch and Sean Galvin, eds., The Jews of Brooklyn (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), 117.

  101. Quoted in Wendy Gordon, “Deli: Comfort Food for the WWII Generation,” Forward (2/21/2012).

  102. Interview with the author, 9/4/2007.

  103. Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive (New York: Penguin, 1982), 117–118.

  104. Leonard Bronstein, an Orthodox rabbi who certified many delis as kosher despite the fact that they were open on Saturday, told me that most kosher delicatessens “did their main business on Shabbos.” He added that it was “always that way; the only date that they closed was Pesach [Passover].” Interview with the author, 6/30/2003.

  105. Jeffrey Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 10.

  106. Levine, “Pastrami Land,” 67.

  107. Susan Stamberg, “From Manhattan to Allentown to Washington, D.C.,” in Alan King and Friends, Matzo Balls for Breakfast and Other Memories of Growing Up Jewish (New York: Free Press, 2004), 3.

  108. Jay Cantor, Great Neck (New York: Vintage, 2003), 25; emphasis in original.

  Chapter 3. Send a Salami

  1. See Robin Platts, Burt Bacharach and Hal David: What the World Needs Now (New York: Collector’s Press, 2002).

  2. Hal David, radio interview with Terry Gross, 9/7/2012, http://m.npr.org/news/NPR+Music+Mobile/160748199.

  3. “Topics of the Times,” New York Times (5/25/1945), 18.

  4. The average meal for a solider contained forty-three hundred calories, with a third of the total coming from fat. Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 94.

  5. A. B. Genung, Food Policies during World War II (Ithaca, NY: Northeast Farm Foundation, 1951), 18.

  6. Violet E. Dewey, “Hoard Rationing Memories,” Milwaukee Journal (8/8/1973), 4.

  7. Samuel Spiegler, Your Life’s Work (New York: Riverdale, 1943), 146.

  8. “Meat Rationing Will Have Effect on Restaurants,” Evening Independent (3/24/1943), 12. In a bid to compel the OPA to modify the point system, delicatessen owners threatened to take advantage of a loophole in the regulations that permitted them to reduce the number of points needed for an item if the item was about to spoil. They plotted, in particular, to band together to slash the points for liverwurst. Jefferson G. Bell, “Point-Cutting War on Rationed Foods Is Begun in City,” New York Times (4/4/1943), 1.

  9. “Dinner Guests Set a Ration Puzzle,” New York Times (3/24/1943), 18.

  10. Ruth Corbett, Daddy Danced the Charleston (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1970), 119.

  11. “Launch Bread and Gravy Month,” Super Market Merchandizing (2/1945), 45.

  12. Bentley, Eating for Victory, 92.

  13. “Four Meat Concerns Guilty of OPA Charge,” New York Times (12/2/1944), 17.

  14. “Delicatessen Strike Off,” New York Times (5/24/1945), 18.

  15. “2 Meatless Days Ordered by Mayor; To Be Enforced, New York Times (1/22/1945), 1.

  16. “All Delicatessens in City May Close,” New York Times (9/22/1946), 43.

  17. “Horse Meat Mart Here Soon Is Unlikely,” New York Times (9/26/1946), 29.

  18. Herbert Mitgang, “A Pledge of Remembrance,” New York Times (12/17/1950), SM13.

  19. Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 11.

  20. Telephone interview with the author, 10/18/2007.

  21. Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 53.

  22. Molly Picon, Scrapbook (1925–1932), Center for Jewish History, American Jewish Historical Society.

  23. H. L. Kaplan advertisement in Yiddishes Tageblatt / Jewish Daily News (2/26/1917), 3.

  24. Barry Kessler, “Bedlam with Corned Beef on the Side,” Generations, Fall 1993, 2–7. See also Gilbert Sandler, Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 132–134.

  25. Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, The Death of an American Jewish Community (New York: Free Press, 1992), 24–25.

  26. Mark Friedman, “Looking Back,” Historian (newsletter of the Rogers Park / West Ridge Historical Society) 16.3 (2001): 2.

  27. Bill Gleason, “Oscar Keeps Friendship with Yanks, Berra Strictly Kosher,” Chicago American (4/23/1964).

  28. Joseph Epstein, “Nostalgie de la Boeuf,” Commentary (2/2010), 41.

  29. Moore, To the Golden Cities, 59.

  30. Orson Welles, “From Mars,” Commentary (6/1946), 70.

  31. Rich Cohen, Tough Jews (New York: Crown, 1999), 14.

  32. Murray “Boy” Maltin, 1/4 Pound Lean (Los Angeles: Boy’s Own, 2001), 14.

  33. Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 45.

  34. Collection of the author.

  35. Segal’s boasted both a deli counter and a “dairy bar.” Thus, while both meat and dairy were offered, none of the items on the menu combined the two. (Abe’s Kosher Delicatessen in Scranton, Pennsylvania, continues this practice to this day.) Among the offerings were an EDDIE beefILTON stew (“no HAM allowed”) and a Kosher Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato Sandwich. The store was closed from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, as well as on all Jewish holidays. Menu from Rosen’s Delirama, author’s personal collection. A picture of the store can be found in Scott Faragher and Katherine Harrington, Memphis in Vintage Postcards (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000), 69.

  36. Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo, 45.

  37. Harry Golden, Only in America (New York: Perma Books, 1958), 113.

  38. Clive Webb, Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 109–113.

  39. Quoted in Moore, To the Golden Cities, 85.

  40. Quoted in Joann Biondi, Miami Beach Memories: A Nostalgic Chronicle of Days Gone By (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2006), 27.

  41. Gilbert Millstein, “Who’s Who and Who’s Ain’t along Broadway,” New York Times (12/31/1950), SM6.

  42. Edward S. Shapiro, We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 102.

  43. Quoted in Biondi, Miami Beach Memories, 58.

  44. Harry Gersh, “Kochalein: Poor Man’s Shangri-La,” Commentary (2/1949), 169.

  45. Mimi Sheraton, From My Mother’s Kitchen (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 243.

  46. Phil Brown, Catskills Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 43.

  47. Brown, Catskills Culture, 17.

  48. Brown, Catskills Culture, 89.

  49. Interview with the author, 3/3/9/2007.

  50. Jane Levi, “An Extraterrestrial Sandwich: The Perils of Food in Space,” Endeavor 34.1 (2010), 7.

  51. Levi, “An Extraterrestrial Sandwich,” 6.

  52. Quoted in Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (New York: Norton, 2010), 289.

  53. Independent Offices Appropriations for 1966: Hearings, Volume 9 (Washington, DC: U.S. Congress, 1965), 912. See also Barton C. Hacker and James M. Grimwood, On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010).

  Chapter 4. Miss Hebrew National Salami

  1. “Restaurant!,” Mad 16.16 (1964).

  2. Joseph Weingarten, An American Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial Speech (New York: self-published, 1954).

  3. See Jeffrey S. Gurock, Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920–2010 (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 102–103.

  4. Howard Cosell, Like It Is (Chicago: Playboy, 1974), 281.

  5. See Ji
m Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York: Norton, 1991).

  6. Green Flag, The Jewish Travel Guide: 1960 (London: Jewish Chronicle, 1960), 145.

  7. “2 Boys, 16, Are Fatally Knifed by Lame Man in Store Robbery,” New York Times (11/26/1964), 43.

  8. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 22.

  9. “Department Stores and ‘Chains’ to Occupy Space in Final Unit of Glen Oaks Shops,” New York Times (1/15/1950), R1. See also Lila Corwin Berman, “The Death and Life of Jewish Neighborhoods,” Sh’ma (6/1/2014), http://shma.com/2014/06/the-death-and-life-of-jewish-neighborhoods/.

  10. Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 147.

  11. Mickey Katz, Mish Mosh (Capitol Records, 1957), LP.

  12. Greg Lawrence, Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins (New York: Berkley Trade, 2002), 3.

  13. Susan Thaler, “My Father, the Deli Man,” New York Times (6/15/1985), 23.

  14. Harry Gersh, “The Jewish Paintner,” Commentary (1/1948), 64.

  15. Jackie Mason, I’m the Greatest Comedian in the World, Only Nobody Knows It Yet! (Verve, 1962), LP.

  16. Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 84.

  17. Alan M. Kraut, “The Butcher, the Baker, the Pushcart Peddler: Jewish Foodways and Entrepreneurial Opportunity in the East European Immigrant Community, 1880–1940,” Journal of American Culture 6.4 (1983): 80.

  18. William M. Freeman, “The Old Standby Becomes a Luxury,” New York Times (5/14/1961), F1.

  19. Personal collection of the author.

  20. Susan J. Thompson and J. Tadlock Cowan, “Durable Food Production and Consumption in the World- Economy,” in Philip McMichael, ed., Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 1995), 36.

  21. Jane Nickerson, “News of Food,” New York Times (3/19/1947), 22.

  22. Joselit, Wonders of America, 192.

  23. See Heinze, Adapting to Abundance.

  24. “Kosher Products Show Swift Rise,” New York Times (1/2/1957), 86.

  25. J. Tevere MacFadyen, “The Rise of the Supermarket,” American Heritage (10–11/1985), 28.

  26. Leonard Lewis, “Waldbaum, Suburb Star, Clinging to Ethnic Image,” Supermarket News (1/14/1980), 1, 28.

  27. Mark H. Zanger, “Ethnic Foods,” in Andrew F. Smith, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 436.

  28. “Meat Processors Reaping Bonanza,” New York Times (12/11/1955). This type of meat was associated with African American “soul food,” rather than white Protestant fare. See Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

  29. Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Random House, 2000), 13.

  30. Interview with the author, 1/14/2004.

  31. Interview with the author, 12/15/2007.

  32. See Tom Reichert, The Erotic History of Advertising (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).

  33. See Keith Lovegrove, Pageant: The Beauty Contest (New York: teNeues, 2002).

  34. Carol Adams, The Pornography of Meat (New York: Continuum, 2003), 12.

  35. J. Leonard Shaub, executive vice president of the Rockmore Company (the ad agency employed by the company), said the ad’s intention was to “emphasize the nutritional value of a product which a child always wants but shouldn’t have too much of. But this is sometimes the only thing a parent can get him to eat, and if it’s nutritional, he will be getting the food value he needs.” “How Agency Helped Crash Non-Jewish Markets,” Advertising Agency Magazine (7/6/1956), 27.

  36. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 119.

  37. Collection of the author.

  38. The campaign was called “What I Would Do for a Hebrew National Hot Dog.” Found in “How Agency Helped Crash Non-Jewish Markets,” 26.

  39. Music from the Yiddish Radio Project (Shanachie, 2006), CD.

  40. Levy’s Rye Bread ad, Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (8/1931), 10.

  41. Robert Glatzer, The New Advertising: The Great Campaigns from Avis to Volkswagen (New York: Citadel, 1970), 55.

  42. Bernard Weinraub, “From Ordinary Faces, Extraordinary Ads,” New York Times (2/21/2002). See also “Judy Protas, 91, Writer of Slogan for Levy’s Real Jewish Rye,” obituary in New York Times (1/12/2014), A22.

  43. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 272.

  44. Gentleman’s Agreement, directed by Elia Kazan (Twentieth Century Fox, 1948).

  45. Will Herberg, Protestant–Catholic–Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 13.

  46. Ausubel, Treasury of Jewish Humor, 355–356.

  47. Quoted in Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 452; Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 110.

  48. Gay, Unfinished People, 161.

  49. Samuel Persky, “New England Testimony,” Commentary (7/1946), 48.

  50. Warren Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Foods: The Corporate Melting Pot,” Food and Foodways 2 (1987): 1–29.

  51. Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Foods,” 10–11.

  52. Quoted in Katherine J. Parkin, Food Is Love: Food Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 113.

  53. Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Foods.”

  54. Herbert Koshetz, “Colgate Slates Riviana Merger,” New York Times (2/13/1976), 59.

  55. Lawrence van Gelder, “Deli Food on a Grand Scale: 500,000 Frankfurters a Day,” New York Times (4/6/1986), B39.

  56. Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Foods,” 28.

  57. Peter Cherches, “Chinese Food, the Early Years,” Word of Mouth (blog) (1/2/2007), http://www.petercherches.blogspot.com/2007/01/chinese-food-early-years.html.

  58. Nevertheless, the film director Mel Brooks remembered about when he was growing up in Brooklyn, “As long as [my mother] was cooking, we never went to a Chinese restaurant. I mean the pot roast, the knaydlach, the stuffed gedempte, all those things with a ‘chuch’ and ‘chach’ at the end—they melted in your mouth.” Quoted in Hanna Miller, “Identity Takeout: How American Jews Made Chinese Food Their Ethnic Cuisine,” Journal of Popular Culture 39.3 (2006): 432.

  59. Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, Growing Up Jewish in America: An Oral History (New York: Bison Books, 1999), 88. The radio host Jesse Brown grew up in Toronto, but his experience is the same as many Jewish New Yorkers: “Why, in the Jewish neighborhood where I grew up, are there eight Chinese restaurants but no Chinese people? Why is Chun King’s won ton soup as much a part of my culinary tradition as my grandma’s matzoh ball soup? Why are my parents more likely to run into the Silversteins from next door at Lee Gardens in Chinatown than at the fruit market around the corner?” Jesse Brown, “Jews and Chinese Food” (audio), Jesse Brown’s website, http://www.jessebrown.ca/radio.html (accessed 10/5/2007).

  60. Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine, “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern,” in Barbara G. Shortridge and James R. Shortridge, eds., The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 166.

  61. Allison James, “Cooking the Books: Global or Local Identities in Contemporary British Food Cultures?,” in David Howes, ed., Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities (New York: Routledge, 1996), 87.

  62. Tuchman and Levine, “New York Jews and Chinese Food,” 170. See also Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (New York: Oxfor
d University Press, 2009); Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 1999); Joshua Eli Plaut, A Kosher Christmas: ’Tis the Season to be Jewish (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012); and Haiming Liu, “Kung Pao Kosher: Jewish Americans and Chinese Food in New York,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 6 (2010): 80–101.