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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

(Continued from page 1)

In some ways things were the same. The matzo brei (a pancake of eggs, onions, and chopped matzo) I had for breakfast that morning was heartwarming, the chicken soup I had for lunch unchanged in its clarity, and the egg barley—an entirely underrated concoction of plumped barley grains, delicately sautéed onions, and assertive black mushrooms with a subtle touch of schmaltz—just superb.

At dinner the next day I did have some nitpicking complaints. The chicken fricassee that used to contain a stingy but welcome number of tasty, rubbery textured chicken giblets had none, as in not a single one.

Still, the new deli has been a smashing success. The day after opening day I tried to go there at lunchtime but found it thronged by hungry mavens in a line that stretched half a block long. It was almost like Jewish Woodstock!

But after the initial rush I found there was an aspect of going there that had changed, at least for me. Or maybe I had changed. Spending time there over the week before Christmas Eve I found myself increasingly fixated on the array of framed photographs from the Yiddish theater days that line the walls of the back room. Some of them depicted actors in traditional European Jewish garb, but the ones that got to me were the photos of Yiddish actors and actresses in then-modern dress, circa the 1920s. There were these flashy, sharp-dressed farceurs who recalled the con-artist lotharios of Singer's New York stories. And the pert and perky, flapper-type, liberated Yiddish theater ingénues, some of them making sly eyes at the sharpies onstage, some even arrayed in Rockette-like kick-line formations.

There was an inexpressible joy and hopefulness to those photos when they were taken, a buoyant sense that the actors could combine their Yiddish theatricality with Roaring Twenties Americana, that made me wish I'd known them and known the language and could have experienced the pleasure they radiated. The hopefulness that came from not knowing that within a decade or so, the fertile civilization of Yiddish Poland, which had given birth to and sustained their art, would be cut off at the root, slaughtered in the camps. The Yiddish theater in New York withered like an amputated limb. (Indeed when the original Second Avenue Deli opened in 1954, the Yiddish theater was already on its last legs, so there was a Remembrance of Things Past aspect to it from the beginning.)

I hate to bring the tragedy of the European Jews into this, but that's what I mean when I say my reaction to it might have had something to do with the way I changed. In the years since I'd moved away from close proximity to the Second, I'd published a book called Explaining Hitler and edited an anthology called Those Who Forget the Past on contemporary anti-Semitism.

Looking at the hopefulness of the Yiddish theater boulevardiers and flâneurs through those retrospective lenses evoked something infinitely sad. It gave a kind of theme-park vibe to the place, a whistling-past-the-graveyard, schmaltzy nostalgia for schmaltz. With nothing left of that Golden Civilization—except a few noble revival companies, our only means of communion with it is the food.

I was glad the food was there. I was glad they still offered three kinds of tongue—regular, center cut, and "tip of the tongue." But the real tongue—the Yiddish tongue that flourished so brilliantly and whose last gleams can be found most heartbreakingly in Singer's masterpiece, Shadows on the Hudson—that tongue has been cut off.

It's funny, over the holidays I found myself transfixed by a YouTube version of a Christmas song I never really knew before. In general, I am no fan of Christmas songs, except Darlene Love's "Christmas"—which, of course, was produced by a Jew named Phil Spector. But this one (which I found linked from a Bob Dylan Web site) was so mournfully Irish, it might as well have been Jewish. It's the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl doing "Fairytale of New York," and it's the saddest, most heartbreaking Christmas song you'll ever hear.

I was listening to it all throughout the days leading up to Christmas Eve, when I made the block-long pilgrimage to the Second on Third. I got myself some egg barley and matzo ball soup at the counter and couldn't get the song out of my head. The song—which is also about once-hopeful immigrants who lost their dreams—made me think of those Yiddish flâneurs and flappers on the wall, and the doomed "Fairytale of New York" they lived in the Golden Age of Yiddish culture in this city.

When you go to the Second (and I think you should), pay your respects to those lost souls on the wall who never knew what was coming. And make sure you tell the waiter you want giblets in your chicken fricassee.

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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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