Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (8 page)
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Authors: Ted Merwin
Tags: #REL040030 Religion / Judaism / History
Beyond the kosher delicatessen industry’s doubtful reputation for the healthfulness and purity of its products, it was also tainted by large-scale scandals that erupted around the selling of nonkosher meat as kosher. Since kosher meat was more difficult to obtain and always commanded a higher price than nonkosher (
treyf
, in Yiddish) meat, meat companies and delis often misled their customers by switching the two. At a time when kosher meat was in tremendous demand—in 1917, the national consumption of kosher meat reached 156 million pounds—there was big money in this kind of scam. Individual rabbis gave their
hecksher
or stamp of approval to the process under their supervision. Yet in 1925, a study by the state found that fully 40 percent of meat sold as kosher in New York City was actually
treyf
.
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It is little wonder, though, because until 1916, when the Union of Orthodox Rabbis forbade the practice, it was not uncommon for both kosher and nonkosher meat to be manufactured in different parts of the same factory. But when companies decided to produce only kosher meat, they often cut corners regarding the supervision of the process. Such was the case with Sunshine Provision Company, which switched in 1922 from the production of nonkosher meat to kosher meat but was found using hog casings for its “kosher” sausages; fully 95 percent of the meat that the company was selling as kosher was actually
treyf
.
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The most egregious case of fraud occurred in 1933, when the owners of one of the most prominent kosher meat companies, Jacob Branfman and Son, were indicted for selling nonkosher meat, which was delivered to the factory late at night, after the kosher supervisor (the
mashgiach
) had gone home. An undercover investigator testified that he had observed through binoculars as a worker draped oilcloth over the Branfman name on
one of the company’s trucks while barrels of nonkosher brisket were being loaded into it. A police raid found two and a half tons of nonkosher meat sitting in the factory.
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When the case came to court, the judge ruled that “to expose for sale” means “to have in stock,” even if the product is not displayed.
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The conviction meant that not only did delicatessens have to discard all the meat they had purchased from Branfman, but rabbis instructed thousands of customers to throw out all the cooking vessels, dishes, and silverware that had come in contact with the offending products.
Delicatessen owners also often tried to trick their customers by passing off nonkosher meat as kosher; they thus saved the hefty price difference between the two types of meat. Some played on the similarity in Hebrew between the words for “kosher” and “meat”—the two words vary only by their initial letter (and even those initial letters look very similar). Rather than offering “kosher meat,” then, some delicatessen owners fooled customers by putting “meat meat” in their windows; they knew that few customers would notice the subtle difference, and they could deny that they had offered kosher meat for sale in the first place. The editor of the
Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine
defended the practice, arguing that if stores use Hebrew lettering or put a Star of David in their window or print advertising, it is simply because they “mean to advise that Yiddish may be spoken in their places, that a Jewish atmosphere prevails, etc.” To require that Hebrew lettering must not be used in a deceptive manner, he argued disingenuously, suggests that Jews are unfamiliar with their own language.
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A revised law then required meat dealers to label their products “kosher” or “on-kosher” with four-inch signs and to display additional signs in their windows making clear which type of meat was offered for sale. These laws complemented the existing consumer-protection statutes, first passed in 1915 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court ten years later, that stated that it was illegal for a food dealer to represent goods as kosher when they were not.
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As an English-language editorial in the
Yiddishes Tageblatt
demanded in 1922, as yet another bill was proposed to regulate the advertising and selling of kosher meat, “butchers, provision and delicatessen dealers who display the word ‘kosher’ must live up to that sign.”
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Some delicatessen owners kept up the battle; they argued that the word
kosher
was difficult to define and can admit of a range of meanings, beyond only the strict Orthodox interpretation. For example, many delicatessens remained open on the Jewish Sabbath, in violation of Jewish law. Even if the meat itself were strictly kosher, selling it on the Sabbath rendered it impure in the minds of traditional Jews. When the state decided to continue to rely on the guidance of Orthodox rabbis and laymen to define “kosher,” more than four hundred kosher delicatessen owners joined in a protest meeting in Brownsville. The owners complained that the new regulations were reminiscent of the despised Russian
korobka
, and they accused the legislature of kowtowing to a small segment of the Jewish community at the expense of the majority of Jews in the city.
Samuel Caesar, the president of the kosher delicatessen owners’ association, reminded the union men at the rally that most of them were members of the Workmen’s Circle, a fervently socialist Jewish organization. How, Caesar thundered, could the owners permit a “small group of rabbis the right to force Orthodox Judaism” on them? In defining the kosher delicatessen owners as secular Jews battling against the forces of religious Orthodoxy, Caesar insisted on the delicatessen as a place where different understandings of Jewishness could coexist.
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This redefinition of the delicatessen in secular terms foreshadowed the development of the delicatessen into a kind of “secular synagogue” for second-generation Jews—one in which the delicatessen transcended its immigrant Jewish origins. As we have seen, the delicatessen, which had been largely unknown in eastern Europe, was also not particularly entrenched in Lower East Side immigrant Jewish life. At the same time, Jews were themselves marginalized by other Americans. In the next chapter, we will see how Jews began to conquer their pervasive
sense of inferiority by turning Jewish delicatessen food from a low-class, suspect item into a high-class one of glitz and glamor.
As the delicatessen continued to gain traction in the culture of New York, different orientations toward Jewish religion and culture would produce not just different kinds of kosher delicatessens but a “kosher-style” type of delicatessen as well that reflected the desire of many Jews to create a new balance between their Jewish and American identities, one in which the nature of Jewish food itself would be redefined to serve the purpose of acculturation into American society.
From a Sandwich to a National Institution
Delicatessens in the Jazz Age and the Interwar Era
I
n the Marx Brothers’ first Broadway show,
I’ll Say She Is!
, which catapulted the vaudeville performers to stage (and later film) stardom, the delicatessen played a starring role. The 1924 revue was about a bored rich girl who promises her hand in marriage to the suitor who gives her the greatest excitement. The climax featured Groucho as a famous French hero. Playing Napoleon to Lotta Miles’s Josephine, Napoleon was surprisingly, anachronistically, and quite bizarrely fixated on Jewish delicatessen foods:
Napoleon:
Get me a bologna sandwich. Never mind the bologna. Never mind the bread. Just bring the check. Get me a wine brick.
Josephine:
Oh! It’s you. I thought you were at the Front.
Napoleon:
I was, but nobody answered the bell, so I came around here.
Josephine:
Well, what are you looking for?
Napoleon:
My sword—I lost my sword.
Josephine:
There it is, dear, just where you left it.
Napoleon:
How stupid of you. Why didn’t you tell me? Look at that point. I wish you wouldn’t open sardines with my sword. I am beginning to smell like a delicatessen. My infantry is beginning to smell like the Cavalry.
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What makes this skit deliciously ironic is its presentation of a “Jewish” Napoleon. After all, it was the great French leader who helped to emancipate the Jews, offering them French citizenship in return for their promise to keep their religion to themselves. This enabled the rapid assimilation of most of the Jews of France and also served as a model for other European governments in their approach to the “Jewish Question”—the problem of how to integrate Jews into European civil society. In return, Napoleon became a staple of Jewish folklore.
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By contrast to this victorious bigwig, the demasculinized Groucho Marx version of Napoleon can’t keep track of his sword, and he doesn’t seem to know where he is going. Even when he finds his sword, he discovers that his presumably unfaithful lover has been using it, quite promiscuously, as a can opener. He’s “hot” for Josephine, but his body smells like a delicatessen. He is sinking inexorably back to his “Jewish” roots, which put him at odds with his role as a French hero and lover. The call of the delicatessen is ultimately too strong; after this repartee, he gestures to the band leader to strike up the famous French song “The Mayonnaise”—a joke, of course, on the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”
The call of the delicatessen likewise reverberated stentoriously for the children of Jewish immigrants who acculturated into American society during the Jazz Age and for whom the Jewish eatery and its fare became symbols of success. Rising prosperity after the First World War led to the pell-mell exodus of Jews from the Lower East Side. Newer Jewish neighborhoods sprang up in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn—neighborhoods in which the delicatessen became a crucial gathering space for a generation of lower-middle-class Jews who were eager to participate in American society while still maintaining loyalty to their ethnic roots.
Even as the membership of the Ku Klux Klan peaked, Henry Ford fulminated against Jewish “control” of American banking and entertainment, and stringent new immigration restrictions were passed that essentially ended the influx of eastern
European Jews, second-generation Jews found a congenial gathering place in the delicatessen, a place where they could feel, in Deborah Dash Moore’s influential phrase, “at home in America,”
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and where they could congratulate themselves on having transcended their immigrant origins. The ability to consume meat was, as we saw for the bourgeoisie in late eighteenth-century Paris, a visible index of upward mobility. The sandwich-making business, in particular, appeared to be a quick route to riches. “There are sandwich impresarios in every city in the country,” the drama critic George Jean Nathan asserted, “who—up to a few years ago poor little delicatessen dealers—now wear dinner jackets every evening and own Packard Sixes.”
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The serving of “overstuffed” sandwiches in theater-district delicatessens presaged the contemporary hot-dog-eating contests sponsored annually by Nathan’s on the Fourth of July, which, like the Thanksgiving feast, are a celebration of American bounty and excess.
5
The anthropologist Robert Abrahams has suggested that American holidays are typically marked by taking ordinary things and “stylizing them, blowing them up, distending, or miniaturizing them”—he lists the “lowly firecracker, the balloon, the wrapped present, the cornucopia, the piñata, the stuffed turkey, and Santa’s stuffed bag.” The overstuffed delicatessen sandwich could certainly be added to that catalogue of cartoonish items that burst their boundaries, release repressed energies, and create a carnival atmosphere of raucous celebration.
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The exaltation felt by second-generation Jews that they had finally “arrived” in America was spurred by the very atmosphere of the nonkosher, theater-district delicatessens, which were imbued with the glitz and glamor of celebrity—as shown in everything from the showbiz pictures on the walls to the sandwiches that were named after the theater and film stars of the day. Allan Sherman and Bud Burtson’s unproduced 1947 musical
The Golden Touch
satirizes the stardust atmosphere of these delis; it revolves around a nonkosher delicatessen in
the theater district called Cheesecake Sam’s that caters to “upscale” customers such as “the most important shipping clerks and celebrated soda jerks! A boulevardier from Avenue A! The distingue of Rockaway! A furrier from Astoria.”
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The Stage Delicatessen, which opened in 1935, was thus aptly named; it was the Jewish
customers
who used it as a platform to display, through conspicuous consumption of large quantities of pickled meat, their own growing visibility in American society; the Stage Delicatessen’s unofficial slogan was “Where Celebrities Go to Look at People.”
8
Its clientele imbibed the show-business atmosphere like slabs of brisket soaking up barrels of brine on their way to becoming corned beef and pastrami. As the vaudevillian Joe Smith joked in one of his routines, “Max’s Stage Delicatessen,” the food was “so high-class that if you get an ulcer from eating here, it’ll have on a tuxedo.”
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At these vibrant, humming eateries, ordinary New Yorkers hobnobbed with the rich and famous. Harpo Marx described the lively crowd at Lindy’s and Reuben’s as a mix of the down on their luck with the very successful—“cardplayers, horseplayers, bookies, song-pluggers, agents, actors out of work and actors playing the Palace, Al Jolson with his mob of fans, and Arnold Rothstein with his mob of runners and flunkies. The cheesecake was ambrosia. The talk was old, familiar music.”
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Second-generation Jews dined amid that lively “music” in order to have some of the stardust rub off on themselves.
It may seem odd that the humble sandwich epitomized life in New York during the opulent, ostentatious Jazz Age. But sandwiches were all the rage. The drama critic George Jean Nathan reported in 1926 on the “sandwich wave” that had “latterly engulfed the Republic.” He found 5,215 stores in New York City alone that specialized in sandwiches, which he discovered had become “one of the leading industries of the country, taking precedence over soda-water, candy, chewing gum, and the
Saturday Evening Post
.” Furthermore, the sandwich appealed, in one form or another, to everybody, in every social class and occupation in society, including, Nathan noted, to “the shopgirl
and the lady of fashion, the day-laborer and the Brillat-Savarin.” As a result, Nathan found no less than 946 different kinds of sandwiches, made from ingredients ranging from snails to spaghetti.
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Cover of Reuben’s menu with caricatures of stage and film stars—note the slogan in the lower lefthand corner. (Collection of Ted Merwin)
The menus in the theater-district delicatessens were typically very long, with hundreds of items available every night. As Jim Heiman pointed out in his history of twentieth-century American menu design, “being handed an oversized bill of fare became an event in itself, subtly suggesting a restaurant’s importance by the seemingly endless choices offered to a customer.”
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It made the customer feel important too, to know that his or her options were so vast; the composer Oscar Levant once jokingly asked a waiter at Lindy’s if he could take a delicatessen menu home, in order to give him something to read.
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During the 1920s, which the novelist and historian Jerome Charyn calls the “delicatessen decade,”
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Jewish eateries participated in this culture of conspicuous consumption. “If you take a glance into the plate-glass window,” noted the humorist Montague Glass of a delicatessen in downtown Manhattan, “you will see such a display of food, tastefully decorated with strips of varicolored paper,
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as Rabelais might have catalogued for one of Gargantua’s heartier meals.” The turkeys, he added, are “interspersed with spiced beef, smoked tongue, plump kippered white fish, and festoons of frankfurters.” Glass compared the decor to that of an old-fashioned Pullman railroad car, which employed such expensive materials as inlaid mother of pearl, stained glass, satinwood, and mahogany.
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Some delicatessen exteriors were even more attention grabbing and ostentatious. Arnold Manoff, a worker for the Federal Writers’ Project who interviewed Arnold Reuben in 1938, compared the interior of Reuben’s with the opulent lounge of the Radio City Musical Hall, noting that as the pedestrian strolls up Fifty-Eighth Street toward Fifth Avenue,
suddenly the wall of brick to your left is ended and the periphery of your eye catches a huge pane of glass curtained in cream folds and
shrubberied formally at the bottom. A red blazing neon sprawls over the window
REUBENS
. Typical. This is
REUBENS
! Who is Reuben that his name should stand alone without a word of explanation, without even a first name, without a Company or Inc after it? What the hell! You don’t mind
GENERAL
MOTORS
; Money! Power! Industry. Well, all right,
REUBEN
. Twenty Five feet long, five feet high on 58th Street, Right next to the Savoy Plaza, the Sherry Natherland [
sic
]. Nearby Central Park, the old Plaza, Fifth Ave. Nearby Park Ave. A ritzy restaurant, if you judge by what you can’t see from the outside.
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The immense neon sign connoted brashness and brazenness, opulence and ostentation; it joined in the nightly visual symphony of the lights of the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The delicatessen’s location among the iconic hotels that surround Central Park also places it in the most august company imaginable—old-money, Protestant New York society. To the writer, there was evidently something incongruous about such an obviously Jewish name being so prominently emblazoned on the midtown Manhattan scene, at a time when Jews were still viewed by many as grasping, ill-mannered interlopers in American society. Yet the sign still suggested that a Jew and his restaurant had, however improbably, reached the pinnacle of American society.
During the Jazz Age, Broadway was itself at its zenith. The number of new shows more than doubled from 126 in 1927 to 264 in 1928—the all-time peak.
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Theater tickets were relatively inexpensive; many New Yorkers attended theater on a weekly basis, and they also patronized the palatial movie theaters that were also located near Times Square.
No ethnic group was more involved and invested in popular culture than were the Jews, who provided the lion’s share of the creative talent, financial backing, and real estate for the entertainment business.
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And no New York eateries were more emblematic of show-business culture than were the theater-district delicatessens, which transformed the ordinary sandwich into a fancy meal. According to Rian James, who penned
a popular dining guide to New York in 1930, Reuben “raised the in-elegant dime sandwich to a wholly elegant dollar status!” James noted that in Reuben’s, you can “see all Broadway parade before you.”
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After his performances at the Winter Garden Theater, the famous Jewish singer Al Jolson, the most popular Jewish entertainer of his day (best known for his 1927 film
The Jazz Singer
), would invite the entire audience to accompany him to Lindy’s for a pastrami sandwich. The bootlegger Arnold Rothstein, infamous for fixing the 1919 World Series, did all his business at delicatessen tables at Lindy’s, where he was such a fixture that when he was gunned down outside the restaurant in 1928, many people thought that he had been an owner of the restaurant. By controlling the city’s underworld from his table at Lindy’s, the historian Michael Alexander has noted, Rothstein demonstrated that a Jew could be influential and admired, despite being a criminal, while remaining squarely within his own ethnic milieu.
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