………
DOUBLEDAY, 1999
(available in paperback from Vintage, 2000)
IN CONTEMPORARY BROOKLYN, Lionel Essrog, an orphan with Tourette’s syndrome, contends with his tics, uncontrollable verbal outbursts, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Lionel is one of the “Minna men”—four orphans recruited as teenagers from St. Vincent’s Home for Boys for employment by small-time criminal Frank Minna. Minna has a soft spot for Lionel, affectionately calls him Freakshow, and tries to help him understand his neurological affliction.
A surrogate family for Lionel, the Minna men ostensibly work for Minna’s detective and limousine agency, a front for a petty criminal operation. In reality, the boys spend most of their time moving stolen goods, although Frank does provide them with some detective training. When Minna is murdered, the boys are devastated and set out to find his killer.
Events quickly spin out of control after Minna’s death. Two of the Minna men compete to fill Minna’s shoes, the third ends up in jail, and Frank’s widow, Julia, leaves town quickly after the murder. Determined to solve the crime, Lionel struggles to keep words straight in his head and his twisted speech under control when he speaks with associates of Minna’s, two older men known as “the clients,” and a police detective. Lionel follows clues through Brooklyn streets to a Manhattan Buddhist retreat, and eventually to a Japanese-owned restaurant and sea urchin harvesting operation on the coast of Maine.
Lionel presents an intimate, poignant, and humorous portrait of Tourette’s syndrome. His mistreatment at the hands of some and the compassion and kindness shown him by others are at the center of this unconventional detective story.
Food “mellows” Lionel, and sandwiches are his obsession. Stakeouts are “gastronomic occasions”—opportunities to devour sandwiches, with knees tucked under the dashboard, “elbows jammed against the steering wheel, chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.”
Even Lionel’s eating habits are guided by his compulsions. He chooses quantities by lucky numbers—six White Castle burgers, five Papaya Czar hot dogs—and he counts how many bites he takes of each.
Hot dogs and hamburgers will do when he has the “itch for something between two slices of bread,” but what Lionel really yearns for are sandwiches from Zeod’s, the fictional night market on Brooklyn’s Smith Street, where he can indulge his fantasies of turkey and Thousand Island dressing on a kaiser roll, peperoncini and provolone heroes, and horseradish and roast beef on rye. At Zeod’s, the meat is sliced “extraordinarily thin” and draped to make a sandwich with the “fluffy compressibility” he craves. Ultimately, it is a Zeod’s sandwich order that provides Lionel with a clue to the mystery of Frank’s death.
In the novel’s final pages, Lionel admits he doesn’t mind driving customers to the International Terminal at Kennedy Airport for one of the “great secret sandwiches of New York,” chicken shwarma from an Israeli food stand, “carved fresh off the roasting pin, stuffed into pita, and slathered in grilled peppers, onions and tahini.” He recommends it highly, “if you’re ever out that way.”
Naturally, Jonathan Lethem suggested a sandwich recipe to pair with Motherless Brooklyn and contributed his thoughts on sandwiches to The Book Club Cookbook in a short essay, “Books Are Sandwiches.”
Books are sandwiches. Between their bready boards lies a filling of information-dense leaves nestled together, an accumulation of layers for cumulative effect. Ratio is everything. Proportion. Too many slices of either meat or cheese can wreck a sandwich’s middle passages, the overused fundamental creating a bricky, discursive dry spot in what ought to have been a moist sequence. Too much aioli or chutney or roasted red pepper (always use those soaked in olive oil, never water) can gush, drench bread, run down the hand, and destroy a wristwatch. Yet other sandwiches, the tours-de-force, thrive on excess, disunity, a peperoncino or cherry tomato bursting through the door like a character with a gun in his hand, a rant of watercress or filibuster of Brie, an unexpected chapter of flaked oregano inserted like a flashback or dream in italics.
We dislike instinctively those who turn a sandwich and gnaw vertically, against the grain, wrecking the spine and architecture of a sandwich. Their disregard for narrative sequence is as violent as spoiling the plot of a book by gossiping in advance of the outcome. In each sandwich inheres an intrinsic eating speed, shameful to violate. Eating more and understanding(?) less? Slow down!
Hors d’oeuvres on tiny crackers are poems, always seeking perfection in elusive gestures, annoying to try to make a meal of. Hot dogs, ice cream sandwiches, and Oreo cookies are like children’s picture books, bright and goonish, drawing the eater’s eye like a magpie’s to something glinting—the clowns of sandwiches. Hamburgers are clowns too, anonymous clowns that pile out of cars, frequently dwarves. Despite the propensity to make hamburgers ever bigger, to boast of ounces, the default hamburger is a White Castle—as Wimpy knows, burgers are eaten in serial, like mystery novels, eye always on the last page, and the burger to follow.
Sandwiches are too often served in public. In fact the reader of sandwiches is essentially engaged in a private act, and becomes steadily irritable at our scrutiny. The Earl of Sandwich may have been a pool player, but the reader of sandwiches has no time for us or the ringing telephone, and only one hand free—for a book.
Ahmad Samhan and Faried Assad, both Palestinian-Americans, are co-owners of Zaytoons, a popular Middle Eastern restaurant with two locations in Brooklyn, one on Smith Street, the location of the fictional Zeod’s market in Motherless Brooklyn. Samhan says the chicken shwarma, from a recipe passed on by a Syrian friend, is their number-one bestseller: Zaytoons sells 140 pounds of the sandwiches daily.
For the traditional Middle Eastern chicken shwarma sandwich, marinated chicken breasts are cooked slowly on a vertical rotisserie. The tender, flavorful meat is then shaved into thin slices and tucked into fresh pita bread with tahini, baba ghanoush or hummus, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, and Middle Eastern pickles.
While Zaytoons prepares rotisserie chicken for their shwarma and serves the sandwich with homemade tahini in freshly baked pita bread, Samhan says you can easily make a delicious version with baked chicken and store-bought pita bread and tahini sauce. Samhan adds, “As Grandma always says, ‘Sahtein,’ meaning, ‘Eat in good health.’” We think Lionel would go out of his way for a taste of Zaytoons’s shwarma, a perfect companion for Motherless Brooklyn.
NOTE: Middle Eastern pickles are sour pickles, usually made from small, cornichon-sized cucumbers, and are available at any Middle Eastern grocery. You may substitute good-quality dill pickles. Store-bought tahini is often unsalted, so you may need additional salt to season the sandwiches.
For the sandwiches |
|
2 pounds boned, skinned chicken breasts |
4 large (10-inch) rounds pita bread |
1 tablespoon kosher salt |
½–¾ cup tahini, hummus, or baba ghanoush |
½ cup white vinegar |
Salt |
½ cup vegetable oil |
2 medium tomatoes, sliced |
1½ teaspoons oregano |
1 small red onion, sliced |
1½ teaspoons ground black pepper |
Middle Eastern pickles (see note) |
1½ teaspoons paprika |
|
1 teaspoon ground cardamom |
|
1 teaspoon ground cumin |
|
5 teaspoons minced garlic |
To marinate the chicken: Trim the chicken to remove any excess fat. Moisten the chicken slightly with water and rub well on all sides with kosher salt. Wash the salt off thoroughly with hot water. Pat the chicken dry.
In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar and oil. Add spices and blend. Add the chicken and turn to coat. Cover, refrigerate, and let marinate for at least 6 hours, preferably overnight.
To prepare the sandwiches: Remove the chicken from the refrigerator 1 hour before cooking. Preheat oven to 350°F. Arrange the chicken breasts in a single layer in a baking dish. Pour in enough marinade to half cover the chicken. Bake until cooked through, about 25 minutes. Baste frequently with additional marinade to keep top of chicken moist.
Slice each pita round in half to form 2 pockets. Spread the inside of the pockets with 2–3 tablespoons tahini, hummus, or baba ghanoush. Slice the warm chicken as thinly as possible and fill sandwiches (about one-half breast, or ½ pound, of chicken per round). Sprinkle with salt to taste, and add the tomatoes, onion, and pickles.
Yield: 4 sandwiches
“Members of the club were selected on the basis of both their literary and culinary abilities,” says Joseph Ginocchio of his Santa Fe, New Mexico, book club whose four married couples discuss fiction over dinner.
The meals started out modestly, but quickly escalated to multicourse dinners. “Each successive person had outdone the last until the meeting turned into a full-course feast,” says Ginocchio. The club started with a reading list dominated by classics, but moved to more contemporary fiction. Of the more than one hundred books they have read together, they name Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn as a preferred reading selection.
The book club thought Motherless Brooklyn, told from the point of view of an orphan with Tourette’s syndrome, provided an unusual and interesting perspective. “Motherless Brooklyn was tremendously poignant,” says Ginocchio, “and we all had great sympathy for the central character. Such human warmth among the characters appealed to us. Yet it also had a comic element and was different from many of the books we have read.”
The Silicon Valley Book Club, with members in the San Francisco Bay area, enjoyed the “tiny” White Castle hamburgers hostess Karen Wynbeek purchased from a local grocery store when they discussed Motherless Brooklyn. “Lionel had a bag of White Castle hamburgers in the car,” says Wynbeek, “and the description of the burgers even mentioned the square shape, the holes in them, and the onions.” Wynbeek also served other New York food: lox and bagels, kosher dill pickles, and New York cheesecake.
For their discussion of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, the Book Club of the Brown University Club in New York dined on burgers, fries, salad, and classic New York cheesecake at Junior’s, a Brooklyn culinary landmark noted for its cheesecake. “Considering that Junior’s is located close to where most of the events of Motherless Brooklyn occurred, we thought it was an apt choice,” says John Kwok, a coordinator of the book club. “Most of the characters in the book ate burgers, so those of us who ordered hamburgers felt it was a very appropriate choice.”
