Growing up in the affluent Long Island, predominantly Jewish, suburb of Great Neck in the 1970s and ’80s, I listened eagerly to my mother and her cousin Marcia reminiscing about working Sunday evenings waiting tables and busing dishes in Uncle Ben’s deli in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I heard about the hustle and bustle, the interactions between the working-class customers and the wise-cracking old Jewish waiters, the kibitzing at the deli counter with the jocular countermen in their white paper hats.
Partly as a connection to my grandparents, who did not keep kosher but who ate nothing but traditional eastern European Jewish food, I grew to love eating in delis, although the suburban ones that were close to my home had a more pretentious atmosphere with their Art Deco lighting, glass columns, and blond wood paneling. The fatty, scrumptious food was mouthwatering—the peppery pastrami, the chewy corned beef, the sour seeded rye bread, the fluffy matzoh balls in parsley-flecked chicken broth, the crunchy fresh pickles, the tangy coleslaw.
Part of what entranced me about delis was the set of elaborate, almost theatrical rituals that governed the making of the sandwiches. There was an intricate, elegant choreography to the movements of the counterman as he sliced up the meat. He took the soft, succulent beef from the steam table and sliced it by hand with a flourish, piling up the slices in the center of the bread—sour, chewy rye studded with black caraway seeds—as if building a monument on a town square. He slid the sandwich down the counter to you in a single, graceful motion, like a pitcher delivering a fastball to home plate.
You took the plate to your table, dipped a little wooden paddle into a small glass jar, and painted the bread with thick, impatient strokes of mustard. You opened wide and took a big, cavernous bite. The meat didn’t melt in your mouth—it crumbled into it, imploding into it, your teeth plowing through the fat and muscle, your taste buds slapping again and again into the sheer rosiness of it, bursting into a long, drawn-out, happy song.
My parents had no formal connections to the Jewish community. They didn’t belong to a synagogue, didn’t celebrate the High Holy Days, and didn’t send me to Hebrew school. But on Sunday nights, especially when my grandparents were visiting, my mother would dispatch me around the corner to Middle Neck Road to a kosher-style deli pompously called Squire’s. I was delegated to pick up an unvarying order: a pound of roast beef, a pound of turkey, a dozen slices of rye bread studded with caraway seeds, a can of vegetarian baked beans, and a squat cylindrical take-out container of gravy. We made our own sandwiches around the round, wooden kitchen table. When we took the first bite of deli, our Jewishness came in like the tide. Before long, nothing but crumbs were left on that table, as if a biblical plague of locusts had devoured everything in sight.
I was always left wanting more.
When I first started to learn about Judaism as a student at Amherst College, it wasn’t the food that attracted me—there wasn’t much good nosh in western Massachusetts—but the simple, lilting Hebrew songs about peace and goodwill, the sense of fellowship with other Jewish students, the restrained, regal elegance of the Sabbath and holiday rituals, the scrappy emphasis on social justice, and the unwavering focus on moral self-improvement.
I never took a course in religion at Amherst, but I ended up writing my senior thesis as a play about intermarriage between Jews and Christians in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where the boundaries between the two groups seemed remarkably fluid and a large percentage of Jews married outside the faith. When I first started writing and teaching about Jewish food, I realized that the deli had served both as a place for the reinforcement of American Jewish identity and as a comfortable space for non-Jews to sample Jewish culture. But no one, to my surprise, had traced the history of the deli in New York or pinpointed its heyday. No one had peered through the greasy, garlicky, gassy, and gluttonous lens of the pastrami sandwich into the role of Jewish deli food in American culture.
Although my family did not belong to a synagogue, did not observe Jewish law, and celebrated few Jewish holidays, eating in delis offered me a sense of Jewish identity that I found in few other places. Whenever we celebrated a family occasion, my grandmother invariably ordered a tongue sandwich, which, in retrospect, seems entirely appropriate; it was as if the tongue that she ate was connected in a double sense to her own tongue—both her gift of gab and her parents’ native language (Yiddish is known as the mameloshen, the mother’s tongue), which, to her deep regret, was not being transmitted to her grandchildren.
I grew up at a time when the deli had long since ceased to function as a major gathering place for the Jewish community, when, even in Great Neck, it was J. P. King’s, the Chinese restaurant on Grace Avenue, that was a more popular hangout spot than Squire’s. But the deli sandwiches remain more salient in my memory than the moo shu pork or the beef lo mein at the Chinese eatery; they connected me to my people and to my past in a way that the Chinese dishes, however delicious, never could.
I knew that these foods from the Jewish deli were the same foods that my grandparents had eaten during their own upbringing, the foods with which they had celebrated births, weddings, and funerals—the foods that enabled them to build and sustain community with other second-generation Jews at a time when Jewishness was not simply an aspect of their identity or experience but the central, defining, and ineluctable feature of their existence.
Eating in delis was, for them, a laid-back, unfussy, grass-roots experience that required no education, no upper-class breeding, no intricate knowledge of manners and mores. Eating in delis, which were permeated with both the aura of abundance and the culture of celebrity, made Jews feel that, for them too, the American Dream was at long last eminently within their reach—so close, you might say, that they could taste it.