Diasporic Dining XXIX: The Yiddishe Grail

The Holy Grail is what the Knights of the Roundtable sought after. Like the shroud of Turin and the very notion of transubstantiation it represented an attempt to get closer to the body and blood of Christ. If the chalice that Christ drank out of has iconic significance for Christians then the deli occupies a similar place in Yiddish folklore. The deli now an endangered species has become the object of a new crusade by a whole new generation of Jewish professionals who attempt to get closer to the World of  Our Fathers, the Alter Cockers, by eating the food they ate in similar establishment where old Frank Sinatra songs are still piped into the restrooms. One such establishment, which could easily apply to the city of New York for iconographic status, is the Mill Basin Kosher Delicatessen at 5823 Avenue T in Brooklyn. As you can imagine Avenue T is way out there, near the end of Flatbush Avenue, in fact. It’s a schlep, but well worth the crusade. The pastrami at the Mill Basin is as biblically lean as the matzo ball soup is light. They have the Jewish version of the wonton known as the kreplach. And there’s stuffed derma or kishka, which is matzo meal and schmaltz encased by cow or sheep intestine and kasha varnishkes for the faint of heart or those who wish to protect theirs from attack. It may be hard to imagine eating a food named for a part of the body that is so essential to speech. For those who are not used to it tongue may seem a little like ordering mouth, but it’s a cold cut whose essence creates no philosophical quandary for aficionados who eat it on rye with Russian dressing. Pickles half and full sour, cole slaw and even macaroni salad are the manna that introduces all meals at this mecca of Jewish cuisine.

De Daumier-Smith's Long Blue Period

Jerry Fletcher, the character played by Mel Gibson in Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory (l997), fills his Greenwich Village apartment with copies of Catcher in the Rye. Of course, the twist lies in the fact that Fletcher, who was modeled to some extent on Mark David Chapman—John Lennon’s killer, who carried a copy of Catcher at the time of the killing and later said the book would explain his actions—is indeed the victim of a conspiracy involving the kind of mind control reminiscent of another classic, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962). (Could the youthful Frank Sinatra, who starred opposite Angela Landsbury in that film, have played Holden Caulfield in the movie version of Catcher that will never be?)

    

Though Jerry Fletcher may have turned out not to be truly paranoid, paranoia is certainly part of the epitaph of the author he adored. In a way, Fletcher is a perfect metaphor for J.D Salinger’s enormous following. Fletcher has been damaged by events he no longer remembers, and so he is striking out blindly, manufacturing explanations for a world that makes no sense to him. Yet he finds solace in a literary character. The problems affecting Fletcher are far greater than anything that Holden Caulfield faced, but the same cannot be said about Caulfield’s creator, who might have been, for all his brilliance, one of the great miser’s of all time.

   

Authors copyright their inner lives. However, Salinger behaved as if someone was trying to steal his, slapping a “Top Secret” label on his creatiive life and ceasing to publish at all after 1965. If writing is ultimately about giving, and not just the kind of narcissism that led Salinger to spend the last 45 years of his life writing only for himself, then Salinger didn’t have a philanthropic bone in his body. “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is one of the Nine Stories Salinger published in 1953.  Speaking of Daumier, the nineteenth-century French caricaturist might have been the perfect artist to capture this egregious instance of creative hoarding.