The Second Avenue Deli Cookbook Read Free

comedies, and serious theatrical productions. Tragedian Jacob Adler (famed for his moving portrayals of Shylock and Lear) and matinee idol Boris Thomashevsky—who yearned to raise the intellectual quality of Yiddish plays—adapted Shakespeare and Goethe for the Jewish stage. Edward G. Robinson, Steve Lawrence (whose father was a cantor), Paul Muni, Leonard Nimoy, impresario Joseph Papp, and director Harold Clurman all began their careers in the Yiddish theater.
    The Jewish Rialto was already on the wane when the Deli opened in 1954, and today most of its venues have been torn down. The old Moorish-motif Yiddish Art Theatre on Twelfth Street and Second Avenue (built in 1926 by the great Yiddish actor/director Maurice Schwartz) is now a multiscreen movie house. And a Japanese restaurant across the street occupies the site of the old Café Royale (celebrated fictionally in Hy Kraft’s 1942 com-edy
Café Crown
). The Royale was once the meeting place for Jewish entertainers and intelligentsia. Charlie Chaplin, George Jessel, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Moss Hart, and Rachmaninoff—not to mention non-Jewish Village writers like e.e. cummings and John Dos Passos, who found the Royale scene colorful—were among its habitués. They gathered there to discuss art, literature, and socialism over blintzes washed down with glasses of tea.
    The Café Royale had closed its doors a few years before Abe arrived on Second Avenue. As a tribute, he wanted to call his establishment the Royale Deli, but the café’s owner wanted a $2,000 royalty, which, at that time, might have been $2 million. Still, the idea of honoring the Yiddish theater stuck in Abe’s mind.
    In the Deli’s second major expansion, he dubbed his new dining area the Molly Picon Room and covered its walls with film and theater posters ofPicon in roles ranging from
Yiddle and His Fiddle
to
Fiddler on the Roof.
At an opening-night party to inaugurate the room, the famous eighty-two-year-old actress (who once sang a Yiddish ballad called “The Rabbi’s Melody” so soulfully she made Al Capone cry) was once again applauded by her fellow thespians. Even Mayor Ed Koch stopped by to kiss the guest of honor and nosh a little chopped liver. Molly was a regular customer during her lifetime; her favorite dish was chicken in the pot.
    In 1985, further warming to his theatrical theme, Abe created a Hollywood Boulevard–like Walk of Stars outside the Deli, with thirty-one gran-ite stars commemorating fifty-eight luminaries of the Jewish stage. A special star pays tribute to Abraham Goldfaden, “the Father of Yiddish theater.” Though Jewish theater actually harks back to the sixteenth century (rooted in Purim plays, it was the Jewish counterpart of Christian passion plays), it was Goldfaden, in the 1870s, who wrote, composed music and painted scenery for, and produced the first professional Yiddish dramas and comedies. His first performance, in a wine garden in Jassy, Romania, was such a flop that the audience not only booed but physically attacked him. The experience taught him two things: that he was a lousy actor and that his material had been too highbrow for the public taste. But instead of nurturing contempt for his unsophisticated audience, he began to use his plays as a forum to educate—to wean his fellow Jews from fanatic traditionalism and cultural isolation. He went on to shape a Yiddish theatrical tradition that, if not subtle or profoundly intellectual, was emotionally stirring and boisterously comical.
    As continuing immigration brought thousands of Jews to New York, the Yiddish theater flourished, freed from fear, censorship, pogroms, and persecution. People who lived in dire poverty—who spent their days laboring in sweatshops and their nights in shabby, overcrowded tenements—managed to set aside a little money from their meager earnings for tickets. A link with their heritage and an island of