Read Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli for Free Online

non-Jews to sample Jewish culture. But no one, to my surprise, had traced the history of the deli in New York or pinpointed its heyday. No one had peered through the greasy, garlicky, gassy, and gluttonous lens of the pastrami sandwich into the role of Jewish deli food in American culture.
    Although my family did not belong to a synagogue, did not observe Jewish law, and celebrated few Jewish holidays, eating in delis offered me a sense of Jewish identity that I found in few other places. Whenever we celebrated a family occasion, my grandmother invariably ordered a tongue sandwich, which, in retrospect, seems entirely appropriate; it was as if the tongue that she ate was connected in a double sense to her own tongue—both her gift of gab and her parents’ native language (Yiddish is known as the mameloshen , the mother’s tongue), which, to her deep regret, was not being transmitted to her grandchildren.
    I grew up at a time when the deli had long since ceased to function as a major gathering place for the Jewish community, when, even in Great Neck, it was J. P. King’s, the Chinese restaurant on Grace Avenue, that was a more popular hangout spot than Squire’s. But the deli sandwiches remain more salient in my memory than the moo shu pork or the beef lo mein at the Chinese eatery; they connected me to my people and to my past in a way that the Chinese dishes, however delicious, never could.
    I knew that these foods from the Jewish deli were the same foods that my grandparents had eaten during their own upbringing,the foods with which they had celebrated births, weddings, and funerals—the foods that enabled them to build and sustain community with other second-generation Jews at a time when Jewishness was not simply an aspect of their identity or experience but the central, defining, and ineluctable feature of their existence.
    Eating in delis was, for them, a laid-back, unfussy, grass-roots experience that required no education, no upper-class breeding, no intricate knowledge of manners and mores. Eating in delis, which were permeated with both the aura of abundance and the culture of celebrity, made Jews feel that, for them too, the American Dream was at long last eminently within their reach—so close, you might say, that they could taste it.

Acknowledgments
    A uthors often compare writing a book to birthing a child. Writing this one was more like raising an unruly child to adolescence. In the more than ten years that it took me to research and write it, my wife, Andrea, and I had three children: Hannah, who is mentioned in the manuscript as a kindergartner, when she tasted deli for the first time, just had her bat mitzvah. (And no, we didn’t serve deli; my wife drew the line.) Our middle daughter, Sarah, never tires of reminding me that my wife wrote a whole manuscript in just two months while serving on the staff of Camp Ramah in the Poconos; she is dubious that someone could spend such a long time on a single project. And our youngest, Leah, seems to have most inherited my affinity for eastern European Jewish food, especially kasha varnishkes (buckwheat groats with bowtie noodles, for the uninitiated).
    First and foremost, I owe a gigantic debt of gratitude to my editor at NYU Press, Jennifer Hammer, who initially suggested that I write a book on this topic and who kept an unbroken faith in it all along, as it went through multiple rounds of peer review. I feel a strong connection to NYU, partly because my father worked there for decades, editing the alumni magazine at the NYU Medical School, and partly because my grandmothervolunteered on Fridays at the Student Activities office of the same school, selling discount theater tickets to the medical students. This is what enabled my family to attend Broadway and off-Broadway shows on a regular basis throughout my childhood, and I credit my love of theater (the field in which I earned my Ph.D.) to these early theatergoing experiences.
    I’m also very much