Save the Deli

by David Sax

  “Turkey?” I guessed. The butcher shook his head.

  “Beef?” said my friend Daniel. The shakes again.

  “Pork?” Chris ventured, which brought “tsk tsk tsk” from behind the mustache.

  “Non, non, non, mes amis!” he said, shaking his bald crown disappointedly. “This one’s duck and this one goose.” Over the course of the next two hours, the butcher, Michel Kalifa, took us on an edible roller coaster of Jewish delicatessen that stretched the limits of our imaginations. We ate tiny dried nubs of veguilly salami the size of a fingertip, which burst like fat bonbons under the teeth, and thin, cigar-sized cognacs, smoky and glistening after having dry cured for three whole months. Kalifa would nod with a knowing smile and pluck more treats from the refrigerator with great ceremony, peeling off the yellow fatty casing of a salami, cleaning away the goose or duck schmaltz in which it was preserved, then running the meat under the deli slicer. Out would come the most wonderful salamis I’d ever tasted, the fat and meat coarsely ground into burgundy and white flecks. One was interlaid with fiery white peppercorns, another with whole chestnuts, while a third, which he called krakovi, was a salty and impossibly rich salami of duck fat and preserved duck meat. With each new treasure Kalifa would lecture us further on the art of kosher charcuterie. His words melded history, cuisine, religion, and philosophy, in the great tradition of Parisian intellectualism.

  “Everything we eat well in Ashkenazi cuisine is made with things that we found in the shtetl,” he pronounced. “With the same ingredient they made ten dishes. The goose and the duck, these were the meats of the shtetl . . . but what you see before you, well, these are creatures of the culinary imagination. It was a poor man’s food, made from the bits left on the carcass that Jews were allowed. Now, today, it has become a noble product.”

  Though Maison David had existed as a butcher shop since 1917 (opened by Polish immigrant David Cohen), Kalifa himself was Moroccan-born and joined the shop in 1976, after studying economics and law. He had trained as a master butcher, charcutier, and wine authority, applying gourmet techniques to elevate the simple foods of Jewish tradition. After all, he remarked, it was French Jews in Alsace who were so instrumental in bringing foie gras to France, taking the gavage force feeding they’d seen the Romans apply in Israel and using it to produce fatty goose and duck livers.

  Kalifa beamed with pride and laced his discourse with a French air of culinary superiority. When I called a slice of pickelfleish corned beef, he once again shook his head and tsk tsked. “C’estpas New York, David" he admonished me, “you have to call things by their proper name. We French, you know, are purists.” Clients, he said, could not rush their experience in Maison David. For him, they needed to pass two hours talking and tasting, to share a moment and appreciate the pleasure of his work.

  On he went, slicing a pletzl into thin pieces, and spreading generously from plastic tubs. The first was foie hache, or chopped liver. This was incredibly moist, literally glistening with schmaltz, with tiny flecks of meat, eggs, caramelized onions, and rich chunks of foie gras. There was a caviar of eggplant and other roast vegetables, and a pink spread, peppered with bright red buds. When finally prodded, Kalifa admitted that it was a pâté of salmon roe, the creamy spread kicked up by little pops of salty fish eggs.

  Kalifa led us through a wonderland of gourmet deli, a kind of Jewish Willy Wonka. After hundreds of similar deli meals in America, Canada, and England, I saw then and there in Paris that I’d been experiencing only one half of Ashkenazi food’s journey, the Anglo-Saxon half, and like a Talmudic scholar who happens upon a revelatory text, whole new worlds of possibility appeared before my eyes. This wasn’t American deli reinterpreted in France. This was a Yiddish extension of the great French gastronomic tradition.

  “It relates to the entire European concept of food and life,” Kalifa said. “I strongly believe that this type of cuisine cannot and should not be industrialized. What we French eat, we must love as well. Sure, you came here, you bought, you tasted, but,” he paused, “you didn’t suffer. You didn’t love. People today, they don’t want to learn this art. It takes time. I’m thirty-five years in the business and I am still learning. I learn every single day!” He stopped and held up his finger for pause, and when our silence was assured he posed the question, “Do you feel how light it is? It’s not how it tastes,” Kalifa went on, “or how it looks . . . it’s how you digest it. If it’s a pleasure, it must also be a pleasure in the stomach. . . . Look, there is no international body of Yiddish cuisine ensuring quality. It’s a mosaic of particularity. Each community assembles it and makes a foundation of Jewish culture in the world. This food is a history of the Diaspora in the mouth. The problem with Yiddish cuisine is that you can’t eat it now and then, you have to live it. You have to eat it at least once a month, it has to be regular, not seldom. One’s stomach cannot be Jewish during the holy days alone, it’s a year-round affair. I’m not talking about a question of kosher or religion, but of an edible culture.”

  In all my travels before and since, Kalifa was by far the most creative, passionate, and talented Deli Man I would encounter. His encyclopedic knowledge of Yiddish cuisine came in bite-sized manifestations brimming with intense, complicated flavors. One didn’t nosh in Maison David. Instead, Kalifa piloted a sensual voyage of culture. At one point, he unwrapped a small baking pan and sliced into a brown, gelatinous substance. Gently doling out domino-sized pieces, he told us to place them upon our tongues and wait. I felt the cool jelly slowly dissolve and release intense aromas of garlic, then boiled eggs, then sharp onion until it finally tasted like rich beef stock. Kalifa had given us p’tcha, a dish of jellied calves feet, which had all but disappeared in North America’s Jewish kitchens.

  Perhaps the beleaguered North American deli could use someone like Kalifa. His artisanal meats could provide the antidote for cheap corned beef in Las Vegas casinos. Deli owners in North America owed it to themselves to pay a visit to Maison David, if only to see the infinite possibilities of their creative potential . . . not by looking outward at fusion with other cultures, but by looking inward at Yiddish food. Kalifa hoped they’d come soon, because he wasn’t sure how much longer Maison David would last.

  The Jewish character of Le Marais was facing extinction, Kalifa told us in dire tones. The city had recently implemented a plan to turn the Rue des Rosiers into a pedestrian mall, closing it down to automobile traffic. Paris said the work would further preserve the look and feel of the neighborhood, while opening it up to tourists, but Kalifa and other local Jewish residents suspected differently. “This was a lovely community,” he said, indignant, “but they have ridded it of Jews. [The city] doesn’t want anything here but fashion boutiques and franchised bistros. It’s become a tourist area, a little Jewish Disneyland. A tourist, he lives in a hotel. He’s not going to buy a steak or get a haircut.”

  Rent was soaring. More than two dozen small Jewish butchers, bakeries, and shops had closed in just two years—including Jo Goldenberg’s. The street construction had disrupted business. Kalifa said his own sales had declined by 80 per cent in just two years. To fight it, Kalifa had formed a neighborhood association. It was an uphill battle.

  “It’s going to be very difficult for all of us to survive,” he said, sadly. “This is a symbol of the Jewish community in good times and bad. It’s just terrible. These were the streets where the victims of the Holocaust walked. This is where generations of French Jews have lived. But when I raise it with the city, they just laugh and say we’re being hysterical. The reality is, in 2003 there was a strong Jewish quarter that was full of life. Now, there’s hardly any Jews living here. It’s a facade . . . a false street. The real neighborhood, c’est mort.”

  Krakow: Heartburn from Poland’s Tortured Past

  My glasses fogged as I stared down at what was once the most important dish in Yiddish cooking, cholent, traditionally eaten as a Sabbath lunch. A rich stew thickened with a few bits of brisket, cubed potatoes, bur
sting red beans, and white pearls of barley, the sprinkling of chopped parsley on top did little to disguise the heft of this dish. It was said that its ingestion required an extra day of prayer for the stomach to recover. I took a bite, expecting perhaps some profound revelatory connection to this place, the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry for eight centuries. Instead I pushed the bland, sticky cholent around the plate. I’d already fought my way through the Jewish Style Carp, a firm, cold carp steak heaped with sweet, almond-flavored jelly, and my stomach was protesting audibly.

  I was eating in Klezmer Hois, a restaurant in the Kazimierz section of Krakow that featured traditional Jewish food and music from the historic region of Galicia. It was a low, dark, curtained place meant to evoke a vanquished era. A band emerged, made up of a bored bassist, a young accordion player, and a stout older woman who led the trio on violin. With all the joy of a Chinese military band, they struck up their repertoire of old klezmer numbers, Jewish wedding tunes, and other Yiddish musical standards. The rest of the diners in the room were British high school students, here on a class trip. After a song or two, a couple of the kids got up and started dancing. The stern-faced violinist stopped and refused to play, pointing at the teenagers with her bow. She said something to the teacher, who instructed his students to sit down. The band left shortly after.

  “I’m sorry,” the teacher said, approaching my table, “but I feel as if we’ve done something culturally offensive. Was it wrong to dance to that type of music?” I didn’t see why not. The music was hardly sacred. In fact, the song the children were dancing to was “If I Were a Rich Man,” from the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, about as sacred and reverent a song to Jews as the Village People’s “YMCA.” The band members, for their part, probably didn’t know what they were playing. The musicians weren’t Jewish, but they clearly felt that Jewish music should be somber. I was the only Jew in the room. In fact, at this time of the evening, I was the only Jew in the building. They were all just trying to play their roles in Krakow’s confused Jewish present, guided by the whiffs of history, but without the actual presence of living, breathing Jews.

  In Poland, the Ashkenazi Jews truly blossomed. From the eleventh century onward, Jews were encouraged to settle in Poland by royals who saw benefit in their economic activity. Still forbidden from owning land, Polish Jews formed a new merchant middle class. When the Church pushed hard for their persecution, Polish leaders such as Kazimierz iv increased protection for Polish Jews throughout greater Poland, including Lithuania and parts of the Ukraine. Kazimierz iv himself established a special town for Jewish Poles, built just outside the walls of Krakow, which still bears his name.

  Following the Spanish Inquisition, Poland became the religious, political, and financial center of Jewish Europe. By the mid-sixteenth century, some 80 per cent of the world’s Jewish population lived in Poland, a figure comparable today to the combined Jewish populations of both Israel and the United States. In Poland, the scope of Ashkenazi cooking grew and evolved, shaped by geography, history, and local flavors. Though some specialties, like the German frankfurters or salamis, or the Romanian pastrami, come from lands outside Polish territory, the bulk of what we eat today in a delicatessen has its roots in greater Poland, including the bagel, originally from Krakow.

  But a series of wars and invasions over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries left Poland to be annexed by the Russian and Austrian Empires. Those who fell under Russian rule were forced to live within the Pale of Settlement, a specific rural territory stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. It was during this period of imperial domination that shtetl life developed. Driven from cities and prohibited from joining professional associations, Jews were forced into poverty. Shtetl life turned inward, and as a consequence more religiously orthodox. By the late nineteenth century, czarist persecution and pogroms drove millions to flee to America.

  After World War I, Polish autonomy was briefly restored, and Krakow reemerged as a major center for Jewish political, religious, and intellectual life. Poland still boasted the largest Jewish population in Europe, numbering close to three and a half million. Though Krakow’s Jewish population of 68,000 was significantly less than that of Warsaw (which, at just under 400,000, made up a third of that city), it was nevertheless significant. One out of four Krakow residents was Jewish. They saw themselves as Poles in the same way that New York Jews see themselves as Americans.

  At the outbreak of the Nazi invasion in September 1939, the Polish Jewish community was the second-largest in the world, after the United States. More than 90 per cent of Poland’s Jewry died during the next six years. Tens of thousands perished fighting the Nazis and Soviet invasion. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation and disease in the ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow from 1940 onward. More than a million were gunned down by roaming Einsatzgruppen death squads in the early years of the war, while twice that number perished in the death camps later on. Jewish Poles made up half of all the Holocaust’s victims and half the Polish citizens killed during the war.

  Upon invading Krakow, the Nazis looted Jewish businesses, distributed yellow Star of David armbands, and desecrated synagogues. In 1941, the entire community was marched into Krakow’s newly formed ghetto. In 1942, the Nazis began transports to Belzec, the first death camp. Belzec was open only for eight months, but out of six hundred thousand only two individuals survived. In March 1943, Krakow’s remaining Jews were packed into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz, some fifty kilometers away.

  Just six thousand Jews from Krakow survived the Holocaust. Of these, more than a thousand were saved by the German businessman Oscar Schindler, who had set up his factory in Krakow for its Jewish slave labor, but soon spent his own money rescuing Jews. While the actions of righteous Polish gentiles saved many during the Holocaust, there were also bitter memories of collaborative anti-Semitism. After the Kielce pogrom in 1946, when thirty-six Jews returning to their hometown were lynched, most survivors realized that after eight centuries of peaceful coexistence, Poland was no longer home.

  Under communism, Polish Jews weren’t allowed to associate with Jewish organizations worldwide. Following Israel’s victory against Soviet-backed Arab forces in the Six-Day War, the Polish communist party closed down Jewish schools, youth groups, and clubs. Official government anti-Semitism forced the emigration of half the remaining Jewish community. The rest buried Jewish life underground. Today, the organized Krakow community has a mere 150 members, most of whom are elderly and alone. If you were to count unaffiliated Jews, or those with a Jewish parent or grandparent, the total Jewish population in Krakow could be as high as five hundred. After eight hundred years as the cradle of Jewish civilization in Europe, Krakow’s Jewish residents have been reduced to the lunch crowd at Katz’s.

  The story of Jewish Krakow could have ended there, until all that was left of Jewish life in Krakow were the ruins of synagogues and crumbling gravestones. But as the Soviet Union collapsed, something remarkable occurred. With the veil of oppression lifted, intellectuals and artists began organizing lectures on the “blank spots” of Polish history—subjects that were previously taboo. Central to this was the Jewish question, including the real nature of the Jewish loss in the Holocaust, as well as the Jewish contribution to Polish culture. Against the monochromatic backdrop of decades of communism, Judaism was exotic. Studying Jewish culture was a way of expressing yourself at a time when doing so was like gasping for air after drowning your whole life.

  Though the neighborhood was a crime-ridden slum during communism, Kazimierz turned out to be the best-preserved Jewish quarter in all of Eastern and Central Europe. Students played klezmer music in smoky bars, and shot slivovitz, a Passover plum brandy. In 1988, a Polish intellectual named Janusz Makuch and a friend organized a small seminar on Jewish films, which drew more than two hundred people. Today, Makuch’s Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow is an annual nine-day summer party that draws more than twenty-five thousand people, mostly non-Jews. T
here’s art, cooking, dance, and music by local klezmer groups and international musicians. With its huge outdoor concerts, it has been dubbed a “Jewish Woodstock,” and though various Jewish individuals participate, it is run entirely by Polish gentiles like Robert Gadek.

  “My parents talked about Jews in the past,” Gadek told me, as we sat in the festival’s office, drinking cherry tea to ward off the damp November cold. “They were an extinct, abstract group of people. To me, Jew was simply an empty word.” As Gadek discovered Poland’s Jewish history as a student in the 1990s, he became convinced that resurrecting it was the right thing to do. “Those from the start of the Jewish revival said, ‘Jews are no longer here, and in the absence of Jews we have to be in charge of that culture. Not necessarily to protect the Jews, but because it is our culture as well!’”

  Among those in the fold of the revival were so-called New Jews—Poles who had grown up secular or Catholic, but who later discovered Jewish ancestry. Maltgosia Ornat, the woman who founded Klezmer Hois in 1993, was one of them. Tall and blond, Ornat’s neat, dramatic eyebrows and deep blue eyes resembled those of countless Polish beauties. At eighteen, she learned that her mother had been Jewish, but had converted. “It was not a kind of shock,” Ornat told me, “more of an interesting tidbit. But it stimulated me to finding out about Jewish culture.”

  As Kazimierz grew in popularity, Jewish-themed businesses emerged. Most of these are concentrated on Szeroka Street, a square with two historic synagogues and a Jewish cemetery. The first of these businesses was a place called Ariel, a Jewish art gallery that opened in 1991 and soon turned into a restaurant. With no Jewish chefs left in Krakow, old cookbooks were unearthed and recipes were gleaned from the surviving seniors in the Jewish community. Ariel became a popular hangout during the early years of the Kazimierz revival. Someone who knew nothing about Jews could eat a Jewish meal, listen to Jewish music, and buy Jewish art. Most importantly, Ariel offered a unique culinary experience in a city that under communism hadn’t had any private restaurants.