3
Send a Salami
Delicatessens during the Second World War and the Postwar Exodus from New York
The entrance of the United States into the Second World War in December 1941 ultimately transformed the relationship of many Jews to their religion. Obliged to eat army rations, Jewish soldiers found it almost impossible to keep kosher on a regular basis. In G.I. Jews, Deborah Dash Moore’s book about Jews in the army, Moore discusses the ways in which many Jewish soldiers, especially those raised in kosher homes, were compelled to modify their eating patterns in order to survive on army rations. “Eating ham for Uncle Sam” became, Moore has found, a patriotic act of self-sacrifice. But not all servicemen were obliged to subsist on nonkosher food; the practice soon developed of sending hard salamis, which keep for a long time without refrigeration, to sons who were serving abroad. For the most part, however, Jews learned that they could do without familiar foods and still maintain their Jewish identity.
Louis Schwartz, a waiter in the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen who was famous for selling more than $4 million worth of war bonds, claimed to have invented the famous slogan “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army,” which became a permanent catchphrase at Katz’s Delicatessen and other delicatessens in the city. The slogan seems to have originated with Hal David, a lyricist whose Austrian Jewish parents owned a kosher delicatessen in Brooklyn; David is best known for a string of 1960s hit songs with the Jewish composer Burt Bacharach.1 David penned it while serving in the army in the Central Pacific Entertainment Section, based at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu; the unit developed songs, sketches, and musicals to be performed for the troops throughout the Central and South Pacific. (The lyric continued, “Don’t just send him things to wear / Send him something he can chew.”)2 The slogan carried a potent unconscious thrust; given the phallic associations that salamis have, sending one to one’s son was perhaps unconsciously attempting to give him a boost of virility in order to enable him to win the war and return safely to the bosom of his family.
At a time when all things identified with Germany were suspect, the German origin of delicatessen food was potentially problematic. As the New York Times pointed out, the word delicatessen was “of Axis origin,” along with frankfurters, hamburgers, and bologna. However, the Times added reassuringly, the situation was not one to fret about. After all, even King George and Queen Elizabeth had recently feasted on Nathan’s hot dogs at a picnic in Hyde Park given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When the filler in the sandwich was a luncheon meat of foreign origin, it became happily domesticated—no longer a foreign intruder but a “perfect symbol of the American melting pot.”3
Jews at home learned, however, that they could maintain their ethnic identity without corned beef and pastrami. The need to send large quantities of food overseas to feed the soldiers led to severe shortages on the home front. The government’s Office of Price Administration (OPA) initially limited the supply of rubber and gasoline before moving on to food items, beginning with sugar and coffee. In 1942, the government instituted a “Share the Meat” campaign in which American were asked to limit their consumption of meat. But rationing still became inevitable, given the fact that up to 60 percent of the nation’s meat supply was reserved for consumption by the military—the average consumption of meat by each soldier was a pound per day4—and by the Lend Lease Program that shipped enormous quantities of food (in the first half of 1943, forty-five million pounds of beef alone)5 to the civilian populations of Europe. One soldier’s wife admitted that she fantasized about eating steak more than she did about having sex.6
Jews were heavily represented in the meat-processing industry in New York, both kosher and nonkosher; indeed, of the five thousand employees in this business, one expert estimated, more than a quarter were Jewish.7 But with the advent of meat rationing on March 29, 1943, both butcher shops and delicatessens no longer had access to much of their product. The major associations of kosher delicatessens calculated that the selling of meat products accounted for about 90 percent of their overall business, with about 75 percent of their sales in the form of sandwiches and 15 percent in the form of cooked dishes.
Beef rationing was instituted with an initial limit of twenty-eight ounces a week per person; it was estimated that the wealthiest third of the population consumed an average of five pounds of meat a week and the poorest third an average of only about one pound a week. Red stamps, issued by the government, were required to buy meat, fish, and dairy products; blue stamps were needed for canned fruits and vegetables. Each citizen, including children, received two ration books a month, containing forty-eight blue points and sixty-four red points.
Delicatessen items carried a premium above the point value of raw meat—two additional points per pound if unsliced and three additional points per pound if sliced.8 If a patron bought cured meats from a delicatessen to make his or her own sandwiches, the red stamps were required. A meal consumed in a restaurant or prepared for take-out did not require stamps, so many delicatessen customers bought complete sandwiches.9 Many citizens hoarded these stamps so that they could make a single large purchase. However, the numbers of points needed to buy particular foods fluctuated on a daily basis. As the memoirist Ruth Corbett recalled, it was cause for celebration when the number of stamps was reduced for a particular item, such as when thirteen kinds of kosher meats were taken down by one point.10 Frankfurters were in such short supply that meat packers were enjoined to stretch their filling by using beans, potatoes, or cracker meal; they suggested substituting bread and gravy for meat.11
Nevertheless, the government recognized that the consumption of red meat by the citizenry was essential in order to maintain wartime morale. The historian Amy Bentley has argued that beef, long a symbol of status and wealth, increased in symbolic value during the war partially because of both governmental and private-industry propaganda.12 The government instituted price ceilings on meat in order to prevent inflation, but this led to a decrease in supply and triggered an extensive black market. That black market was particularly pronounced in delicatessen meats, especially corned beef and tongue; the following year, four of the major kosher sausage companies in New York—Zion Kosher, Real Kosher, Brownsville Kosher, and Benjamin Rachleff—were convicted. (Leo Tarlow of Zion Kosher was sentenced to a forty-day jail term, although the jail time was suspended.)13 In May 1945, the delicatessen manufacturers, distributors, and retailers all threatened to strike in order to try to compel the OPA to make more meat available.14
In order to comply with federal guidelines limiting meat consumption, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia requested that no meat be sold on Tuesdays in New York City, with the only exemption being for hot dog and hamburger stands, which were asked to encourage substitute foods like fish.15 While many delicatessens had been open seven days of the week, they almost unanimously decided to close their doors on these “meatless Tuesdays,” with a few remaining open only to sell beer. Irving Krasner, a jobber in the delicatessen business, married his wife, Selma, on a Tuesday and went back to work the next day, while Barbara Solomon’s dad used his precious Tuesdays to take her and her brother for leisurely boat rides up the Hudson or on excursions to the Bronx Zoo.
Periodic shortages continued, even after the end of the war; about a tenth of the thousand kosher delicatessens in the city shut down in September 1946 for lack of meat. The delicatessen industry associations called a meeting to discuss closing down all of the stores for at least a month, given that the shops had only 10 to 20 percent of their usual merchandise. Kosher delicatessens were especially hard hit, with that reduction in their normal supply and with some meats, such as corned beef and tongue, virtually unobtainable at any price. Louis Schweller, the president of the Bronx Delicatessen Dealers Association, predicted that most of the thousand or so remaining kosher delicatessens would have to close. But also affected were the seven thousand or so delicatessens that were mostly indistinguishable from grocery stores. In all, according to Jack Kranis, attorney for the Joint Council of Delicatessen Store Dealers, as many as ten thousand employees—waiters, countermen, and kitchen help—could be left jobless.16
Customers shop for meat in Gellis Delicatessen in Manhattan during postwar shortages on October 9, 1946 (Copyright Bettmann/CORBIS)
Food writers in the press suggested using nonmeat substitutes, canned meat products, or such innovations as “corned beef spread.” Restaurants and hotels were asked to “stretch” their meat by preparing hash and nonrationed meat such as kidney, liver, and tripe. A horse-meat dealer in Newark announced plans to open an outlet in Manhattan, incurring the wrath of former mayor LaGuardia, who called the consumption of horse meat “degrading and humiliating” and pointed out that eating horses had been rejected even by the “peasants of Europe and the coolies of China.”17 Fortunately, the shortages eased before horse meat became a staple of the New York diet.
That delicatessen food was seen as a special treat was shown by the ongoing efforts of the 52 Association, a group that started in 1945 after a restaurant owner picked up the tab for a group of blind sailors who had dined in his restaurant. The owner and his friends then created an organization in which fifty-two men would each be asked to contribute fifty-two dollars a year to pay for a weekly party for wounded veterans, serving food from delicatessens and gourmet food stores. By the early 1950s, the organization boasted more than two thousand members in New York alone and had expanded its efforts to include not just sponsoring the social events but helping the veterans to find jobs. According to one journalist, the organization’s philosophy was that there is “not much wrong with a man’s spirit that cannot be bettered by large portions of pastrami and cheesecake rendered under warm, friendly conditions.”18
Murray Handwerker, the son of the founder of Nathan’s, took an indirect path to bringing delicatessen into his store, which initially served only hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, and chow mein. While serving overseas, he became introduced to foreign cuisines, as did many of his fellow soldiers. Upon his return, he decided to experiment with serving different foods. Murray took advantage of his father’s vacation in Florida to start serving shrimp and clams. Only after he started making a profit from seafood did he bring in (nonkosher) delicatessen foods. “The postwar years were a turning point,” he recalled. “Tastes were changing. And I, coming home from the war and going into the business, was part of that scene.”19
While the war exposed Jews to other types of food, it also provided opportunities for non-Jews to learn about Jewish food. Lieutenant Colonel Harold Dorfman realized how much he missed delicatessen food when he served as navigator in a B-24 bomber on September 12, 1944. As the plane approached its target, the submarine pens of northern Germany, the pilot was ordered to inquire and record what was in each crew member’s mind. Each responded, in turn, that he was thinking about his family back home—each, that is, except for Dorfman, who said that he was consumed with a desire for a hot pastrami sandwich. The response from the pilot: “How do you spell pastrami?” The crew endured an eight-hour attack by enemy gunfire by laughing and joking about the episode. But to actually taste the unfamiliar delicacy, most had to wait until they arrived in New York eight months later on their way back to Fort Dix.20
The “New York” Jewish Delicatessen, outside New York
After the Second World War, many Jews migrated out of New York, often in search of the warmer climes that they had discovered during their military service. Bringing their love of Jewish food with them, these newcomers established “New York–style” delicatessens all over the continent. While these delicatessens traded on the idea of “authentic” New York Jewish food, they each developed local variations on the theme. Many imported food from New York or hired delicatessen managers or workers away from New York, but they put the stamp of the local culture on the delicatessen and its menu.
Many Jewish New Yorkers relocated to Miami and L.A., where they found palm trees and wide-open spaces. By migrating to far-away cities that were known for their “leisure lifestyle,” Deborah Dash Moore has argued, Jews remade themselves “from natives standing on the threshold of security and status into strangers seeking to establish networks to sustain themselves.”21 In the absence of well-developed social, professional, and religious networks, food still connected them to the life that they had left behind.
In some parts of the country, of course, Jewish delis were few and far between. When the actress Molly Picon returned to the United States from a series of performances in South America in the 1930s, she undertook a tour across the South and Southwest. “We continued driving straight through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the Smokies, and south until we got to San Antonio. For four days, we’d be driving, and not one delicatessen on the whole trip!” she complained.22 But almost every city that had a significant Jewish population had delicatessens, and these eateries were, as in New York, important gathering spots for an acculturating generation of American Jews.
In Baltimore, “Corned Beef Row” flourished on Lombard Street in Baltimore, with delis such as Weiss’s, Sussman and Lev’s, Awrach and Perl’s, and Nates and Leon’s. Baltimore had boasted delis since the turn of the century, with five delicatessens listed in the Baltimore city directory as of 1905 and seventeen as of 1910. One of the first, H. L. Kaplan & Company, began in 1897; by 1917, it advertised in a New York Yiddish newspaper, the Yiddishes Tageblatt, promoting its “high grade kosher sausage, smoked and corned beef, tongues, and pure chicken fat.”23
Most of these delicatessens were located in East Baltimore, where the majority of the Jews lived. As in New York, most were strictly take-out stores until the interwar era, when they began to operate full-service restaurants as well. Sussman’s Delicatessen had a separate counter on each side of the store, one for smoked fish and herring, the other for sausages and other meats. In 1926, its owner, Jacob Sussman, went into partnership with Carl Lev, a delicatessen dealer from New York. By the mid-1930s, they had installed seating booths, an Art Deco–style bar, and a ceramic-tile floor. A Viennese baker from New York prepared the bread, pies, and pastries.
Baltimore delicatessens, many of which, like the kosher delicatessen in Providence, doubled as soda fountains, were known for their variations on traditional sandwiches. The “Broadway Special” at Sussman and Lev’s comprised tongue, spiced beef, corned beef, salami, sweet gherkins, and lettuce, all of which could be washed down with an Almond Smash soda. Over at Ballow’s, Nathan Ballow served the ten-cent Easterwood Special, a half loaf of rye bread filled with bologna and mustard, as well as a bologna and hot dog combination. Nates and Leon’s, founded by Nates Herr and Leon Shavitz, was known for its combination sandwiches, of which it ultimately developed 120, including an especially popular one of corned beef, coleslaw, lettuce, and Russian dressing. Harry and Seymour Attman, who promoted their deli as the “home of fifty sandwiches,” took ideas for combinations from the Carnegie Delicatessen in New York.24
Interior of Sussman and Lev’s Delicatessen in Baltimore from the 1930s (Courtesy of the Jewish Museum of Maryland)
In Boston, the G&G, owned by Irving Green and Charlie Goldstein, was an iconic deli on Blue Hill Avenue, in the heart of the Jewish working-class neighborhood, that, in the 1940s, served a decidedly nonkosher mix of ice-cream sodas, beer, potato pancakes, liverwurst and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, and chopped chicken liver accompanied by bread and butter. The historians Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon describe it as the central gathering place for the Jewish community, the Jewish version of the downtown Algonquin Club, where the Brahmins of Boston carried on their business. Candidates for local and national office knew that they needed to shake hands at the G&G in order to carry the Jewish vote; at the G&G, on every election night, a wooden bandstand was installed just outside the door, where the candidates and their supporters would make their last-minute pitches. Even John F. Kennedy, for example, according to Levine and Harmon, “made eye contact and munched french fries smothered in kishke grease with the best of them.”25
Other nearby delicatessens were the downtown Essex Food Shop, which boasted the “biggest and best sandwiches in Boston”; the Modern Delicatessen & Lunch in the suburb of Roxbury, which carried three kinds of “solame” and two kinds of “frankforts”; and a chain called Barney Sheff’s, located in Boston, Roxbury, and Revere. Other than Rubin’s, which opened in Brookline in 1928, kosher delicatessens were never very popular in Boston, perhaps because of the centrality of pork and shellfish in the cuisine of New England. Indeed, one specialty of the Boston delis was the Swiss delicacy called cervelat—a mixture of beef, bacon, and pork rind packed into cow intestines and then smoked and boiled.
Chicago, a city famed for its stockyards and for providing dressed meat to the rest of the country, was also known for its delicatessens—even if they were rarely called by that name.26 Manny’s Coffee Shop and Deli opened in 1942 in the Maxwell Street area in Chicago, where the Jewish ghetto was still emptying out. When the New York Yankees came to town, the players got corned beef sandwiches and pickles from Friedman’s Deli on Western Avenue, an establishment owned by the diehard Yankee fan Oscar Friedman. Friedman had befriended Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson when Friedman was stationed in Sumter, South Carolina, during the Korean War, which happened to be Richardson’s hometown. Friedman’s son, Mark, recalled that each visit by the Yankees occasioned an exciting family outing to the stadium; before the game, they would deliver a paper sack of sandwiches and pickles to the Yankees’ dressing room and get to meet Richardson, Tony Kubek, Elston Howard, Whitey Ford, and new manager Yogi Berra. Another celebrity customer of Friedman’s was Nat “King” Cole, who performed with his trio at a nearby nightclub called the Rag Doll. Cole once insisted, despite the owner’s objections, on ordering—and eating—a corned beef and sardine sandwich.27
The writer Joseph Epstein, who grew up in Chicago, recalled that Friedman’s, which sported only ten or eleven tables, was a “meeting place after dates or a card game,” a place where he found “older men, bedizened with pinky rings, talking about deals they had cut or bets they had won.” Epstein frequently ended up there at one o’clock in the morning, when he and his friends “might tuck into a bowl of chicken kreplach soup, a corned-beef sandwich, and a Pepsi, maybe a couple of cups of coffee, a slice of cheesecake, possibly pick up a bit of halvah on the way out, a full fourth meal of the day, eating and arguing, before turning in for a perfect night’s sleep.”28
Delicatessens were particularly important as Jewish gathering places in Los Angeles given that Jews in the sprawling region tended to live much less closely together than they had in New York. Moore quotes a Los Angeles rabbi to the effect that the “sprawling atmosphere militates against the creation of a Jewish climate . . . in a given street or group or streets where people could come together informally and still be with like-minded persons.”29 The delicatessen also became the hangout of choice for the many Jews who worked in the film industry. “There could be no picture making,” the film director Orson Welles flatly declared, “without pastrami.”30
Canter’s Delicatessen, which had first opened in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1924, relocated to the Jewish suburb of Boyle Heights in 1931 and then moved to Fairfax Avenue—the heart of the Los Angeles Jewish community in the postwar years—in 1953. During the Depression, Canter’s sold so many sandwiches for a dime apiece that a local bank borrowed money from it; by 1946, the deli was raking in a million dollars a year. Cohen’s (also on Fairfax), Woloshin’s (which was one of the few kosher delicatessens on the West Coast), Linny’s, Lax’s, Eat ’n Shop, Joseph’s, and Nate ’n Al’s were also hangouts for Jews in the entertainment industry. Both Lax’s and Joseph’s advertised themselves as offering what they called “choice Eastern delicacies,” which neatly captured the identification of delicatessen food with both New York and eastern Europe.
In Tough Jews, a history of Jewish gangsters in America, Rich Cohen describes his father’s ritual breakfasts with his friends from childhood (including the television news anchor Larry King) at Nate ’n Al’s, where they act like big shots, call each other by mobster-sounding nicknames in their indelible Brooklyn accents, and act fearless and macho and mean. The deli roots them in a shared ethnic Jewish past, while it feeds their fantasies of machismo. As Cohen writes, “They fled Brooklyn thirty-five, forty years ago and have shed as many outward signs of their heritage as would be shed, yet still retain something of the old world, a final, fleeting glimpse of what their fathers must have been.”31
Other Jews from New York opened delicatessens in Southern California. The grandmother of Murray “Boy” Maltin operated a restaurant during the Depression on the first floor of their apartment building on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. The family moved to Los Angeles when Maltin’s father bought a hamburger stand on Lick Pier in Ocean Park and soon moved up to owning a delicatessen near the beach. During the Second World War, Maltin recalled, it was quite a scene on weekend nights, when the coins started pouring into the jukebox. A popular song of the day was a Johnny Mercer romantic ballad, “And Angels Sing,” adapted from a klezmer tune by the trumpeter Ziggy Elman (né Harry Finkelman), sung by Martha Tilton, and performed by Elman with a band drawn from Benny Goodman’s orchestra.
As Maltin remembered it, “The Yehuden [Jews] were slapping the mustard on the pastrami-and-slaw-sands, the corned-beef-with-sauerkraut-sands, the chopped-liver-and-pastrami-sands, the club-sands. On and on went the music; and a hundred conductors behind the deli counter, waving their arms in the air and slapping the rye with mustard spoons.”32 Maltin’s father later bought a kosher butcher shop on Pico Boulevard (in the Jewish section known as Pico-Robertson) and transformed it into a deli called Bonds (since it was bought with war bonds) that was the largest kosher deli west of the Mississippi; it had a seating capacity of 350 people, with its own bakery and a banquet that seated 200 guests.
As Jews moved to other parts of Los Angeles in succeeding decades, other delicatessens sprang up, including Zucky’s in Santa Monica, the Stage Stop in Arcadia, and Art’s in the Valley. A delicatessen in South Gate called Kosher Murphy’s (trading on the long association between the Jews and Irish in popular culture) served kosher frankfurters and salami along with grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Levitoff’s, the “house of delicacies,” offered “hot corned beef, hot tongue, and hot pastromi” at its two locations, one in Beverly Hills and the other on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.
Jewish delicatessens were also scattered throughout the Deep South. Mazo’s in Charleston, South Carolina, was run by three brothers; the historian Marcie Cohen Ferris has found that there was “one uptown, a more ‘genteel’ operation downtown, and another location on Folly Beach.”33 Rosen’s Delirama opened in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1905; by the early 1960s, it was advertising itself, on its Jewish-star-shaped menus, as “the largest, most modern, and most complete strictly Kosher Food Mart in the country.”34 Other delicatessens in Memphis included Abraham’s (where the specialties included a pastrami Reuben and Hungarian meatballs on an onion roll served with hot slaw), Halpern’s, and Segal’s, which was a restaurant, caterer, and kosher butcher shop.35
As early as 1881, a grocery store in New Orleans had advertised “kosher smoked and pickled beef, sausages and tongues,” as well as goose grease, New York salt pickles, and Passover cakes. But only after the Second World War did the city boast a number of full-service kosher delis, including Pressner’s, which offered a “kosher smorgasbord” that included pastrami, tongue, salami, liverwurst, bologna, and an assortment of appetizing items such as smoked, fish, herring, and lox.36
In some southern cities, the delicatessen became a place of pilgrimage for both Jews and non-Jews. Harry Golden, who moved from New York to become the editor of the North Carolina Israelite, recalled the 1953 opening of the Brass Rail, a delicatessen in Charlotte. Church Street, the main business thoroughfare, “began to look like the Red Sea with wave after wave of Israelites crossing over each day for stuffed cabbage with raisin sauce, pumpernickel bread, chicken-in-the-pot, and boiled beef flanken.” As the church bells pealed at noon, “We’re Marching to Zion, Beautiful, Beautiful Zion,” Jews and non-Jews alike began “pouring across Church Street to Izzy and Jack who are already slicing the hot pastrami.”37
One southern delicatessen, however, became a flashpoint for racial animosity during the civil rights era. Charlie Lebedin opened a New York–style delicatessen in Atlanta called Leb’s that refused to serve African Americans; the owner even turned away the singer Harry Belafonte, who came to town to do a benefit concert. In 1964, a series of sit-ins and protests at the delicatessen, along with other eateries owned by Lebedin, induced the Ku Klux Klan to support the owner. But when Lebedin joined the KKK in a protest of a local dinner to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, the delicatessen lost the few remaining Jewish customers that it had.38
In 1941, when Judith Nelson Drucker’s father retired from the garment business and moved his family to Miami, delicatessen foods were still not readily available there. “So whenever my father would go up to New York, he’d come back with a big box of salamis.” The salami became, like them, a fish out of water. “We identified with the salami,” she ruefully recalled. Nevertheless, Washington Avenue on the southern part of Miami Beach, according to a contemporaneous press account, sported “numerous vegetarian and kosher restaurants, delicatessens, and cafeterias where a bagel with a spot of cream cheese is 30 cents (the charge is 45 cents with lox) and herring and chopped liver are daily items on the menu.”39
Sissi Perlman Feltman recalled that when her parents opened Joe’s Broadway Delicatessen in the 1930s, it was “one of the few places to go besides Joe’s Stone Crab,” which was a famous seafood restaurant that was also owned by Jews. As in New York, Sunday was delicatessen night for many Jewish patrons. “It wasn’t kosher, but it was an authentic deli,” Feltman noted. “We had our own bakery in the back where we made our rye bread, and we cured our own pickles in big wooden barrels. We cooked big pots of brisket, and my brother was always stationed in the front window, carving a big roast beef.”40
By the postwar era, the “Shtetl by the Sea,” as Miami Beach was nicknamed, increased its population significantly, with many elderly Jewish “snowbirds” who wintered in Florida and returned to New York in time for the spring holiday of Passover. Other famous Miami Beach delis included Pumpernik’s and Raphil’s. One writer waggishly called Miami Beach “an extension of Lindy’s, the Copa, Toots Shor’s and the Gaiety Delicatessen, with sand.”41 The idea that others besides Jews might want to inhabit Miami during the winter months angered one Jewish hotel operator, who barked, “I’m sick of hearing that. We made Miami Beach a corned beef and dill-pickle stand and that’s the way it’s going to be!”42
Wolfie’s, opened in Miami Beach in 1947 by Wolfie Cohen, sported a laid-back atmosphere with a singing waiter. The genial host, like his counterparts in New York, was known to approach a couple sitting at a table in stony silence; he would joke with them until they laughed and began conversing with each other. Jerry Cohen, the contractor who built Wolfie’s, issued a challenge: “Find me a Jewish person in Miami Beach who didn’t go to Wolfie’s. . . . The Jewish culture of Miami Beach was all about eating. Even if you went out to dinner, you stopped off at Wolfie’s before you went home. The way that New York had Lindy’s, Miami Beach had Wolfie’s.”43
The delicatessens in Miami Beach were, like their counterparts in New York and L.A., known for their celebrity clientele. Barbara Raichlen (the wife of the barbecue guru Steve Raichlen) told me that her father’s deli, Raphil’s, was the “place to see and be seen,” with luminaries such as the gangster Meyer Lansky and the movie star Marlon Brando eating in the restaurant and its walls plastered with pictures of famous people. Al Jolson was known to frequent Joe’s Broadway Deli. And it was in Pumpernik’s, which was eventually bought by Wolfie Cohen and renamed Rascal House, that the future CNN host Larry King (né Zeiger) first started doing live radio interviews with celebrities.
The Delicatessen Summers in the Catskills
Playing a Viennese authority on mountain climbing on the pioneering 1950s television variety show Your Show of Shows, the New York Jewish comedian Sid Caesar proudly recalled climbing Mount Everest in 1935 with five other climbers and an ample supply of corned beef and pastrami sandwiches. Actually, he admitted, his group didn’t reach the summit—or even the mountain. “How far did you get?” his interlocutor inquired. “About as far as Twenty-Third and Broadway,” Caesar replied, before they got caught in such terrible traffic that they could proceed no further.
Those Jews who stayed in New York did often succeed in bringing delicatessen sandwiches on trips with them, especially when they summered in the Catskills Mountains. Jews who could not afford to stay in Borscht Belt hotels—known for their gargantuan meals of traditional Jewish foods, including many deli-type delicacies—made do with rented bungalows called kochaleins (Yiddish for “cook for yourself”). Husbands would typically work during the week and come up to the mountains for the weekends. Each family, the satirist Harry Gersh recalled, arrived with a paper bag containing a dozen rolls, a loaf of pumpernickel bread, and a pound each of pastrami and corned beef. These were accompanied, according to Gersh, by pickles, mustard, sauerkraut, sour tomatoes, bagel, lox, cheese, and a whole white fish. While the women of the family took over the cooking from then on, everyone looked forward to the weekend, when the men would come bearing more delicatessen food. The fathers, Gersh disclosed, packed their clothes in loose packages and filled their suitcases with food from the delicatessen and appetizing stores. This was to keep the landlord, who profited from selling food to the tenants, in the dark.44 The New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, whose family summered in the Catskills when she was a girl, recalled that when weekend visitors arrived, “the customary gift was delicatessen,” along with “towering boxes of cake.”45
There were also Jewish delicatessens that opened up in the Catskills, including Kaplan’s in Monticello, Singer’s in Liberty, Cousin’s in Ellenville, and Frank and Bob’s in South Fallsburg.46 The best known was Kaplan’s on Broadway, famed for its immense sign with ten thousand flashing lightbulbs; performers were introduced in the hotels as “Broadway entertainment” only because they had eaten at Kaplan’s just before the show.47 Opened by Moe and Annie Kaplan in the years following the Second World War, the kosher-style deli got meat from Hebrew National and bread from local bakeries. (It also served cheese blintzes and cheesecake, but only with separate silverware and on separate dishes.) Among the waitresses were Ricki and Sari Kaplan, the nieces of the owners; their only other option for work, given limited opportunities for women, was the job of telephone operator. Celebrities such as Perry Como and Neil Sedaka ate at Kaplan’s after performing in the local hotels. The comic Mac Robbins recalled that the entertainers from the hotels would take guests to a nearby delicatessen in exchange for a free lunch.48
In the summer, the bulk of the clientele at Kaplan’s were those who lived in the bungalow colonies, along with parents visiting their children in the many summer camps in the area. But some customers would drive up from the Bronx on a lark to have a sandwich. The tables were large; strangers were often seated next to one another. The place got so busy that Sari Kaplan recalled that her sister would slip her a “potato chip” sandwich so that she could have a bite to eat in between serving tables. The one rule of family life, she said, was that “no one gets married, gives birth, or dies during the summer”—there was simply no time to do anything but take care of the business. In the winter, college students stopped at Kaplan’s on their way to and from upstate universities such as Cornell and the state university campuses at Cortland and Binghamton. The entire front room of the store was decorated with college pennants; you got a free salami if you brought in a pennant that was not already up on the wall. The “college banner special” was chopped liver and roast beef on a seeded roll.49
Corned Beef in Space
While Jews went “up the mountains” and all over the country, often bringing delicatessen sandwiches along for the ride, it was a corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s Delicatessen in Cocoa Beach, Florida, that traveled the farthest distance of any delicatessen sandwich in history. In 1965, at the height of the space race with the Soviet Union, there was a fierce competition to be the first country to land a man on the moon. Gemini 3 was manned by John Young and Virgil Grissom; a fellow astronaut named Wally Schirra, who was known to be a prankster, had given Young the sandwich to smuggle aboard. This violated numerous rules of space travel because NASA was testing out various kinds of food to see if they could be safely consumed in space without either flying into the astronauts’ windpipes or into the mechanical controls of the spacecraft.
The Russians, by contrast, believed that it was important for astronauts to experience some pleasure and relaxation through having good food on board and had already experimented with giving their astronauts toothpaste tubes of pâté, cheese, chocolate, and coffee, along with tiny pieces of bread, candied fruit jelly, and bits of salami. Indeed, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, on his first voyage in space, gobbled a bite-sized salami sandwich.50 (It was important for astronauts to be supplied with high-quality food because, as the historian Jane Levi has noted, the shift of fluid to the head tends to hamper the senses of both taste and smell, and American astronauts, as opposed to Russian cosmonauts, had been noticeably skinnier and weaker, with less of their food eaten, when they returned to Earth.)51
In the middle of the Gemini flight, Young suddenly inquired if his partner was interested in a corned beef sandwich. After the astonished Grissom took a bite, he noticed nervously that crumbs of rye bread were starting to float around the cabin and that the smell of the beef was beginning to permeate the ship. “It became instantly obvious,” he later recalled, “that our life-support system wasn’t prepared to cope with the high powered aroma of genuine kosher corned beef.” He reluctantly stowed the sandwich away.52
After the spacecraft landed, the astronauts were called on the carpet for their breach of the gastronomic rules of space. Representative George Shipley of Illinois complained that the sandwich incident was “disgusting.” Comparing the spacecraft to a surgeon’s operating room, he was appalled that the sandwich was permitted to pollute the sterilized space. George Mueller, the director of the Gemini Program, responded with a straight face that NASA frowned on “unauthorized objects such as sandwiches going aboard the spacecraft” and assured the congressmen that the agency had “taken steps, obviously, to prevent recurrence of corned beef sandwiches in future flights.”53
In the end, the sandwich incident was not so much overstuffed as overblown. But it showed how iconic the delicatessen sandwich had become. What if the Gemini 3 had ended up on another planet, and aliens had picked up the corned beef sandwich and concluded that it was the staple food of earthlings?
The Second World War changed the relationship that Jews had to their own traditional fare, exposing them to other types of food and opening up new vistas for Jewish life in other parts of the country. Even as the delicatessens that Jews imported to other parts of the country enabled them to continue to gather and to connect to their heritage, wartime rationing taught Jews that they could do without delicatessen food. In the next chapter, we will see how upward mobility—of the social and economic kind, rather than the mountain-climbing or space-travel varieties—changed the relationship of Jews to delicatessen food even more, ultimately leaving the delicatessen in the dust.