A wry look at the New York Jewish deli

The 2nd Avenue Deli — the outdated one, on the nook of East tenth Street — occupied a cherished place in my household. It wasn’t particularly pleasant or low-cost, and even reliably wonderful, nevertheless it did have the immeasurable advantage of being near my grandfather’s optometry store. My father usually met his brothers there and infrequently ran into the cousins who for some eccentric motive referred to as it the Tenth Street Deli. The menu learn like a litany of percussive Old-World incantations: chopped liver, kasha varnishkes, kishkes, kugel and kreplach. Also, hen fricassee and Dr Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, a beverage I refused to style. I by no means went there with buddies. It was the place kin congregated.

That world ended violently. The deli’s Ukrainian-born founder Abe Lebewohl (“Livewell”) was on his method to make a financial institution deposit in 1996 when somebody — the police by no means did discover out who — shot him useless. His widow and their children stored the place going for one more decade, however a shadow haunted the enterprise. In 2007, two of Lebewohl’s nephews moved the deli to a brand new location, then opened a second. Neither of the next-gen 2nd Avenue Delis was on Second Avenue. The model persists however the magic is gone, the costs have bloated, and the beloved hen fricassee has been deleted from the menu.

Forgive the nostalgia journey: that’s what it’s like to go to the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition I’ll Have What She’s Having: The Jewish Deli. Relics abound in the show instances: a meat slicer, a pushcart, a barrel, dozens of menus, neon indicators from defunct companies, and a pristine apron sporting the emblem 2nd AVE DELI written in Hebrew-style characters. The assortment of historic notes and memorabilia shouldn’t be a lot of a visible feast. A Thirties Cel-Ray bottle and bottle opener sitting in a vitrine doesn’t precisely get an aesthete’s juices flowing. The advert marketing campaign for Levy’s Jewish Rye — an array of black, Asian and Native American fashions grinning at their sandwiches above the tag line “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s” — is as shut as the present will get to spectacle. Instead, we get grainy photographs and cryptic scraps deciphered by explanatory texts. A little black union membership guide helps inform the story of Paula Weissman, who survived Hitler’s demise camps to change into a legendary waitress at Fine and Shapiro and spent many years following a co-worker’s first-day recommendation: “Don’t sit down. Keep working.”

I wasn’t the just one transported again many years by this accumulation of artefacts, judging by a hubbub of overheard remarks: “Grandpa used to love the matzo balls at that place!” For the back-when-the-subway-cost-a-nickel crowd, the present is a heat bathtub of wistfulness. For everybody else, it’s an anthropological tour into an American meals tradition that has largely gone the method of Yiddish theatre.

The exhibition tells an inspirational story of immigrant meals retailers who rose from street-cart hawkers to commanders of the Formica tabletop. It goals for a celebratory really feel, leveraging clips from Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, plus the scene of scenes from When Harry Met Sally that lends the exhibition its title. Nearby, the sculptor Alan Wolfson has normal a paean to Katz’s in the type of a realist miniature.

Still, the primary temper is gloomy, with a aspect of stewed remorse. The massive, clattering Jewish deli, with its choral fragrances of brine, mustard, paprika, and fats, is usually an establishment of the previous. In the Thirties, New York City had roughly 3,000 of those institutions; immediately there are barely a dozen. Some aren’t kosher at all, however slightly “kosher-style”, a non secular oxymoron that ready the method for the invention of the Reuben. (The legal guidelines of kashrut, which forbid mixing meat and cheese, abhors the marriage of corned beef and Swiss.)

Recent years have been particularly brutal. Ben’s Best Kosher Delicatessen on Queens Boulevard as soon as seated 65 and served stuffed cabbage and knishwiches to mayors (Ed Koch), senators (Jacob Javits) and governors (Nelson Rockefeller). It closed in 2018. Loesser’s, which opened in 1960, served the greatest pastrami in New York City, in line with a Daily News ballot. It closed on Thanksgiving Day, 2019. Fine and Shapiro, on the Upper West Side since 1927, shuttered simply earlier than the March 2020 lockdown. These days, my mother and father should journey from Manhattan to the Bronx to patronise Liebman’s, one among the metropolis’s final and best Jewish beef-centric establishments.

Increasingly Americanised Jews shunned their very own gastronomic ancestry and gravitated to the (incessantly bastardised) cuisines of different immigrant teams as an alternative

The decline was partially a pure product of assimilation. Increasingly Americanised Jews shunned their very own gastronomic ancestry and gravitated to the (incessantly bastardised) cuisines of different immigrant teams as an alternative. Then there was all that crimson meat and schmalz, so out of step with physicians’ recommendation and the tradition’s dietary aspirations that some purveyors now deal with their very own choices as a sort of grim joke. Today’s 2nd Avenue menu consists of the “Instant Heart Attack,” (“2 large potato pancakes with your choice of Corned Beef, Pastrami, Turkey or Salami,” for $36.95).

The curators take an admirably scholarly method to a much-debated matter, however they do deal with the time period “deli” somewhat too loosely for my Talmudic style. Delicatessens had been strictly meat-based enterprises, however the exhibition additionally features a part on dairy eating places, which serve all the pieces else wanted to maintain the Jewish physique and soul collectively: cheese blintzes with bitter cream, borscht, bagels, lox, smoked fish salads, pierogies, and vegetarian soups. These had been the kinds of institutions that Isaac Bashevis Singer memorialised.

“The moment I sit down at a table, they come over,” he wrote in the 1968 story “The Cafeteria”. “‘Hello, Aaron!’ they greet me, and we talk about Yiddish literature, the Holocaust, the state of Israel, and often about acquaintances who were eating rice pudding or stewed prunes the last time I was here and are already in their graves.” The prepare of thought that leads from the dairy restaurant to demise has nothing to do with ldl cholesterol and all the pieces to do with historical past.

So is that this actually a present about the Jewish deli, or is it usually about Jewish meals or Jewish reminiscence — or stereotypes of what Jews eat? Such vagueness conflicts with strict dietary legal guidelines, and in addition with some households’ exacting rituals round the making of gefilte fish, preserved in historic runes on torn pocket book pages or in meticulous oral custom. Debates over the trivialities of meals preparation have at all times been integral to the tradition. “That was people’s exercise,” one knowledgeable testifies in a video clip. “Rather than go to a gym, they’d argue about the corned beef.”

The present does attempt to jolt itself out of that nostalgic stupor. The Jewish deli is again, we’re requested to consider, now in a extra fashionable, sustainable and ecumenical incarnation. One present contender for the Best in New York title is seemingly USA Brooklyn Delicatessen, which sounds prefer it ought to belong to an American chain in, say, Seoul, however is definitely in Manhattan. Judging from the menu, the meals may greatest be described as kosher-style-style. A wall label studies that “customers delight in Reubens on toasted potato buns with juniper berry sauerkraut and the artisanal Pastrami Hash in a Jar.” As my complete clan would say: Oy.