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Where Is the Schmaltz of Yesteryear?Christmas Eve in a Jewish deli.

By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007, at 3:10 PM ET
2nd Avenue Deli. Click image to expand.

When I first heard about the rebirth of the Second Avenue Deli, I had a feeling the place was stalking me. For years when I lived downtown, this pastrami palace—one of New York City's last iconic, non-tourist-attraction temples of schmaltz (not the metaphoric kind but the liquid chicken fat that infuses so many of its dishes)—was a siren song. For this nonobservant Jew it was perhaps the most tangible aspect of my Jewish identity, a Proustian connection to the vision of shtetl life one finds in Isaac Bashevis Singer's work.

Not just the food but the whole aura of the place, the locale in the heart of the former Yiddish theater district where you could find gold stars with the names of the one-time luminaries of that once thriving, now virtually vanished world, embedded—in imitation of the Hollywood Walk of Fame—in the gritty sidewalk of lower Second Avenue in front of the deli.

In addition I felt some karmic connection with the place, as it was located just two blocks from the hospital where I'd been born; somehow I felt it had been patiently waiting for me to return from the WASPy environs of that college in New Haven, Conn., to see me claim my birthright mess of pottage, or in this case potted brisket.

Although this kosher meat version of a Jewish deli faced off against a rival, equally iconic kosher dairy establishment, the tiny but revered B&H Dairy restaurant across the street, it was the rich, meaty, stewlike amalgams at the Second Avenue Deli that kept drawing me back: the giblet-studded chicken fricassee just like my mother made, the last relic of her family's past in the Pale of Settlement. (Although, truth be told, Swanson TV dinners were her specialty.)

And the stuffed cabbage and the stuffed derma (if you don't know what the latter is you don't want to), the stuffed breast of veal, everything stuffed and soused with heavy gravies—I couldn't stay away. All transcended by "the Second's" inimitable cholent, a food so dense it deserves a special place on the periodic table of elements somewhere between lead and plutonium.

By the time the deli closed in 2006, I was stuffed too. Back in 1998 I'd moved farther up Second Avenue, and it had taken me several years to lose the weight I gained from the close proximity to the chicken liver and chicken fat.

But I didn't regret it—even after I discovered that there was better chopped liver and smoked sable at the Upper West Side's funky-chic deli Barney Greengrass. Philip Roth ended his best novel, Operation Shylock, there, and I engaged in a shamefully trivial but bitter three-way feud in print with Daphne Merkin and New York magazine's Gael Greene over whether Barney's chopped liver was the best in the city. (My position was triumphantly vindicated by the authority on New York Jewish culture, I.B. Singer's old paper the Forward, but Daphne and I only recently reconciled. I don't think Gael Greene will ever speak to me again.)

So, yes, I'm a little over-the-top passionate about these matters—overcompensating I'm sure for my inability to be more than a secular humanist lover of my fellow Jews and Jewish culture. And despite my defection to Barney's chopped liver, the Second was always first in my heart.

In fact, the moments I was most acutely conscious of my Jewish identity were the Christmas Eves I spent at the Second Avenue Deli, a place where Jews congregated to huddle against the alienating loneliness of a Christmas-song-saturated city. "Silent Night" for us was a noisy night of chomping and slurping, a steamy communion with the matzo ball soup that so far surpassed the neon yellow concoctions of the theme-park Jewish delis on Broadway. There was something so pure and unalloyed about the ethereally pale essence of the Second's soup and the perfect texture of its matzo balls—not too fluffy, not too dense, just chewy and grainy enough—which has been the subject of more Talmudic disputation than many salient Torah passages.

And then it closed. Some say the spirit went out of it when some thug murdered owner Abe Lebewohl on the street near his restaurant in 1996. The perp was never caught, and for 10 years it stayed open with the wanted poster prominently affixed to its door posts, greeting you with unalloyed tragedy whenever you entered its doors. (It's there in the new place, too.)

But this past summer, word got out it was going to reopen on the iconic Noo Yawk corner of 33rd and Third, which was a little spooky because I was at 33rd and Second, which is why I say I felt the place was stalking me. I could feel my waistline expanding as I approached it on the morning of opening day, just a week before Christmas Eve.

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Photograph of the Second Avenue Deli by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
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