Save the Deli

by David Sax

  Gone. Finished. Dead. Toyt fahrtik gishtorbin.

  To the deli’s regulars, it was the worst possible scenario. Fyvush Finkel, the Emmy award-winning actor from Picket Fences and Boston Public, had been a loyal customer since the deli opened, coming in for quick meals between shows at neighboring Yiddish theaters during the 1950s. Sometimes he’d walk around the deli, singing “Happy Birthday” to three tables in one night—in Yiddish of course. “When I passed by the deli and looked in and saw an empty shell . . . my heart fell,” Finkel told me over frankfurters and Cel-Ray sodas at Katz’s a year later. “It was very sad. Very sad. I felt terrible.”

  An editorial titled “Deli Down” in the Forward (New York’s Jewish newspaper of record) on the closing of the 2nd Ave Deli had this to say:

  The closing of the Second Avenue Deli, the landmark Lower East Side kosher eatery, has all the classic elements of a modern-day Jewish cultural crisis: the struggle for historical memory. The quest for generational continuity. The never-ending battle for control of the land on which we stand. And, of course, the search for a truly great pastrami sandwich.

  Abe Lebewohl was born in the territory of Galicia in 1931 on the shifting Polish/Ukrainian border. Captured by the Soviets, Abe’s father was branded a capitalist and was exiled to perform hard labor in Siberia, while Abe and his mother were shipped to Kazakhstan. After the war, the family landed in an Italian UN refugee camp, where Abe’s baby brother, Jack, was born. In 1950, the family made it to New York, and Abe took a job as a soda jerk in a Coney Island deli. After a stint at several other delis, Lebewohl scrambled together a few thousand dollars in 1954, bought a ten-seat luncheonette at the corner of East 10th Street, and opened up his 2nd Ave Deli.

  Here was an area steeped in Jewish lore, surrounded by Yiddish theaters, synagogues, bathhouses, and other delis. But as the 2nd Ave Deli grew more and more popular, the theaters closed and the Yiddish actors who had built Abe’s business were quickly forgotten. He created the deli’s Walk of Stars in their honor, cementing their names in the sidewalk outside. Lebewohl also opened the Molly Picon room, in a 1970s expansion of the restaurant dedicated to the Yiddish actress.

  By the early 1990s, the 2nd Ave Deli was regarded as one of New York’s top Jewish delis, if not its best. Unlike most other famous delis, it was kosher (though not glatt kosher). The food went beyond standard deli fare, offering a full menu of Ashkenazi dishes, including homemade gefilte fish, flanken with mushroom barley soup, chicken fricasee, and even cholent, the sabbath stew. Everywhere the deli’s food went, Lebewohl seemed to appear, whether catering parties, Broadway openings, or bar mitzvahs. He could never refuse a hungry mouth. Any time the many homeless from the neighborhood came into the 2nd Ave Deli, Abe made sure they left full. Then he’d pack up the day’s leftovers into the delivery truck and take it to shelters around town, his smiling face, bald scalp, and wild curls heralding a salty salvation for the most needy.

  “He used to leave the truck unlocked so that this one homeless guy could get into the truck and go to sleep at night,” recalled Abe’s daughter Sharon. “One time he was in the truck sleeping. My father didn’t realize it and at five o’clock in the morning he drove to the fish market. He didn’t pay attention, he just threw the fish into the back of the truck and then took the truck to be washed. When the guys at the car wash took the hose to the back of the truck they suddenly heard a scream and realized that guy was in there. They were most shocked that my father wasn’t surprised. He just casually said, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize he was in there today.’”

  As Sharon and I chatted in a Union Square coffee shop one gray fall day in 2006, her words about her father revealed a deep love. In the weeks before, as I spoke to dozens of delicatessen owners and deli lovers around New York, the very mention of Abe Lebewohl’s name brought those same words. He was a “mensch,” a “legend,” “the nicest guy you could ever meet,” and “the last of the great Deli Men.” But hearing Sharon Lebewohl talk about her father in a shaky voice, and seeing the tears well up in her eyes, I caught a glimpse of her painful burden. Abe Lebewohl was more than a legend to her, he was her father, and the 2nd Ave Deli had been all that she had left of him.

  On March 4, 1996, Abe Lebewohl drove his delivery truck to the bank to deposit the previous night’s receipts. Two men hijacked Abe in broad daylight and drove him around the corner to 4th Street, where a third was waiting. The men shot and killed Abe Lebewohl, took $10,000 he was carrying, and sped away, never to be found.

  “My father was immortal in my mind,” Sharon said. “It wasn’t until I passed the deli, saw the news trucks and the gates down and saw people putting flowers and letters behind the gate,” she recalled, a look of horror flashing across her face, “that I thought, ‘Oh my god, it’s true.’”

  More than fifteen hundred people attended Abe Lebewohl’s funeral at the Community Synagogue. Well-wishers spilled onto the streets and fire escapes of nearby buildings. Obituaries appeared in all the major papers. The prospect of the 2nd Ave Deli outliving its gregarious founder seemed impossible. Many assumed that it would close, yet days after Abe’s shiva ended, the deli reopened. Abe’s younger brother, Jack, put aside his law practice and manned the helm while Sharon helped out in the kitchen.

  “There was something very comforting about it,” Sharon recalled. “Customers would come with stories about him. It helped my healing. But it was very difficult. I can’t tell you how many times I actually thought I saw my father in the deli. I’d see a man with a bald spot in the back where my father’s was, and for one second I thought that if I hadn’t looked in the coffin and saw my father I would have thought ‘Oh my god he’s here.’ That part didn’t get easier.”

  When I dined at the 2nd Ave Deli on a Friday night in 1999 (the only time I ever did), the place was perfect. Waitresses poured out fragrant metal bowls of chicken soup so densely packed with the fatty essence of the poultry that they glowed. Knishes, golden and crispy in their shell, revealed piping-hot potato mash with hints of pepper and a creamy texture. And of course the sandwiches were outstanding: pastrami hot, tender, and marbled, sliced thin so that chewing was almost unnecessary. With its wood trim, low ceiling, and hushed vibe, it felt more warm and welcoming than any other brighter, bustling deli. The servers were quick with the jokes and the walls oozed nostalgia. You instantly felt at home. This was a deli of the highest caliber, a fixture of the neighborhood, the city, and the greater Jewish world. Most every New Yorker I spoke with cited it as their favorite delicatessen.

  With all this going for it, what on earth could have caused it to close?

  “It took everyone by surprise,” said Ida Berger, a waitress who had been working at the 2nd Ave Deli since 1993, and was now in her eighties. “No one knew a thing. It came Sunday night—[Jack] put a key in the door and walked away.” Berger had been home that night recovering from hip surgery, when the other staff began calling her. “It was a blow to all of them.” One day you’re serving kasha varnishkes, and the next you are standing on the frozen corner, locked out of your workplace. Though many of the 2nd Ave Deli staff moved on to other delicatessens around the city, some were still adrift a year later.

  I asked Mrs. Berger whether the reason for the closure surprised her, and she quickly shot into a tirade. “They wanted to increase [the rent] $9,000 a month!” she practically screamed into the phone. Customers were already complaining, and raising prices would have only pushed more away. Ida Berger had lived in the Lower East Side her whole life, had worked at a number of delis, and had seen many others shut their doors. Was there a future for delis in New York? “With delis? Forget it. It’s a dying trade. Definitely not. They’ve all gone out. There’s no way of reviving it.”

  But if that was the case, how did Abe Lebewohl keep the 2nd Ave Deli running when he was alive, facing similar challenges?

  “Abe was a world-class nudge and he was the perfect Deli Man,” recalled Steve Cohen, who managed the 2nd Ave Deli for twenty-two years unti
l the day it closed. When we met, Cohen still sported a fading 2nd Ave Deli baseball cap. “Now it’s a business, but to him it wasn’t a business, it was a calling. It was run like mom and pop and now [the deli world] is corporate. When you’re paying this kind of rent, you can’t run it like a mom and pop. You gotta go on margins, you gotta think food costs . . . it’s a whole different world out there.”

  Then why not change the deli? Modernize it to fit with the times, cater to the hip crowd moving into the East Village?

  “You know, I like the past,” said Cohen. “When people said to me, ‘It’s just like it was,’ that was the greatest compliment ever.” Cohen’s philosophy was in line with what his customers cherished. After Abe’s death, Sharon Lebewohl worked tirelessly on a series of low-fat items to add to the menu, in keeping with what other delicatessens were doing. The healthy menu failed dismally. Customers came to the 2nd Ave Deli as an escape from health regimes, not to find one. Abe had once famously boasted, “My food will kill you.” His customers couldn’t have been happier with those words.

  What about Jack Lebewohl, I asked, how did his approach change from his brother’s?

  “He needed it like luchenkup, a hole in the head,” Cohen said. “It wasn’t his calling in life . . . at all. He was never enamored of the business.”

  The more deli owners and personalities I spoke with around New York, the more I heard skepticism about Jack Lebewohl and the death of the 2nd Ave Deli. Barry Friedman, owner of Friedman’s in Chelsea and the Pastrami Queen on the Upper East Side, had offered to purchase the 2nd Ave Deli from Lebewohl months before. “I guess he’d rather close the doors,” Friedman said. “The lease wasn’t his problem. The landlord is a personal friend of my partner. It wasn’t a surprise like all of a sudden the landlord was raising the rent. I think he just got tired of it, he didn’t need it.”

  Despite dozens of messages left with his wife, assistant, and answering machine, Jack Lebewohl was not interested in telling me his side of the story after the deli had closed. However, my conversation with Sharon Lebewohl, Jack’s niece and former co-owner, revealed similar sentiments. It had been close to a year since the deli closed, but her emotions were still raw. Sharon would purposefully walk two blocks out of her way to avoid even glancing at the corner where the 2nd Ave Deli had been. A Chase bank eventually occupied the space, but in late 2006, the deli’s ghostly facade served as a sad reminder to all who passed by.

  “I can’t relive that feeling when I drove by right after [my father] died. I can’t imagine nothing being there,” Sharon said, staring into her coffee cup. “The deli was very cathartic for me. People ask me how often I go to the cemetery, and they’re shocked to hear I don’t. I was there for my father’s funeral and unveiling and my mother’s funeral and unveiling . . . that’s it! I don’t feel them there, but in the deli I feel them.”

  How did she deal with the closing? When did she know it was going to shut, and why didn’t she tell anyone? And what about Jack? What went on between them in those tumultuous days? Was the 2nd Ave Deli’s closing truly inevitable?

  “I knew maybe a week before,” she recalled, fighting back emotion, weighing each sentence with a long pause. “It was as much a shock to me as it was to the staff. I remember calling my kids and telling them, ‘I just want you to know before the news hits’ and them saying, angry, ‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’ Because I didn’t know earlier.”

  Over the course of the previous year, Jack had given no solid indication to Sharon that a decision needed to be made (they were co-owners of equal share, along with Sharon’s sister Felicia, who wasn’t involved at all). Occasionally Jack would wonder aloud whether they could sustain the business, but aside from a halfhearted proposal to drop the mail order service, its closure was never openly discussed.

  On Christmas Eve, Jack told Sharon, “We have to close. We don’t have a choice.” Buying the building would have cost over $20 million and the banks strongly advised against it. Sharon contemplated whether she could operate the 2nd Ave Deli on her own. Her kids weren’t involved in the business, and Sharon remembered that when her granddaughter was born, she had vainly hoped that maybe the deli could hold on long enough for her to grow up and take it over. She quickly came to her senses.

  Over the course of the final week—that compressed space of schmaltzy nostalgia between Christmas and New Year’s—the 2nd Ave Deli chugged along as normal. When it closed, none of the staff received so much as a phone call from Sharon and Jack, and it hurt many of them deeply. One of the deli’s closest and most loyal staff members said that they would have expected it from Jack, but not from Sharon, Abe’s beloved daughter. The least she could have done was make a few calls. Why didn’t she?

  “I was in such denial, in my wildest dreams I just didn’t believe it was going to happen,” she said. “I knew a lot of people were surprised about that from me. I think had I known months before, I would have put my foot down and said, ‘They have to know now,’ but I just had a week to kind of grasp it.”

  Jack Lebewohl certainly had the personal wealth and business experience to weather the financial storm and pony up for the rent increase . . . but for how long? Costs were not going to get any cheaper, the neighborhood was only getting more expensive, and a lease still meant he was beholden to the whims of the landlord. How soon until he had to charge $20 for a pastrami sandwich, or assume millions of dollars in personal debt just to float the deli?

  Could he have sold the deli to someone else? Possibly, but what would it have become were it taken over by someone outside the family? What if it declined in quality, as many others had? Then people would have blamed Jack for selling out his brother’s legacy. Jack was left with few good options. It all came down to this: were Abe Lebewohl still alive, approaching eighty, how much longer would he have lasted in the same circumstances? Steve Cohen remarked on that fantasy, “At some point, they just carry you out the door.” Jack Lebewohl may have taken the decision to close the 2nd Ave Deli, but I would not blame him for doing so.

  “If it wasn’t for Jack,” Sharon said with deep reverence, “we would have closed in 1996.”

  Part Two

  USA: COAST TO COAST WITH LATKES TO BOAST

  According to many New Yorkers, good Jewish deli simply doesn’t exist outside New York City. Whenever they take a trip elsewhere, they inevitably whine about the pastrami and kvetch about the knishes. They’ll harp away for hours about supposed violations of the sacred rules of New York deli—how the egg creams aren’t made the same way or how the mustard is yellow, and not the proper spicy brown. And they will inevitably unleash pseudo-scientific tirades about the water—oh the precious water—without which no one can supposedly pickle a cucumber, let alone a corned beef.

  When you encounter one of these grouchy New Yorkers, do as I do and act like they are bears. Nod politely and smile. Let them stomp and growl. Back away, keeping your hands visible at all times. Whatever you do, don’t believe a word of it. Because while New York is the undisputed spiritual and historic center of the delicatessen world, only a fool believes that great Jewish deli is limited to its five boroughs.

  Whenever Jewish communities have emerged in America, the Jewish delicatessen followed closely behind. And though the number of Jewish delis has diminished greatly around the country (as in New York), delis can still be found from the shores of the Pacific to the harbors of the Atlantic, just south of the Canadian border, north of the Rio Grande, and even in Hawaii. Without experiencing these far-flung delicatessens, the story of the Jewish deli’s evolution in America would be grossly incomplete. And so, upon returning to Toronto from New York at the end of 2006, I started to plan a vast road trip across America’s deli landscape.

  Leaving at the end of January, and due back on April 1 for the first night of Passover, I would have two full months to drive around America’s delicatessens, racking up an estimated ten thousand miles of highway time. I pulled out a map of the USA and started connecting the
delis, until I formed a rough triangle from Toronto to Los Angeles to Miami and back home.

  I knew it was never going to be a perfect trip. There were whole swaths of the country, like the Pacific Northwest and New England, that were too distant to explore. I wouldn’t be able to visit places like the recently opened I Love New York Deli in Seattle, Kenny & Zuke’s in Portland, and Sadie Katz in Burlington, Vermont. I really wanted to visit Shapiro’s Delicatessen in Indianapolis, Jake’s in Milwaukee, Zaftig’s in Boston, Cleveland’s Corky and Lenny’s, and dozens more, but they were all out of the way. Toward the journey’s end, as I realized I had under a week to make it from Miami to Toronto, I ended up skipping entire crucial areas of the East Coast. So my apologies go out to Attman’s and Miller’s in Baltimore, 4th Street Deli, Koch’s, and the Famous in Philadelphia, and the temple of New Jersey excess at Harold’s, home of the largest sandwiches in America.

  Even with all these omissions, I still managed to haul my ever-expanding ass across the entire continental United States, eating at up to four delicatessens every single day. At the end of it, I certainly felt that I’d gathered as complete a picture as humanly possible of the Jewish delicatessen business in America. If a solution to save the deli exists, it rests in the patchwork of states where over five million American Jews live.

  Detroit: Motown’s Deli Blues and Michigan’s Suburban Jews

  On the way to United Meat and Deli’s inner-city factory, blocks of peeling postwar duplexes announced my arrival in America’s starkest example of urban decline.

  Sy Ginsberg was waiting for me in his office, a small room packed floor to ceiling with Detroit Tigers memorabilia, and greeted me warmly with a fat handshake and a big smile from below his cropped gray mustache. Born and raised in Detroit to a deli waitress mother and a father in the scrap business, Ginsberg began working in delis at fifteen, cleaning out the pickle barrels at Lou’s, in the Highland Park neighborhood. In 1968, he and a friend bought an existing deli called Hersh’s, renaming it Mr. Deli. Up until that time there had been a dozen or so Jewish delis in Detroit proper, including Nate’s, Brother’s, Darby’s, the Avalon, the Esquire (where Ginsberg’s mother worked), and Alban’s (which had closed just weeks before I arrived).