During the summer, in the Catskills resort community where I grew up during the ’50s, getting great Jewish food was not a problem. The hotels on our side of the mountains in Fleischmanns, N.Y., were dying, but there were still enough city people that it was not hard to find smoked fish and salamis and decent rye bread.
In the off-season, it was a different story. The small community of year-round Jews, to which my family belonged, had to return to the mother ship, New York City, for supplies. We went to Houston Street on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood where my father was born.
Visiting what we called the appetizing stores was not the main reason for these trips. You came in to visit family or go shopping in the morning, see a show in the afternoon. My view of the city was shaped by my mother’s pronouncements of the indisputable facts, which she considered to be whatever came out of her mouth.
“You know how you tell a New York woman,” she’d say, before leaping out of the car at 34th Street to make for Ohrbach’s, a store famous for knocking off Paris fashions and offering them for a fraction of the price, a tactic she much admired. “When the wind is blowing and a New York woman has the choice between holding down her skirt and holding on to her hat, she holds on to her hat.”
Then she was out of the car, for the three or four hours when she could be one.
At age 8 I was too young for the rigors of Ohrbach’s. I went with my father on the food run, a special time for me as my father had no particular interest in kids. The first stop was Katz’s, on East Houston, where he had a pastrami on rye and I had a turkey sandwich and we both had a Dr. Brown’s, cream for him, black cherry for me. Then we went shopping, getting salami at Katz’s, where the slogan, “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army,” delighted me. Then, proceeding along Houston, to a pickle shop the name of which I cannot remember, and to Yonah Shimmel’s for knishes. Sometimes to Russ & Daughters, which had vats of creamed herring and rows of small white fish with gold crinkled skin and fat yellow dried apricots dipped in chocolate and was very fine.
My father was not a happy man. The death of his father when he was 19 forced him to quit college and take over a sagging Catskills boarding house and dairy farm. It had taken happiness out of him, if it was ever in him. But he was happy when he was buying food on the Lower East Side. I understand it now better than I did then: It was the happiness of a working man when he can afford to go into a fancy food store and buy not the basics, but the luxury items, for his family.
I never doubted the common wisdom that the oldest child feels most responsible, because I saw it in my family. First at the boarding house my father and his younger brothers ran with their mother, then, when I was about 10, at the building supply company they started. My father was the worrier, the planner; his younger brother Artie was the muscle, delighted when the opportunity arose to throw an annoying customer out; their youngest brother Hymie, the patient and sensitive one, was the detail man.
Now the three brothers are all gone and I am the oldest and my three younger cousins, Hymie’s children, have taken over the business.
We have our own food tradition. It happens at least twice a year, when I drive my car to the country in the fall to be put into storage or in the spring when I pick it up.
The tradition has varied a bit over the years as the Jon Vie Bakery in the Village, which had the best rugulah, went out, and as Murray’s Bagels, the bagel store I prefer, came in. But the touchstone is Russ & Daughters, on the same strip on East Houston I went to with my father. My order doesn’t change much: two pounds of nova; a large whitefish or two, boned; a pound of chopped liver; two big containers of creamed herring; cream cheese with chives; cream cheese without chives; a half pound of traditional belly lox, which is so salty you’re thirsty all day, but is the way my cousins and I remember lox so we like it. Two boxes of rugulah, traditional and chocolate. Sometimes some beautiful dried fruit dipped in chocolate.
I get to the family business around noon on Saturday, just after they close and my cousins are waiting for the laggard delivery trucks to come in. My cousin Steven wipes off his desk and covers it with paper towels and my cousin Lisa gets the tomatoes and onions from the pantry in the back office and slices them and I unpack the food. My cousin Jason and Lisa and I sit at the partners’ desk our fathers used to share; which was ruined in a flood and my cousins had refinished at absurd expense. There is a lot of comment on the food. When Steven says this particular whitefish is excellent, really excellent, and puts away a third of it, I am as happy as if I had made it.
We sit around and tell family stories, some of which only I, as the oldest, remember, some of which we know only second hand:
The racehorse the three brothers bought, which looked to be a winner, till it bolted the fence at the county fair in Delhi. The time Steven, age 16, on his first delivery run, was driving a five-ton truck down McKinley Hollow Road and the brakes failed and our Uncle Artie, seated beside him, reached over and slowly pulled the emergency brake, cool as you please. A farm dog named Ike. A hired man named Mike. The time Hymie paid a quarter for a box at an auction and opened it to find a litter of puppies. The time – this was before any of us were born – Artie, on a bet, slung a calf over his shoulders and was carrying it up the steep hill to the barn when our grandmother saw him and hollered in Yiddish, “Artie, put down the cow!”
I always have difficulty, during these lunches, getting my mind around the fact that my little cousins, whom I used to baby-sit, run a business that employs 18 people and are buying cement trucks; that our fathers and uncles are gone and we are the grown-ups.
“I still can’t get use to them not being here,” I say. “It feels like they’re still here.”
“We say that all the time,” Jason says. “We expect any minute they’ll come walking through the door and say, ‘O.K., you did a pretty good job, but we’ll be taking over now.’ ”
We eat whitefish and bagels and lox until we could explode and then we pack it up. The cousins divide the food, taking some home, leaving some at the business for lunch. I go back to the city, knowing they will be eating it and enjoying it for the next few days and I feel pretty good. Like my father felt, I suppose.
source: nytimes.com
