by David Sax
Kazimierz’s big boost came in 1993, when Steven Spielberg filmed Schindler’s List there, sparking renewed interest worldwide in the Holocaust and Kazimierz. Wealthy philanthropists refurbished synagogues, built museums, and opened up cultural centers. Tourism blossomed. More Jewish-themed restaurants opened up in Szeroka Street, while the old ones expanded into 200-seat dining halls with adjoining hotels. Jewish bookshops appeared. You can even buy the 2nd Ave Deli Cookbook near the very land where Abe Lebewohl (a Galician Jew) was born.
My first Jewish restaurant in Kazimierz was Ariel, the pioneer of Krakow’s Jewish food revival, and the one that advertises itself most blatantly as Jewish (though its owners are not). Above the gate to the courtyard patio was a giant wrought iron candelabra, below which the restaurant’s name was welded in Hebraic-style lettering. On either side of this elaborate signage were two stately stone lions, presumably Lions of Judah. Short of a neon Star of David, it practically screamed J-E-W.
The restaurant was split into two rooms, each with low ceilings and dark wooden beams. The walls were covered with paintings of Jewish life, though exclusively of Hasidic scenes: men in dark suits praying or deep in contemplative study. Among the dishes on offer were matzo ball soup, gefilte fish, chopped herring, fried kreplach, borscht, kasha, cabbage rolls, and blintzes. I was more interested in trying the dishes that were once common in Poland, but couldn’t be found in North American delis.
I started with the waiter’s recommendation of Berdytchov soup, a dish that was supposedly typical of the town Berditchev, currently in Northern Ukraine. Though the broth was laced mostly with cabbage, cubed potatoes, carrots, and microscopic pieces of beef, it was the overwhelming sweetness added by honey, cloves, and cinnamon that gave the soup its characteristic flavor—like dumping spiced cider into canned vegetable soup.
I ventured on to the menu’s most traditional shtetl dish: stuffed goose necks. Though goose was to Yiddish cuisine what beef is to the New York deli, in North America only Montreal’s Schwartz’s serves goose anymore. Ariel’s version stuffed the skin of a goose neck with chopped chicken liver and rice-sized dough dumplings. The stuffed neck was fried until it resembled a stubby crackling sausage. They weren’t the most appetizing sight, but the prospect of fatty liver, wrapped in fatty skin, and then deep-fried (in fat!), was tempting. Of the two necks, one was overdone, with tough, chewy skin and gamey, bitter liver. But the other was an artery-slaying taste sensation. The outer layer of crisp, oily skin gave way to a creamy membrane of sweet fat, which bathed the smooth, earthy liver in an undercurrent of richness that was almost unfathomable.
My head swimming with goose schmaltz, I headed out, pausing for a few moments in Ariel’s gift shop. It featured some CDs of klezmer bands, a few books, and Hasidic figurines in glass cases. These, I would soon discover, are common all over Poland, sold to tourists and locals alike. Most are wooden carvings of Hasidic men playing instruments. One of these caught my eye. His skin was pale and ghostly. His eyes were black, with dark, heavy bags underneath. His nose was huge and bent in the most perverse way. He held a tightly clutched bag of money and a large gold coin. I was staring at a classic anti-Semitic portrayal of a penny-pinching Jew, for sale to tourists in a Jewish restaurant owned by Polish gentiles, a mere hour from the ovens of Auschwitz. Not the thing you want to see when you’re trying to hold down greasy fried goose necks.
Kazimierz inevitably provokes strong feelings from anyone who visits it, especially if they are Jewish. On the one hand, you have the sincere rehabilitation of a lost Jewish culture that’s driven, financed, and run by Polish gentiles. Theirs is a heartfelt attempt at reconciling the troubled events that occurred on Polish soil. To see these people enthusiastically nourishing Jewish culture is touching. Their work has helped eradicate negative stereotypes, both of Jews in Polish eyes, and also of Poland in the eyes of Jews. Many Holocaust survivors have returned to visit Poland for the first time because of the work that people like Robert Gadek have done.
Yet the same emotions that make the Kazimierz revival so powerful also render it extremely volatile. While elements of it are touching and genuine, there is a certain streak of opportunism and exploitation. Kazimierz is first and foremost a tourist destination, and the business of tourism, whether a Times Square delicatessen or a restored Jewish quarter, will always sacrifice altruism in the name of profit. Sometimes it takes on the feeling of kitsch, such as the Fiddler on the Roof songs played at Klezmer Hois, while at other times it seems like something out of the world of Borat.
In Kazimierz, I found poor taste present, though not prevalent. Some Jewish restaurants advertised traditional “Jewish” dishes on their menus like pork loin and other blatantly treyf foods. Some restaurants have dressed their waiters and musicians in “Jewish” costumes, including fake beards and skullcaps. When Jews abroad hear about Kazimierz, many express outright disgust. Poland to them is the world’s largest Jewish cemetery, and the idea that people are profiting from Jewish memory is blasphemy. Staring at that little Jew figurine, I imagined what Native Americans must feel when they stumble into a souvenir shop in Wyoming and see the pow-wow dolls for sale.
The common criticism leveled at the Jewish revival in Krakow is that it is not Jewish-led. When I asked Robert Gadek about this, he gave an exasperated sigh. “We need to ask: ‘Who shall organize Jewish culture in Poland so that it’s sufficiently Jewish? Does the office staff have to be Jewish? Does the audience have to be Jewish? Do all the foods have to be kosher?’ Maybe. It can be done. But for what? Because I’ll tell you, if it is only for Jews, by Jews, we’ll have fifty people out there, instead of twenty-five thousand. Poland is the perfect place for this, because of its Jewish history, and yes, because of the Holocaust. . . . It belongs here to show these people what they lost. If you don’t know what was lost, and what this culture could have been, you don’t understand what the Holocaust was. You only get numbers.”
On my second day in Kazimierz, I finally met Jews. The city’s small Jewish community center is found just outside Kazimierz, where twenty or so elderly Jews come to eat kosher meals that are cooked daily. On Monday nights the cook even makes “pickle meat,” essentially corned beef. She told me that it was cured there over several days, then boiled, and served with potatoes and a sauce made from horseradish. When I asked her if it was ever served as a sandwich she burst into laughter. Apparently the very concept of a corned beef sandwich was simply ridiculous.
In fact, the Polish Jews I met found the whole idea of North American delicatessen strange. While in the Senior’s Club, a social spot where the older members of the community met daily for coffee and Hebrew lessons, I looked through a translated Jewish cookbook. The woman whom I sat with remembered foods such as pickled beef (which she’d boiled with wine and pepper) and matzo brie. But when we came to the page that had a Reuben sandwich on it, she tried to explain that it was named so because it was Reubenesque, after the painter who did colorful portraits of plump women. She even did a little outline of a curvaceous figure with her hands.
Krakow’s remaining Jews dined at the Jewish-themed restaurants only on special occasions. What really mattered to them was the creation of a group called Czulent (the Polish spelling of cholent). Czulent is a youth group formed in 2004 by students who had discovered some Jewish heritage in their families. Because the orthodox rabbis wouldn’t accept these New Jews as so-called kosher Jews (without documentation, they need to undergo conversion), they banded together, discovering their identities in their own way, especially through cooking. Gathering Jewish recipes from seniors or the Internet, they cooked dinner for the community in the synagogue each Friday night. Dr. Zosea Radzikowska, an elderly and vocal lawyer, called Czulent “our hope for the future.”
One of the principal members of Czulent was a young woman named Ishabel Szatrawska. Food, she told me, remains part of the Jewish identity, even if the formal association with Judaism has been severed for several generations. This was her experience.
Her family was the only one she knew of that made chopped liver. Even though they ate pork, her grandfather could not bring himself to eat a sandwich with butter on it. Though Ishabel didn’t know why, as a kid she was never allowed to eat at anyone else’s house. Only later did she realize that it was because they were Jewish.
And though my Ariel experience left a bitter aftertaste, this wasn’t the case with Alef. Owned by Janusz Benigier, another New Jew, the restaurant had recently moved out of Szeroka Street, into a newer hotel. Instead of the dark, somber spaces that the other Jewish restaurants occupied, the dining room at Alef was flooded with natural light. Two large murals depicted historic Kazimierz and historic Jerusalem, and the walls were jammed with old portraits, some of Jewish figures and rabbis, another of Mozart and famous Polish poets. There were no display cases filled with scary figurines.
The menu at Alef looked basically the same as the other restaurants, but I was intrigued by an appetizer called Goose Liver Soufflé. The soufflé was basically a terrine of cooked goose liver, mixed with matzo meal and some other ingredients, resembling a slice of meatloaf. Its texture was surprisingly light and soft, with a subtle touch of gamey flavor that was enhanced greatly by a bright red sauce, the most amazing beet-sweetened horseradish that was creamy, sugary, and fiery (in that succession). It was easily the best dish I ate in Poland and remains a Jewish food I’ve yet to find elsewhere.
To cap off my lunch I ordered the kreplach in broth. During the preceding year I’d eaten dozens of kreplach in soups from Los Angeles to London, so my expectations weren’t too high. Out came a bowl of consommé the color of bourbon, darker than most chicken soups, with the flavor of onion and some beef marrow. Every other kreplach I’d come across had been some variation of shapeless blob. But these were neat little empanadas of thin dough, crimped artfully around the edges as though Alef’s chef had spent his formative years making dim sum in a Hong Kong hotel. Inside I found minced brisket with strong overtones of peppercorns and freshly chopped garlic.
On my last night in town, fighting my cholent and watching the solemn band at Klezmer Hois, the sad truth about Krakow’s revival appeared a bit clearer. Here I was, supposedly eating authentically Jewish food, surrounded by Jewish art and artifacts, listening to traditional Jewish music, in a building that had been a part of Europe’s Jewish legacy centuries before any delis came to New York. But no matter how faithful Klezmer Hois, Alef, or Ariel were, they lacked a Jewish soul. There was no tam. I felt at home at most North American delis, or even the British, French, and Belgian delis from the moment I walked in, but I never felt that in Krakow’s Jewish restaurants. When the violinist upbraided the students for dancing to a Broadway show tune, I realized that no matter how carefully the Poles recreated this world, it would never be sufficiently Jewish.
“It’s not real because there are no Jews,” Klezmer Hois’ owner, Maltgosia Ornat, told me. “This place is a monument because it is not authentic. Different activities happen, but it’s not real. There’s no continuation of Jewish life.”
On my last afternoon in Poland I stood in the driving rain of Birkenau, the Nazi’s largest death camp. As far as the eye could see, long wooden barracks stretched to the horizon. Two hours earlier I had been a few miles away, in Auschwitz, the Polish army base used by the Nazis as a political prison and eventually a death camp for Poles, Gypsies, Soviet pows, and Jews. Despite the electrified barbed wire, the wrought iron Arbeit Macht Frei, and the small gas chamber and crematorium, Auschwitz felt like a museum. Inside each of the buildings were exhibits depicting the atrocities committed on these grounds. Though barbaric, I felt a certain sense of detachment. I’d seen these same images, films, and artifacts dozens of times before, and I felt like I could have been at any one of the Holocaust memorials I’d visited in my life.
But Birkenau was different. It was the physical manifestation of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” specifically built as a factory of death. Its gas chambers dispatched twenty thousand lives each day, and its scale was simply staggering. I stepped into one of the dark barracks, alone. I inhaled the worn cedar of the bare bunks. There was no smell of humanity, no trace of the four hundred souls who had once awaited death here. I closed my eyes and thought back to one of the exhibits in the Auschwitz museum: a vast pit behind glass where thousands of cooking pots and pans were heaped into a pile. You had to remind yourself that every item represented a Jewish family. Each pot once simmered on a stovetop in Krakow, Odessa, or Amsterdam, filled with chicken, onions, garlic, dill, and perhaps a marrowbone for extra flavor. Each pot had belonged to a mother, who cooked for her family and friends and community. Some had been cholent pots, which had stewed in shtetls that were now empty fields. Others were used to pickle briskets in Paris, make fricassee in Bucharest, or cabbage rolls in Hamburg.
Six million lives.
Each family with a pot.
What had been lost?
How many recipes were gone forever?
In that moment, sheltered from the driving rain in that quiet barrack, amid a field of death scattered with the incinerated remains of three generations of European Jewry, I thought back to the journeys I had taken that year: to New York, across North America, to Europe. Each deli began with one member of one family who had left Poland or Russia and settled in America, Canada, England, or France. The Jewish delicatessen as we know it may have manifested itself in lower Manhattan, but the Ashkenazi heartland of Eastern Europe was always its source. It was the well from which deli drew its Yiddish flavor, and I was standing where that well had been drained.
Out of the six million dead, how many potential Deli Men went into those ovens?
Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
How many Jewish delicatessens had been smashed and burned across Europe?
Hundreds? Thousands?
How many Yiddish cooks had perished feet from where I stood?
One million? More?
I remembered the golden corned beef knish prepared by Rose Guttman outside Detroit, and the bubbling blueberry blintz that I’d eaten with David Apfelbaum in San Francisco. Both Rose and David had been in this place. They’d lost their families here, but had miraculously survived, going on to own dozens of successful Jewish delis. They were just two individuals spared by fate, and they had fed deli to millions in the decades since. Had this place never existed, how many more Jewish delicatessens would the world have known? Would I still be on this mission to save the deli?
In the flames of the Holocaust, the Jewish world lost more than lives. It lost an entire culture, which survives now only in fragments. In America, every other immigrant group will always have a source for their authentic flavors. So long as a billion and a half Chinese live in China, there will always be a family in Fujian willing to move to America and open another Chinese restaurant. Jewish delicatessens don’t have that option. Theirs is the food of a partially destroyed people, three generations or more removed from its source. Delis are cooking from the fading memories of a time and place that no longer exist. No more Jews from Poland are coming to New York to open up a delicatessen.
For all the reasons that the delicatessen was endangered and in need of saving—economics, demographics, assimilation—all of them were presaged by the Nazi destruction of the Yiddish world. The source of all Jewish delicatessen had been systematically extinguished, wiped off the face of the earth forever. This, above all else, was the reason that the deli was dying.
Epilogue
Deli’s 2nd Coming (Just off 3rd Ave)
Though the windows were papered over and the sign covered, the door was unlocked. Inside the bright new delicatessen on this mid-December night, contractors scurried around making last-minute adjustments. The slicing machines were still wrapped in plastic, and many of the refrigerated cases sat empty, though behind sections of the glass I spotted trays of chopped liver, coleslaw, and pickles. Packages of unopened kosher hot dogs were ready to sizzle on a grill that wasn’t yet hooked up to the gas li
ne.
“David Sax!” It was Steve Cohen, the former manager of the 2nd Ave Deli, a huge smile across his face. “Welcome,” he said, “welcome to the 2nd Ave Deli.”
Out from the back of the deli, where sixty brand-new seats were filled with friends and family on this Friday night, barreled Jack Lebewohl. A huge goofy grin was splashed across his face as he snared me in a big embrace. “I gotta tell you something, David,” he said, holding my arm. “It’s great to see you here.” From behind Jack appeared Jeremy, his youngest son, who would reopen the 2nd Ave Deli in just over forty-eight hours.
I was standing in a narrow restaurant on 33rd Street, just west of Third Avenue, ready to experience the rebirth of one of New York City’s most famous Jewish delicatessens. Everything I had been working on for the previous year and a half seemed to come alive in that very moment. Part of me simply expected to wake up, as if it were all a glorious, impossible dream. It wasn’t. “Come,” Jeremy said to me, “let me show you my deli.”
The new 2nd Ave Deli occupied a small footprint in the neighborhood of Murray Hill, twenty-three blocks uptown from its original East Village location. It was not in a particularly Jewish area of Manhattan, nor was it in a tourist area, though it was close to the long-standing Sarge’s Deli and a Yeshiva University’s city campus. You entered into a small vestibule, where a painting of the vibrant street scene that was in the original 2nd Ave Deli hung behind glass. Once inside, there was little space between the wall and a tall, long display case packed with food. Beyond the deli counter, across from the cash, was a small bar with four seats. A narrow passage led back to the dining area, which was split into two sections by dark mahogany dividers topped in glass etched with the deli’s logo. Removed from the street and the hubbub of the takeout counter, the dining room already felt warm, intimate, and inviting. This was a space tailor made for fressing.