Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (19 page)

By creating Jewish parodies of popular songs, Jews fantasized that the whole world had become Jewish. The masters of this form of comedy, both of whom referred almost obsessively to deli food in their work, were Mickey Katz and Allan Sherman.

Katz began his career as a clarinetist in Cleveland but soon found work with the Spike Jones orchestra, which was known for its send-ups of popular songs. Katz first invented a klezmer-inspired, Yiddish version of “Home on the Range,” which he followed with “The Yiddish Mule Train,” “Kiss of Meyer,” and “Duvid Crocket,” all of which sold tens of thousands of copies.
Much of his success came from the quality of his orchestra, which included Mannie Klein (later replaced by Ziggy Elman) on trumpet, Si Zentner on trombone, and Sam Weiss on the drums.

Jewish food was a constant theme of Katz’s Rabelaisian humor. Josh Kun has noted that Katz’s parodies are invariably based on the “‘substratum laughter’ produced by food—
gribbenes
, matzoh, schmaltz, pickles, kishka, bagels, latkes—and its digestive impact on those who consume it.”
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What could Jewish humor be based on, at a time when many Jews were not well versed in their own tradition? Even if they no longer spoke Yiddish and had never learned much Hebrew, they could speak deli—the universal language of American Jewishness. Kun views Katz as resisting Jewish assimilation by insisting on the Jew as outsider, as on the cover of one of his albums,
Borscht Jester
, in which the musician is shown in cap and bells, holding a salami.

Katz seemed unable to resist incorporating references to Jewish food in almost every song, no matter how incongruous the reference. In his recordings and performances, including a short-lived 1951 Broadway show called
Borscht Capades
, Katz performed songs such as “Halvah Hilarities,” “Matzoh Ball Jamboree,” “Farfel Follies,” and “Chopped Liver” (based on “Moon River”). In his version of the end of Al Jolson’s “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” he substituted “I’ll send you some pickles and rye” for Jolson’s famous extended warble “Goodby-y-ye.” Katz combined klezmer with swing, calypso, polka, mambo, opera, and rock music. Katz’s music provided what must have felt like an easy fix, a quick detour into memory lane before getting back on the road to success in American society.

Katz’s successor in the business of Jewish song parodies, the aforementioned Allan Sherman, was born Allan Copelon in Chicago in 1924, the son of the racing-car driver and automobile-garage owner Percy Copelon and his wife, a flapper named Rose Sherman. Sherman’s parents divorced when he was six years old; he lived with his mother and eventually adopted
her maiden name. Expelled from the University of Illinois for breaking into a sorority (for the purpose, he said, of using the phonograph player), Sherman ended up performing song parodies at a bar in Chicago, before finding work in New York writing jokes for various radio and stage comedians, including Jackie Gleason and Jack E. Leonard. In the early days of television, he was also a writer for variety shows such as
Cavalcade of Stars
and
Broadway Open House
.

Sherman’s first album,
My Son, the Folksinger
, took the nation by storm; it became the fastest-selling album in recording history, eventually selling more than a million copies. When this short, obese man with heavy glasses with a raspy voice took American folk or Broadway songs and set them to lyrics about deli food, he showed that Jews still maintained an ethnic consciousness even while Jewish culture appeared to be increasingly subsumed under the overarching Judeo-Christian ethos. In his song “Shticks of One Kind and Half a Dozen of the Other,” on his 1962 album
My Son, the Celebrity
, he sang, “Do not make a stingy sandwich / Pile the cold cuts high / Customers should see salami / Coming through the rye.” The salami (read: Jewishness) erupted through the rye (read: American society), bringing Jewish culture to the fore.

By changing “Moon River” (from the film
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
) to “Chopped Liver,” “With a Little Bit of Luck” (from the Broadway musical
My Fair Lady
) to “With a Little Bit of Lox,” and “Water Boy” (a southern African American song) to “Seltzer Boy,” Sherman exploited not just the humorous associations of delicatessen foods but the sense that Jews were transforming American culture in their own image. According to Sherman’s biographer, Mark Cohen, while Sherman’s delicatessen-themed musical
The Golden Touch
never made it to Broadway, its “suspicion of success, encouragement to remain true to oneself, and proud assurance that chopped liver and other homely hallmarks of Jewish life were worth keeping . . . remained the themes of Sherman’s life.”
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While the author Ken Kalfus has suggested that Sherman made Jewish humor “mainstream,” he also notes that Sherman emphasized Jewish particularity. In Kalfus’s words, it “expressed Jews’ apartness from American culture, at a time when the culture itself was about to go counter.” Kalfus writes perceptively about the emphasis placed at the time on the “lovability of the loser,” cataloguing such bumblers and bunglers—both real and fictional—as the 1962 Mets (40 wins, 120 losses), Alfred E. Neuman, Charlie Brown, and Jerry Lewis.
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In any event, Sherman turned Jewish food into comic gold in a way that transcended its Yiddish origins and made it accessible and humorous to both Jewish and non-Jewish Americans. As the critic Gerald Nachman has pointed out, Sherman “resisted being branded a ‘Jewish’ performer, as his repertoire played to everyone. . . . His lyrics spread a generous helping of chopped liver over a slice of American cheese. The playful lyrics were a kick, but they also made fun of Jewish (and, by extension, all) middle-class American life in the early 1960s.”
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Another “danger,” that of intermarriage with non-Jews, loomed ominously over the delicatessen. Eating nonkosher delicatessen food had long symbolized having the “forbidden pleasure” of sexual relations with non-Jewish partners. In the 1940s, the novelist Isaac Rosenfeld had famously observed the riveted passersby who watched beef fry (a kosher imitation of bacon) falling off the slicing machine of a window of a Lower East Side delicatessen. Rosenfeld wrote that a crowd, “several rows deep,” constantly gathered to watch this spectacle—“oblivious of the burden of parcels, of errands and of business; no comments are made, they stand in silence, not to interfere with another’s contemplation, as they follow the course of the slices, from the blade to the box.”
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Rosenfeld viewed the trance that the people fell into not in religious terms but in sexual ones; he suggested that the beef
fry is an “optical pun” on the concept of
treyf
and that Jews unconsciously associated eating
treyf
with sex with non-Jews—unlawful carnal knowledge, indeed! Rosenfeld insisted that anti-Semitism sprang from a misconception among non-Jews that Jews were “lecherous” and enjoyed “greater freedom from restraint.” As Eve Jochnowitz interprets him, Rosenfeld “traces all of sexual pathology to the laws of kashrut,” suggesting that “all anti-Semitism is rooted in gentile myths, all provoked by Jewish food, about Jewish superior sexuality.”
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By the late 1980s, the Jewish-Christian intermarriage rate had skyrocketed from almost nothing at the beginning of the century to about 50 percent, as Jews increasingly sought non-Jewish partners and non-Jews felt more comfortable marrying Jews.
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The trope of the Jewish man and the
shiksa
(a derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman) had become especially familiar in popular culture, especially in the films of Woody Allen. Jewish delis often served as backdrops for relations between Jewish men and their non-Jewish girlfriends, as in
Annie Hall
, when the main character, Alvy Singer, takes his tall, midwestern girlfriend to the Carnegie Deli as a prelude to their having sex for the first time; she mistakenly orders a pastrami sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise (echoing a scene in the Broadway musical
Skyscraper
in which Julie Harris commits a similar faux pas in the Gaiety Delicatessen),
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and he grimaces, as if remembering Milton Berle’s classic joke that “every time someone goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread with mayo, somewhere a Jew dies.”

Food and sex are frequently linked in Allen’s films; as Allen’s character in
Love and Death
quips when his lover invites him to her bedroom, “I’ll bring the sauce.” Or as Allen noted in a parodic
New Yorker
essay, on food in the world of philosophy, “As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness; many sandwiches were forced to stay closed and only opened after the Reformation.” (Indeed, the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza “dined sparingly because he believed that God
existed in everything and it’s intimidating to wolf down a knish if you think you’re ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.”)
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But why has Alvy taken Annie to a deli in the first place, if not to shore up his own vulnerable ego? The delicatessen is the one place that is comfortable and familiar for the demasculinized Jewish man and where he can thus feel superior to her and her anti-Semitic family. His refraining from coaching her on what to order, and his thus allowing her to make a fool of herself in front of him, elevates him in his own eyes. It allows him to make love to her from a position of strength rather than of weakness and inferiority.
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The historian Henry Bial views this scene from the dual perspectives of the Jews and non-Jews in the film audience, noting that the non-Jews “learn what it means to act Jewish as the film progresses. . . . Alvy’s rolling eyes and horrified expression are an in-joke to some of his viewers and a ‘teachable moment’ to the rest.”
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This dynamic is neatly reversed in the Katz’s Deli scene in Rob Reiner’s 1989 film
When Harry Met Sally
—a takeoff of the Woody Allen genre and of
Annie Hall
in particular—in which the non-Jewish woman, Sally, played by Meg Ryan, shows the egotistical Jewish man, Harry, played by Billy Crystal, that he is less masculine than he thinks he is because he cannot tell whether she is having an orgasm (and, in a sense, that she doesn’t need him at all in order to have it). While the fake orgasm is not related specifically to the food that she is eating (she is eating a turkey sandwich, from which she carefully removes one slice of meat after another before consuming it), it is uniquely appropriate in the deli context—one has the sense that the humor would evaporate if it were shot in a Chinese restaurant with tinkling music in the background. The scene makes hay from the associations that Jewish food has with sex, with vulgarity, with unbridled bodily urges, with the lack of civility and restraint.

After all, the deli—with its casual vibe, lack of tablecloths, and raucous atmosphere—was a place where Jews had celebrated
freedom from table manners, from the need to speak softly, and from the oppressive kinds of control over their own physical bodies that they needed to assert in the wider society in order to prevent being viewed as vulgar, uncivilized, and uncouth.
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In the context of the Lower East Side, where Jews had historically lived in overcrowded tenements that afforded little privacy, “private” sexual behavior was often much more “public” than most would have preferred, and the deli was an extension of this private space into the public realm.

Yet, despite Sally’s explosive, seemingly definitive usurpation of the space, a Jewish woman defiantly has the last word: the well-dressed, elderly customer at the next table (played by the director’s mother, Estelle Reiner) declares in a perfect deadpan, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
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And Jewish women do indeed reclaim the space in the 2007 documentary
Making Trouble
, in which four female stand-up comics—Judy Gold, Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney, and Jessica Kirson—eat lunch at Katz’s while paying tribute to three generations of female
Jewish entertainers in American history, such as Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, and Gilda Radner.
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But non-Jewish women again take center stage in a flash-mob video from November 2013, in which twenty female customers at Katz’s simultaneously reenact the scene from the Reiner film.
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Broadway Danny Rose
, Allen’s black-and-white 1984 film about a hard-luck theatrical agent, opens with a scene of a group of aging Jewish comics—Corbett Monica, Sandy Baron, Jackie Gayle, and Will Jordan—sitting at a table in the Carnegie Deli, swapping anecdotes about their life on the road. They then reminisce about Danny Rose, the agent, played by Allen. Rose has been reduced to representing such clients as a blind xylophone player, a one-armed juggler, a couple who “fold” balloon animals, and a skating penguin dressed as a rabbi.
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The film highlights the waning of secular Jewish culture, using the deli as a symbol of that decline. According to the film scholar Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, “what Allen locates in the Jewish world of the Catskills” and, by extension, the Carnegie Deli, “and what Danny Rose recreates with his ragtag band of odd ‘acts,’ is the sense of unforced community that existed among a people gathered together to share a culture that would inevitably disappear in the process of Americanization.” Rubin-Dorsky is struck by Allen’s finding a “nurturing spiritual connection to the Jewish past” through the reiteration of the link between Jewish comedy and Jewish food.
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Jewish masculinity is even more explicitly connected to deli sandwiches in “The Larry David Sandwich,” an episode of
Curb Your Enthusiasm
in which the main character, Larry David, who grew up in Brooklyn but now lives in Hollywood, decides for once to pray at a synagogue for Rosh Hashanah but finds out that the tickets are sold out and that he will have pay a scalper to gain admittance. His attendance at the service proves to be disastrous and results in his being ejected, along with his non-Jewish wife, Cheryl. Larry seems not to care; he realizes that he prefers to spend his time at his favorite Jewish deli, Leo’s, where
he has finally achieved the signal honor of having a sandwich named after him.

The problem for Larry is that “his” special sandwich is not a traditional meat sandwich but one of sable and whitefish. In being a kind of inauthentic deli sandwich, it thus subtly undermines Larry’s claim to true celebrity, as well as his masculinity, as symbolized by the lack of red meat in his sandwich. The latter point is underlined by the fact that Larry is also afraid to shake hands with the deli owner, Leo, because Leo’s handshake is crushing.

Larry’s attempts to trade sandwiches with Ted Danson, whose namesake is a roast beef, coleslaw, and Russian dressing combo, are fruitless. Larry argues, naively, that Danson should not care what the ingredients of his own sandwich are since Danson doesn’t frequent the deli as much as Larry does or
bring his father to eat there; Danson, after all, is not Jewish. But Danson refuses the trade—the fish sandwich sounds terrible and is much too ethnically Jewish, and, in any case, Danson knows a good deli sandwich as well as Larry does. Nevertheless, even as deli food became more mainstream, as
Curb
showed, it also maintained a strong connection to secular Jewish identity, as one of the few remaining links that Jews like Larry had to their Jewish heritage.
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The episode presents the deli as a more viable Jewish space than the synagogue, where the worshipers are shown as bored and impatient. By contrast, the deli is a shown as a place of fun, fellowship, and humor where commercialism can be openly celebrated in its connection to popular culture. While the same characters, including the deli owner, are also shown at the synagogue, the conversations among them revolve around the deli sandwiches, not the lofty spiritual matters that one might expect them to be discussing on the Jewish New Year.

For these characters to have sandwiches named after them makes them feel that they have achieved true recognition; having other people eating “their” sandwich causes tremendous pride and pleasure. To get “up on the board” in a synagogue might mean having your name on a plaque on the wall; this honor is acquired simply by giving money. But to be “up on the board” at the deli is a sign of real fame.