Authors often compare writing a book to birthing a child. Writing this one was more like raising an unruly child to adolescence. In the more than ten years that it took me to research and write it, my wife, Andrea, and I had three children: Hannah, who is mentioned in the manuscript as a kindergartner, when she tasted deli for the first time, just had her bat mitzvah. (And no, we didn’t serve deli; my wife drew the line.) Our middle daughter, Sarah, never tires of reminding me that my wife wrote a whole manuscript in just two months while serving on the staff of Camp Ramah in the Poconos; she is dubious that someone could spend such a long time on a single project. And our youngest, Leah, seems to have most inherited my affinity for eastern European Jewish food, especially kasha varnishkes (buckwheat groats with bowtie noodles, for the uninitiated).
First and foremost, I owe a gigantic debt of gratitude to my editor at NYU Press, Jennifer Hammer, who initially suggested that I write a book on this topic and who kept an unbroken faith in it all along, as it went through multiple rounds of peer review. I feel a strong connection to NYU, partly because my father worked there for decades, editing the alumni magazine at the NYU Medical School, and partly because my grandmother volunteered on Fridays at the Student Activities office of the same school, selling discount theater tickets to the medical students. This is what enabled my family to attend Broadway and off-Broadway shows on a regular basis throughout my childhood, and I credit my love of theater (the field in which I earned my Ph.D.) to these early theatergoing experiences.
I’m also very much indebted to Professor Darra Goldstein at Williams College, the former editor of Gastronomica, for her help and encouragement. And I am exceedingly grateful to my former agent, Michele Rubin, and to my new one, Susan Ginsburg, at Writers House in New York. My freelance editor, Alice Peck, suggested the book’s title.
I’ve had a tremendous amount of fun—and a lot of good pastrami sandwiches—working on this project, including interviewing dozens of deli owners and executives of kosher sausage companies, who were generous with their time and anecdotes. I’m also grateful to Marty Silver, former executive vice president of Hebrew National, for allowing me unfettered access to his company’s archives in Jericho, Long Island. And I’d like to convey my appreciation to Ziggy Gruber, Brian Merlis, and Marlene Katz Padover for their help in locating and reproducing images for the book.
I’m indebted to many librarians and archivists, including Shulamith Berger at the Special Collections of Yeshiva University Library, Jeremy Megraw at the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library, and Dan Sharon at the Spertus Institute in Chicago (who, after one research trip to the library, mailed me articles for years whenever he ran across something that was germane to my topic). And I want to thank David Sax, author of Save the Deli, for always making time to chat about delis and to help me to track down an elusive interviewee.
I thank my terrific editor at the Jewish Week, Rob Goldblum, who has given me helpful feedback, endless encouragement, and weekly opportunities to stretch my wings as a writer by enabling me to pen a wide variety of articles, including the personal essays and reflection pieces that are my forte. I thank Provost Neil Weissman at Dickinson College, as well as the college’s Research and Development Committee, for the resources to travel and share my ideas with academic and popular audiences alike. And I thank my students, who, even as they are required to revise draft after draft of their own essays, have pushed me to become both a better writer and a better teacher of writing.
Helpful feedback and valuable suggestions came from Simon Bronner, Hasia Diner, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Melissa Klapper, Sharon O’Brien, Arthur Sabatini, and Paul Zakrzewski. In addition, many of the ideas in this book come from people who have heard me speak, and I want to thank both the organizers of these programs and the audience members—it is always invaluable for me to get feedback on my work and to share my abiding love of this subject with people for whom the deli was a central feature of their own childhoods, a setting for some of their most cherished memories of family and friends. Even as the deli itself continues to fade into obscurity, these memories will endure.
I reserve special thanks for my life coaches, Judith Katz and Gene Galbraith. But my greatest thanks, of course, go to my wife, Andrea, who shares all of my hopes and dreams—and, occasionally, my sandwiches. Her love and support make everything that I do not just possible but pleasurable and fulfilling. She wrote about the power of and symbolism of food in Judaism long before it ever occurred to me as a research topic of my own. I love her with all my heart—and quite a bit of my stomach.