Food: A yummy trip through deli-land

One of my last stops in New York City before heading to the airport is a visit to Artie’s Deli on Broadway. My husband’s “care package” includes a few pounds of both extra-lean corn beef and pastrami, a loaf of real Jewish rye, real deli mustard. I freeze the meat and pack everything in my carry-on. Now that’s a real welcome back dinner!

In Israel, however, I haven’t found one real deli. How is it possible for a Jewish country NOT to have even one real deli? I salivate over fresh-roasted thin-carved turkey breast on good NY rye, slathered with thick Russian dressing, a bowl of sour pickles and another of good coleslaw. My husband dreams about real NY corn beef and pastrami.

But here? No such thing. I roast my own turkey breast, so I’m covered in that department, but I’m not up to what my grandmother and great-grandmother did – making their own corn beef, pastrami and pickles. You can season and broil (to the rare-ish state) a nice piece of sinta, and thin slice it for sandwiches the next day, but it isn’t the same thing.

Only back a few weeks, I’m already having deli day dreams, so this JTA book review by Sue Fishkoff, published in the Jerusalem Post here came at exactly the right time. Coming out in August is David Sax’s “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen.”

Yum. Oh, to be in a city with one of these major destinations!

This one just went to the top of my book wish list.

When it comes to Jewish delicatessen, 30-year-old David Sax is the go-to guy. A longtime deli aficionado, the annoyingly trim Sax spent three years eating his way through more than 150 Jewish delis to research “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen,” a wistful, riotously funny paean to this quintessential slice of American Jewish history.

The book, which will be published in October by Houghton Miflin Harcourt, is a delicious romp through a fast-disappearing world.

In 1931, Sax reports, there were 2,000 delis in New York City, three-quarters of them kosher. Today, Sax says, his research turns up 25 Jewish delis in the city, two-thirds of which are kosher. A similar pattern has followed across North America, with city after city sounding the death knell for its last traditional deli. Sax guesses there are just a few hundred left worldwide, most of them in the United States.

“The Jewish deli is dying,” Sax told JTA. “Each time I hear a deli closes, something inside me dies.”

The kosher pastrami sandwich may date from the late 1880s, as Fishkoff mentions writer Patricia Volk who told Sax that her great-grandfather was the first to make one. German immigrants brought this type of business to New York in the 1820s, according to Sax. About half-a-century later, MOTs were making kosher variations to the treif foods, such as schmaltz instead of lard, etc.

There’s a discussion of kosher versus kosher-style (which isn’t) and that the high cost of kosher meat means few places can afford it.

But most of this book is about food, the gloriously fatty, heart-stopping Ashkenazi cuisine that is the signature of the Jewish deli: braised brisket in wine sauce; pickled tongue; cabbage rolls in sweet-and-sour tomato; matjes herring; and, of course, the litany of “k’s,” the knishes, kreplach, kugel and kvetching.

He saves his highest praise for the deli meats: corned beef pickled and boiled in vats of brine; pastrami, lovingly rubbed with secret spice mixtures, then smoked and steamed to perfection. The way to suss out a good deli, he says, is to order the matzah ball soup and whatever deli meat the city specializes in, be it corned beef, tongue, pastrami or smoked beef, a softer, gentler Canadian variant.

Delis are nostalgia, as we remember our childhoods, visits with grandparents or great-grandparents. I remember those horrible-by-today’s-standards absoutely delicious greasy thick-cut deli fries back on Avenue D in East Flatbush. By the time you got a bag home, you were covered in dripping oil. The indescribable taste was like nothing else anywhere.

I don’t want wasabi-shmeared corn beef or turkey breast. For wasabi, I go to any number of excellent Japanese restaurants in Tel Aviv. I don’t need fushion deli-Asian. I’m a purist when it comes to this kind of food. I may just decide to put up a barrel (well, maybe a glass jar!) of pickles or a hunk of meat, if I get desparate enough.

And if you are looking for great Jewish pastrami or cornbeef in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, there’s a fantastic kosher restaurant in Mountain View (the home of Google) called The Kitchen Table where the young brilliant chef makes his own pickled meats and pickles. The highest compliment I can pay to The Kitchen Table is that we went there three times and most people didn’t even know it was kosher. The food was creative, fresh and excellent. The chef even makes kosher lamb bacon – now that was a BLT to remember! Since our visits, I’ve been making yam fries. Visit the Table’s website for the menu, and make sure to eat there when you’re in Google’s neighborhood.

The article ends with a lament about the disappearing delis of San Francisco, and that it’s a shanda for only two delis to serve a region with more than 350,000 Jews. What about here in Israel, where there are millions of people without even one deli?

Friends and relatives planning a Tel Aviv trip might want to visit their good neighborhood deli and bring some along for us.

Oh, and the other delicacy lacking is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (the bags of mini’s are best). Hint hint!

Food: A yummy trip through deli-land

One of my last stops in New York City before heading to the airport is a visit to Artie’s Deli on Broadway. My husband’s “care package” includes a few pounds of both extra-lean corn beef and pastrami, a loaf of real Jewish rye, real deli mustard. I freeze the meat and pack everything in my carry-on. Now that’s a real welcome back dinner!

In Israel, however, I haven’t found one real deli. How is it possible for a Jewish country NOT to have even one real deli? I salivate over fresh-roasted thin-carved turkey breast on good NY rye, slathered with thick Russian dressing, a bowl of sour pickles and another of good coleslaw. My husband dreams about real NY corn beef and pastrami.

But here? No such thing. I roast my own turkey breast, so I’m covered in that department, but I’m not up to what my grandmother and great-grandmother did – making their own corn beef, pastrami and pickles. You can season and broil (to the rare-ish state) a nice piece of sinta, and thin slice it for sandwiches the next day, but it isn’t the same thing.

Only back a few weeks, I’m already having deli day dreams, so this JTA book review by Sue Fishkoff, published in the Jerusalem Post here came at exactly the right time. Coming out in August is David Sax’s “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen.”

Yum. Oh, to be in a city with one of these major destinations!

This one just went to the top of my book wish list.

When it comes to Jewish delicatessen, 30-year-old David Sax is the go-to guy. A longtime deli aficionado, the annoyingly trim Sax spent three years eating his way through more than 150 Jewish delis to research “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen,” a wistful, riotously funny paean to this quintessential slice of American Jewish history.

The book, which will be published in October by Houghton Miflin Harcourt, is a delicious romp through a fast-disappearing world.

In 1931, Sax reports, there were 2,000 delis in New York City, three-quarters of them kosher. Today, Sax says, his research turns up 25 Jewish delis in the city, two-thirds of which are kosher. A similar pattern has followed across North America, with city after city sounding the death knell for its last traditional deli. Sax guesses there are just a few hundred left worldwide, most of them in the United States.

“The Jewish deli is dying,” Sax told JTA. “Each time I hear a deli closes, something inside me dies.”

The kosher pastrami sandwich may date from the late 1880s, as Fishkoff mentions writer Patricia Volk who told Sax that her great-grandfather was the first to make one. German immigrants brought this type of business to New York in the 1820s, according to Sax. About half-a-century later, MOTs were making kosher variations to the treif foods, such as schmaltz instead of lard, etc.

There’s a discussion of kosher versus kosher-style (which isn’t) and that the high cost of kosher meat means few places can afford it.

But most of this book is about food, the gloriously fatty, heart-stopping Ashkenazi cuisine that is the signature of the Jewish deli: braised brisket in wine sauce; pickled tongue; cabbage rolls in sweet-and-sour tomato; matjes herring; and, of course, the litany of “k’s,” the knishes, kreplach, kugel and kvetching.

He saves his highest praise for the deli meats: corned beef pickled and boiled in vats of brine; pastrami, lovingly rubbed with secret spice mixtures, then smoked and steamed to perfection. The way to suss out a good deli, he says, is to order the matzah ball soup and whatever deli meat the city specializes in, be it corned beef, tongue, pastrami or smoked beef, a softer, gentler Canadian variant.

Delis are nostalgia, as we remember our childhoods, visits with grandparents or great-grandparents. I remember those horrible-by-today’s-standards absoutely delicious greasy thick-cut deli fries back on Avenue D in East Flatbush. By the time you got a bag home, you were covered in dripping oil. The indescribable taste was like nothing else anywhere.

I don’t want wasabi-shmeared corn beef or turkey breast. For wasabi, I go to any number of excellent Japanese restaurants in Tel Aviv. I don’t need fushion deli-Asian. I’m a purist when it comes to this kind of food. I may just decide to put up a barrel (well, maybe a glass jar!) of pickles or a hunk of meat, if I get desparate enough.

And if you are looking for great Jewish pastrami or cornbeef in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, there’s a fantastic kosher restaurant in Mountain View (the home of Google) called The Kitchen Table where the young brilliant chef makes his own pickled meats and pickles. The highest compliment I can pay to The Kitchen Table is that we went there three times and most people didn’t even know it was kosher. The food was creative, fresh and excellent. The chef even makes kosher lamb bacon – now that was a BLT to remember! Since our visits, I’ve been making yam fries. Visit the Table’s website for the menu, and make sure to eat there when you’re in Google’s neighborhood.

The article ends with a lament about the disappearing delis of San Francisco, and that it’s a shanda for only two delis to serve a region with more than 350,000 Jews. What about here in Israel, where there are millions of people without even one deli?

Friends and relatives planning a Tel Aviv trip might want to visit their good neighborhood deli and bring some along for us.

Oh, and the other delicacy lacking is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (the bags of mini’s are best). Hint hint!

Ohio: The Cincinnati-Kennedy connection

As the country mourns the loss of Sen. Edward Kennedy, one family feels the loss even more personally.

Cincinnati.com carried the story of the family of Boris Katz, now a top researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His daughter Jessica was called “The Littlest Refusenik,” and thanks to Kennedy, the family allowed to move from Moscow to Boston for life-saving treatment.

“Who can say why a congressman [Tom Luken] and people from Cincinnati got so involved?” said Katz, whose daughter married this summer. The family had no local ties but their situation touched the city’s Jewish community some 30 years ago.

Jessica was born in 1977 in Moscow with malabsorption syndrome, a disease that prevented her from digesting milk or food. Soviet doctors could not cure the condition, and as their infant daughter grew ever weaker, her parents realized her only hope for survival hinged on treatment in the West.

Soviet officials, however, denied the family permission to leave, citing security issues, as they often did in the case of “refuseniks,” the name given to dissidents but also to those whose only offense often was simply asking to leave the country. Boris’ wife, Natalya, had knowledge, Soviet authorities said, of state secrets through her job at the Soviet Institute of Experimental Meteorology and the Institute of Geophysics, a claim she denied.

“You never knew who would be denied a visa or why – and that was the point,” Boris Katz said. “They could say it was about state secrets, but that usually was just nonsense. The more arbitrary and random the process was, the less likely people would be to apply for a visa, knowing they could lose their job and have their life disrupted for the next 15 years.”

The story details the people involved in getting the little girl out of the Soviet Union. Among them were Lillian Silver of Roselawn, whose father-in-law Rabbi Eliezer Silver of Avondale, raised “millions of dollars funneled to passport thieves, counterfeiters, smugglers and even top Nazi officers to buy not just the freedom, but the lives, of Jews in death camps and trapped behind enemy lines.” As national president of Vaad Hatzala (Rescue Committee), his actions directly saved some 10,000 individuals and spared many more.

Children’s Hospital in the city was said to be one of the few centers equipped to treat the child’s condition and a volunteer told Silver, who launched a letter-writing campaign, arranged for local Jews visiting the Soviet Union to deliver the non-milk formula required. When Congressman Luken’s office was contacted for assistance, the local story brought in a national audience, including Kennedy’s staff, and others became involved in the medical and humanitarian aspects of the case.

The story has all the characteristics of a good espionage thriller. Phone calls from public phones, taxi cabs, strangers bringing supplies from the US.

“This was an amazing thing to us,” Boris Katz said in an interview last week. “In our small apartment in Moscow, we of course had no idea what a congressman or senator or people in America were trying to do for us. But it gave us hope.”

One woman who has stayed in touch with the family all these years was Dabby Blatt of Wyoming. In August 1978, her family visited the Moscow family.

Once Kennedy became involved, things moved faster. He visited Moscow in September 1978 to press Brezhnev to allow them to emigrate. Two months later, they arrived in Boston and she got the treatment she needed.

Thirty years on, Katz recalled, that he’s “still surprised how many people were brave enough to pack the baby formula and other things we needed in their luggage and then, despite KGB intimidation, deliver it to us in a dark Moscow street.”

“But this is the interesting thing about life – it only needs one person to give the spark and another to help.”

Blatt and her daughter attended Jessica’s July wedding in New York.

Read the complete story at the link above, and remember that it takes only one person to believe in a cause to accomplish major achievements.

Ohio: The Cincinnati-Kennedy connection

As the country mourns the loss of Sen. Edward Kennedy, one family feels the loss even more personally.

Cincinnati.com carried the story of the family of Boris Katz, now a top researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His daughter Jessica was called “The Littlest Refusenik,” and thanks to Kennedy, the family allowed to move from Moscow to Boston for life-saving treatment.

“Who can say why a congressman [Tom Luken] and people from Cincinnati got so involved?” said Katz, whose daughter married this summer. The family had no local ties but their situation touched the city’s Jewish community some 30 years ago.

Jessica was born in 1977 in Moscow with malabsorption syndrome, a disease that prevented her from digesting milk or food. Soviet doctors could not cure the condition, and as their infant daughter grew ever weaker, her parents realized her only hope for survival hinged on treatment in the West.

Soviet officials, however, denied the family permission to leave, citing security issues, as they often did in the case of “refuseniks,” the name given to dissidents but also to those whose only offense often was simply asking to leave the country. Boris’ wife, Natalya, had knowledge, Soviet authorities said, of state secrets through her job at the Soviet Institute of Experimental Meteorology and the Institute of Geophysics, a claim she denied.

“You never knew who would be denied a visa or why – and that was the point,” Boris Katz said. “They could say it was about state secrets, but that usually was just nonsense. The more arbitrary and random the process was, the less likely people would be to apply for a visa, knowing they could lose their job and have their life disrupted for the next 15 years.”

The story details the people involved in getting the little girl out of the Soviet Union. Among them were Lillian Silver of Roselawn, whose father-in-law Rabbi Eliezer Silver of Avondale, raised “millions of dollars funneled to passport thieves, counterfeiters, smugglers and even top Nazi officers to buy not just the freedom, but the lives, of Jews in death camps and trapped behind enemy lines.” As national president of Vaad Hatzala (Rescue Committee), his actions directly saved some 10,000 individuals and spared many more.

Children’s Hospital in the city was said to be one of the few centers equipped to treat the child’s condition and a volunteer told Silver, who launched a letter-writing campaign, arranged for local Jews visiting the Soviet Union to deliver the non-milk formula required. When Congressman Luken’s office was contacted for assistance, the local story brought in a national audience, including Kennedy’s staff, and others became involved in the medical and humanitarian aspects of the case.

The story has all the characteristics of a good espionage thriller. Phone calls from public phones, taxi cabs, strangers bringing supplies from the US.

“This was an amazing thing to us,” Boris Katz said in an interview last week. “In our small apartment in Moscow, we of course had no idea what a congressman or senator or people in America were trying to do for us. But it gave us hope.”

One woman who has stayed in touch with the family all these years was Dabby Blatt of Wyoming. In August 1978, her family visited the Moscow family.

Once Kennedy became involved, things moved faster. He visited Moscow in September 1978 to press Brezhnev to allow them to emigrate. Two months later, they arrived in Boston and she got the treatment she needed.

Thirty years on, Katz recalled, that he’s “still surprised how many people were brave enough to pack the baby formula and other things we needed in their luggage and then, despite KGB intimidation, deliver it to us in a dark Moscow street.”

“But this is the interesting thing about life – it only needs one person to give the spark and another to help.”

Blatt and her daughter attended Jessica’s July wedding in New York.

Read the complete story at the link above, and remember that it takes only one person to believe in a cause to accomplish major achievements.

Leaving Prague: Retracing her steps

In 1938, Sudetenland was occupied by Hitler’s troops. On the border with Czechoslovakia, thousands were driven from their homes. In other countries, “kindertransports” were organized to save Jewish children by sending them out of central Europe, but no plan had been created in Czechoslovakia.

Two months later, a young British stockbroker – today Sir Nicholas Winton – was planning to go skiing in Switzerland when he received a phone call from a Westminster School teacher Martin Blake, also an ambassador for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Blake asked Winton to make an emergency visit to Prague.

After visiting refugee camps outside Prague, Winton realised he had to act quickly.

“I found out the children of refugees and other groups of people who were enemies of Hitler weren’t being looked after. I decided to try to get permits to Britain for them.

“Everybody in Prague said, ‘Look, there is no organisation in Prague to deal with refugee children, nobody will let the children go on their own, but if you want to have a go, have a go’.

“And I think there is nothing that can’t be done if it is fundamentally reasonable.”

Winton recruited a team to organize a series of trains, while he returned to the UK to find homes for the children.

From March-August 1939, eight trains saved 669 children. The last train, with 250 on board, was to leave September 1 – the day the war began. German troops stopped the train, the children and families left behind were deported to concentration camps.

Born Lisa Dasch, Lisa Midwinter was 3 when she traveled to England with her brother. They were born in Teplice, near the German border to a wealthy family who were vacationing when they received word not to go home but to go to Prague. Of the journey to the UK, she says:

“I remember this great big black object as high as you could see. I remember figures in blue, which must have been the train driver, singing and handkerchiefs, and terrific noise.

“I remember handkerchiefs being waved and crying, and seeing grown-ups crying.”

At the end of the journey, Ms Midwinter said she felt “totally desolate with a card on the front of me”.

“I remember this feeling of being all alone in a totally foreign place.”

The story describes how Midwinter, a Londoner, is preparing for a trip back into her past. The four-day journey with her son and granddaughter will retrace her childhood experience and to meet the man who saved her.

Her first home was with a dentist’s family in Manchester but they could not cope with the traumatized child, who was taken in by a friend of her mother’s. Fortunately, Midwinter’s story ended happily as her parents made it out and settled in Stoke-on-Trent, and also served as surrogate parents for many Czech children.

More than 100 people will join with Midwinter on the trip between Prague and London; 20 of them are Winton’s “children,” with their own children and grandchildren.

Midwinter is determined that her family should understand how much they owe to Sir Nicholas, and gain a glimpse of the agony faced by Czech parents who knew they were seeing their children for the last time.

But above all that they should understand they are part of an extraordinary worldwide family which owes its existence to the man who, at the age of 100, will once again stand on the platform at Liverpool Street to welcome them.

Read the complete story here. And for much more about Winton (Thanks, Judith!), click here. That article reveals that “Winton was born to Jewish parents that converted and baptized him.”