Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (26 page)

68
. Samuel Popkin, “The Delicatessen Industry,”
Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine
(5/1932), 12–13, Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library.

69
. Popkin, “The Delicatessen Industry,” 13.

70
. David Ward and Oliver Zunz,
The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900–1940
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 266.

71
. See A. H. Raskin’s review of Max Danish’s
The World of David Dubinsky
, in which Raskin criticizes the book for failing to provide “an adequate sense of personal piquancy of a union leader as full of spice as the pastrami and pickled tomatoes he loves to munch at Lindy’s or the Stage Delicatessen.” A. H. Raskin, “The Man behind the Union,”
New York Times
(11/10/1957), 306.

72
. Daniel Rogov, “You Expected Maybe Pâté de Foie Gras?,” in Daniel Rogov, David Gershon, and David Louison,
The Rogue’s Guide to the Jewish Kitchen
(Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post Press, 1984), 23.

73
. Laurie Ochoa, “Just What Is a Delicatessen Supposed to Look Like, Anyway?,”
Los Angeles Times
(3/11/1990), 99.

74
. Ruth Glazer, “West Bronx: Food, Shelter, Clothing,”
Commentary
(6/1949), 582.

75
. According to the report, 98 percent of cattle and also 98 percent of calves that were slaughtered in New York were killed according to the kosher laws; however, only about half of the meat consumed by the city’s inhabitants was slaughtered locally. “Half of All Meat Used in New York Is Kosher,”
Jewish Daily News
(5/29/1921), 16.

76
. Jacob Cohn,
The Royal Table: An Outline of the Dietary Laws of Israel
(New York: Bloch, 1936).

77
. “Dietary Laws of ‘The Royal Table,’”
Literary Digest
123 (1/2/1937), 28.

78
. “Feeding the City,” Works Progress Administration Study (8/15/1940), New York City Municipal Archives.

79
. Interview with the author, 6/9/2005.

80
. Jenna Weissman Joselit,
The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950
(New York: Picador, 2002), 177.

81
. See Mordechai Kaplan,
Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life
(New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994). Rabbi Ezra Finkelstein, son of Louis Finkelstein, one of the most prominent rabbis of his day, recalls his father lunching during the mid-1920s at a kosher delicatessen with Cyrus Adler, then president of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Adler ordered a sandwich, while Finkelstein requested a cup of tea. An Orthodox Jewish passerby wearing a black hat and a long beard came into the restaurant and asked them, in Yiddish, if the restaurant hewed to strict standards of kashrut. Finkelstein, not wanting to get into a discussion of why he was having only a cup of tea (which could indeed indicate a lack of trust in the restaurant’s standards with regard to food), shrugged his shoulders. The man took a look at Adler, who was clean shaven, and said to Finkelstein, in Yiddish, “So this other fellow is a non-Jew?” Ezra Finkelstein, e-mail to the author, 11/3/2010.

82
. Moore,
At Home in America
, 75.

83
. Moore,
At Home in America
, 76.

84
. Willensky,
When Brooklyn Was the World
, 190.

85
. Isidore P. Salupsky, “An Open Letter to the Storekeepers,”
Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine
(1/1932), 11.

86
. Isidore P. Salupsky, “What a Delicatessen Man Should Remember,”
Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine
(6/1932), 11.

87
. “Delicatessen—A Necessary Luxury,”
Voice of the Delicatessen Industry
(1940), Center for Jewish History, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

88
. Interview with the author, 1/7/2002.

89
. Ruth Glazer, “From the American Scene: One Touch of Delicatessen,”
Commentary
(3/1946), 62.

90
. Interview with the author, 9/4/2007.

91
. Interview with the author, 8/13/2003

92
. Interview with the author, 2/12/2005.

93
. Interview with the author, 2/10/2005.

94
. Kazin,
Walker in the City
, 34.

95
. Midrash Tanhuma, Genesis 1. The Torah refers to itself as
eish da’at
, “fiery law.” Deuteronomy 33:2.

96
. Naomi Seidman, “Alfred Kazin and the Great
Beyond
,” JBooks.com, n.d., http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Seidman_Kazin.htm.

97
. Kazin,
Walker in the City
, 40.

98
. The irony of children watching shoot-’em-up films at the local movie theater was not lost on Goldfried, who knew that the headquarters of Murder Inc., the Italian-Jewish organized crime syndicate, was located in a nearby candy store called Midnight Rose’s. But Goldfried was fearless. When Louis Capone
(whom many mistakenly assumed to be related to Al Capone) and a group of his associates came in after Prohibition to persuade the deli owner to buy King’s Beer, a brand that they controlled, he bravely told them to get lost.

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.

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
beef
ILTON
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).