Half doughnut and half roll, of formidably crusty exterior, and yet yielding an infinite if elusive deliciousness, despised and yet forever chosen, does not the bagel partake of the central paradoxes of Jewish existence and perhaps of the essential quality of the Jews themselves, called, on highest authority, a stiff-necked people? Perhaps not. But if the basic mystery remains impenetrable, there is still much that the inquiring sociologist can discover and report.
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Amid the more and more open scandal of what American know-how has done to American bread—white, whole wheat, rye, or vitaminized—that tasteless, flavorless, bodiless miracle of modern science—the Jewish bagel stands out like a golden vision of the bygone days when life was better, when things had substance, staying power, and an honest flavor of their own. As a form of bread, the bagel shares this distinction in America with a few other non-mechanized survivors from the old country, such as pumpernickel, challah, and the Italian white bread still baked and sold in first-generation neighborhoods; like challah, the bagel is a distinctively Jewish contribution to the good life in Columbus’s continent.
It is true that Miss Faye Emerson, asked on a recent broadcast of “We Take Your Word” to define a bagel, answered unhesitatingly that it was a kind of English hunting dog. But perhaps Miss Emerson was suffering from mike-fright. Actually, knowledge and appreciation of bagels has thoroughly penetrated large areas of American life, and the bagel market is quite steady—remarkably so, in fact, considering that the definition accepted as correct after Miss Emerson’s failure was: “A bagel is a doughnut dipped in concrete.” (Speaking of doughnuts, it should be mentioned that the official American name for a bagel, as given in Leah W. Leonard’s book Jewish Cookery, is “water doughnut.” Try that on your local delicatessen store some time.)
Bagels aren’t just another form of bread, much less another form of doughnut; they have a being and character of their own. They are—well, bagels. That is to say, eaten with lox and cream cheese on a Sunday morning, or just with lox, or just with cream cheese, they are, putting the matter baldly, a delight. The aesthetic harmony of that first combination alone—setting aside for a moment the whole question of dunking—would seem to guarantee the continued existence of the bagel, in the teeth of all the Wonder bakeries in America.
But, beyond all this, bagels have a few other distinctions that make them quite unique. For one thing, there is shape. The bagel is round, like a doughnut, and has a hole at its center; and this quality of circular recurrence combined with central emptiness seems to exert some potent fascination over the human mind: a whole complex of jokes and proverbs clusters around the bagel that the simple idea of ordinary bread is powerless to provoke, and the thought of a bagel, like that of a doughnut, seems to contain somehow, for a great many people, something inherently comic. Think of a bagel and you are likely to think of something profound, such as “In my beginning is my end”; think of a loaf of ordinary bread and you are likely to be just bored.
For another distinction, bagels aren’t just baked, like every other form of bread, they are boiled and baked. This is what accounts for the distinctive glossiness of bagels. It also accounts, as any bagel-maker will tell you, for their wholesomeness. Having been subjected to two separate cooking processes, they naturally come out twice as good. (We are discussing, it will be understood, only the bagel classic and proper, not the egg bagel, a mixed form made by adding eggs to the basic formula and, in most informed opinion, including our own, an inferior type. It is, however, outside our province at this time to examine the claims of the egg bagel at any length.)
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Like the invention of the wheel or the discovery of gefilte fish, the origin of bagels is lost in the mists of antiquity, and dating it, or placing it in a particular locale, presents a problem before which the keenest scholar must admit defeat. The etymology of the word is apparently from the German beigen, to bend. We know that making bagels has always been a Jewish specialty, and that it originated somewhere in the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe. There is extant in the archives of the Jewish Scientific Institute (Yivo) a printed broadside put out in Vilna in 1869 which contains two separate blessings intended for egg bagels—one, after the opening formula, “Blessed art Thou, Lord of the universe . . .” concludes: “boreh minei mzonos”—“who creates various kinds of food”; and another concludes: “al h’michya v’al hakalkala”—“[Blessed art thou] for sustenance.” It is also clear that bagels had by that time entered the fabric of folk life in Eastern Europe deeply enough to lend a byword to the language; if a merchant wished to protest the steadfast and unchanging nature of his prices, he would say “Es iz vie a bagel far a groshen.” But all this tells us nothing but that bagels have been known and eaten for at least a hundred years. Beyond that lies only the outer darkness.
Of course, there are legends. One story has it that the bagel, like matzah and so much else of Jewish culture, originated out of persecution. At the height of the Middle Ages, it is said, toward the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 10th, when the intensification of religious feeling that was to culminate in the Crusades had begun to gather strength, many of the fervently religious of Christendom began to place a special importance on the connection between bread and the person of Jesus Christ Because Christ had incarnated himself in the bread of the Holy Eucharist, it was felt by the more intolerantly pious that bread had a peculiarly sacred connection with Christianity, and that the Jews, who rejected Christ, should therefore be denied its use. So, the legend goes on, a great deal of agitation was stirred up by anti-Semites, and in many provinces Jews who attempted to brave the situation by openly buying or baking bread were set upon by mobs, stoned, and beaten. But one little duchy in an out of the way corner of Prussia was ruled over by a good duke, and when this persecution began to afflict the Jews of his district, they decided to lay their cause before their ruler. He, the story goes, being a humane man, cast about for some solution, and, having taken counsel with his advisers, announced that it had been ruled that only what was baked could properly be called bread. The Jews promptly took the hint, and departed to seek out a way to prepare wheat without baking. What they decided on was boiling, and what resulted was the first batch of bagels ever made. In the beginning the boiled product was only “toasted” a little; gradually, however, when things had quieted down, it began to be both boiled and baked.
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That is the legend. The truth, probably, is that bagels first began to be made in Russia. It is from that country, and from Bessarabia, that most of the skilled bagel-makers now in America came, and the tradition of bagel production and consumption has a much longer history there than can be traced anywhere else. In Russia, too, bagels were popular with wide sections of the non-Jewish population, although making them was almost entirely a Jewish industry, and they had even come to be bound up with non-Jewish group life in a way that would seem odd to an American Jew: during the Russian Christmas season it used to be the custom for groups of children to roam from house to house, as they do here on Hallowe’en and Thanksgiving, singing and receiving gifts; and, old-time bagel-makers remember nostalgically, the demand for bagels always took a long jump just before the Christmas season, because, along with nuts and candy, it was bagels that the children were given as gifts. Whether the custom still survives is hard to say; after the 1917 Revolution the Communists put a complete stop to the production of bagels, on the ground that they were a luxury, and whether it has been revived since no one seems to know.
Of course, the Russian version was a little different from the Sunday morning bagel that has become familiar in America. It was much larger, for one thing, often as much as a foot in diameter, and it was made to last for months, rather like hardtack. A bagel was a good thing to take on long sea voyages in those days, but not much good with cream cheese and lox.
That may be one of the reasons why, in the Jewish life of Eastern Europe, bagels were traditionally eaten before Tisha B’av, the commemoration of a historic day of misfortune for the Jewish people. On that day, according to tradition, the Temple fell, and on that day also Bar Kochba’s rebellion was finally crushed; it used to be the custom for Jews to eat a bagel, or an egg—something round, because roundness was symbolic of mourning—on the eve of Tisha B’av, sprinkling whatever was eaten with ashes, to keep the taste of bitterness in their mouths through the day of fasting. But bagels were eaten also on Lag B’omer, a happier holiday.
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Who first baked a bagel in America, and when and where the happy event took place, is something else that will presumably remain a pleasant mystery forever. It used to be said in Yiddish, as an expression of contempt for pretended skill or mystery, “Ai, vosì Men newt a teigel un men macht a bagel” (“So what? You take a lump of dough and you make a bagel”). But bagel-making really is a skilled craft, as yet almost untouched by machine techniques, and it couldn’t have been done by just anyone. Probably there were a few skilled bagel bakers in the first great waves of immigration from Eastern Europe that washed over America in the 1890’s; it was shortly after that date, anyhow, that bagels made their debut on American soil. Most of the skilled bagel bakers now practicing their craft in New York came here in the early 1900’s.
About that time bagels began to be made extensively in little two- or three-man cellar bakeries dotted around New York’s East Side, some of which, though not many, are still in existence. The use of cellars for bagel-baking gave rise to a quip which is still remembered with indignation by old-timers in the bagel industry: it used to be said, if a man was in difficulties or generally unsuccessful and one was questioned about his fortunes: “Er ligt in der era un bakt bagel” (“He lies underground and bakes bagels”). There is a further explanation of this saying in the fact that often, in these cellar bakeries, the oven was built so low that a pit two or three feet deep had to be dug in front of it for the man working the oven to stand in, so that he did, literally, “lie underground and bake bagels.” But that doesn’t, in the view of bagel bakers, excuse the injury done the fair name of their craft. Bagel-making is skilled and difficult work, and it takes a good deal of time to pick up the necessary techniques; it is also in most cases a family craft: there are men in some of New York’s bakeries now who count themselves as the sixth generation of bagel bakers, working with skills handed down from father to son in an unbroken line of descent that reaches back beyond memory.
In spite of their resentment at the use of their craft as a synonym for poverty, bagel bakers who were working back in the 1900’s do not deny that things were pretty tough for the workers in the industry then, and working conditions as bad as the quip implies. On the contrary, they are fond of recalling how bad things were in the old days and contrasting them with the better conditions of today. The improvement is due largely to their union, which now calls itself—with a slight shift of spelling for the benefit of Galitzianers—the International Beigel Bakers’ Union, and which made its first attempt to organize in 1907. This attempt was not wholly successful until 1925, but today all the bakeries in New York are fully organized, and bagel bakers earn some of the highest wages in the industry.
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There are, right now, between thirty and forty bagel bakeries in New York, scattered from the further marches of the Bronx all the way to Coney Island. A few are just across the river, in New Jersey. Otherwise, to the bagel fancier, the country presents the aspect of a desert whose bagel-making oases are few and pitifully far between. (One bakery in East New York is doing its best to mitigate the situation by shipping bagels to the rest of the country by air, but so far its operations have not been extensive enough to be significant.) Most of the bakeries employ only three or four skilled men, although a few of them are a good deal larger; but even the small ones are capable of turning out, on the average, about twenty thousand bagels a day.
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At one such bakery in Williamsburg I made the acquaintance of a baker named Aaron Zlotnick, a sturdy, pleasant, and talkative man of about forty-five who began work when he was eleven and has been turning out bagels ever since. The place he works in is fairly roomy, as bagel bakeries go, since it employs six people, but it wouldn’t give the owners of the Thousand Window Bakery much of a turn. As a matter of fact, it has only one window, a plate-glass store front on South First Street. Behind the window is a room about the size of an ordinary retail bakery, and furnished only with a counter, where bagels are sold fresh from the oven to people who want them that way. A good many do, apparently, because a steady trickle of customers came and went while I was there. Beyond this room is another and larger one in which the bagels are actually baked, a square, high-ceilinged, and clean-looking place with whitewashed walls.
I found Mr. Zlotnick in the back room engaged in twisting a long string of dough into one bagel after another. This, he told me later, is his specialty. A skilled man can do it at the rate of approximately thirty bagels a minute, or one bagel every two seconds; Zlotnick was running slightly better than that when I clocked him. He was standing in front of a flour-sprinkled table that ran along the side of the room, and before him was a huge lump of dough that must have weighed several hundred pounds. Usually the men who do this part of the job work in teams of two, one man cutting slices out of the mass of dough and forming it into long, perfectly proportioned strings, while his partner twists the strings into the little circles that form the bagels, snapping each one off with a precision and economy of movement that takes years to learn. Zlotnick prefers to work alone, and he has found that things go just as quickly.
As I watched him work, he told me a little about himself. He was born in Kiev and first began to practice his trade in that city, becoming the fourth generation of his family to do so. A cousin of his in Kiev who went to work at about the same time is now president of the Beigel Bakers’ Union in America; his family used to bake bagels for the czar. After the Communists came around Zlotnick moved over into Bessarabia, but things weren’t much better there, so, like a good many other bagel bakers, he decided to try the New World. His first stop was Toronto, from which, after a few years, he moved down to New York. Yes, he said, bagels were quite popular in Toronto. “But not in Connecticut,” he added ruefully. “Too many Yankees.” He tried to open a bagel bakery in Hartford some years ago, because it seemed to him that its considerable Jewish population could support one. “No go,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re all Yankees up there.”
As he spoke he went on twisting his string of dough into bagels, his shoulder muscles moving steadily in a staccato, jerking rhythm. After twisting each one and snapping it from the string, he would give it a little rolling slap against the table and place it on a flat tray at his side. As each tray was filled he added it to a stack on the floor. “You know,” he said, “I never earned a penny except by baking bagels.” He nodded reflectively, and then grinned. “I don’t say it’s something to be proud of. You know, like this. It’s just the truth.”
Zlotnick is surprisingly young for such an old-timer in the trade, young enough, in fact, to have seen service in the army during the last war, when he was stationed in the South. He said, with perhaps a touch of professional exaggeration: “When they found out I was a baker, they asked me, the first thing, could I bake bagels. Texas. Imagine that.”
There have been other afflictions besides the Bolsheviks to trouble the bagel-maker’s horizon. One of these is the persistent rumor of a bagel machine like the ones used to stamp out doughnuts, which would of course promptly put a number of highly skilled craftsmen out of business. So far, however, nothing of the kind has materialized. And the bagel-makers do not seem very worried; of the several hundred who belong to the union, many are teaching the trade to younger members of their families. It used to be feared that the art of bagel-making would eventually be lost in the United States because of the reluctance of younger bakers to take the trouble to learn it, but since the war many young veterans have followed their fathers into the trade.
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After the bagels have been formed they are allowed to stand, stacked up in their shallow boxes, for several hours. Then they are considered ready to be boiled and baked. Most evenings, Zlotnick told me, the bakers begin to put them through the oven at about seven o’clock, and go on working until two or three in the morning. On weekends, though, when the demand for bagels rises sharply, the oven is generally stoked up and ready to go by six. The night I was there I moved over to watch the baking at about six-thirty. There were two men running that end of things, one a short, broad-shouldered, quick-moving man who took care of the oven, and the other, his helper, in charge of the vat in which the bagels are boiled. This vat is a stone cauldron four feet wide that looks a little like a sunken bathtub, and it was bubbling merrily when I came over. The helper, a middle-aged man with a frowning, deeply-lined face, wearing a varicolored yarmalke that might once have been a jockey cap, was busily picking bagels up from a tray with his fingers, six at a time, and dumping them into his vat. He had been pointed out to me as the newest man in the place, a veteran of Buchenwald and Auschwitz who had only succeeded in getting to America three months before. Once in a while he would pick up a flat paddle about two feet long and stir his bathtub vigorously. The bagels are boiled for about eight minutes. At the end of that time they are fished out with a net and dumped on a long trough set up alongside the vat. Then the master baker takes over.
While the first batch of bagels was boiling he had been swabbing out the oven with a cloth tied to the end of a pole that looked about fifteen feet long. This was to take off the “top heat,” he told me, and if he didn’t do it the bagels would come out black instead of brown. When he had cooled things off to his own satisfaction, he laid the pole aside and took down from two hooks suspended from the ceiling a long, thin wooden plank, known in the trade as a “peel.” He laid this down alongside the trough, and began to line up the glistening white bagels on it, picking up six bagels at a time as the vat man had done, three in each hand. At each end of the trough was a large bowl of coarse salt, and as he came to it he dipped both handfuls into the bowl so that a segment of each bagel was covered with salt. When he had a whole row lined up he shoved the plank through the hinged door of the oven. After a few minutes he slid the plank back out and ran a piece of heavy string under the bagels down the whole length of the plank, to loosen them from the wood. Then he put his peel back in the oven and turned it sideways, dumping the bagels off in a long straight line. The purpose of the plank is to give the bagels time to dry, so that they won’t stick to the floor of the oven.
After that, he repeated the process at intervals of a few minutes, each time moving the long lines of bagels already in the oven a little further from left to right, and turning them over from time to time with a tremendously long paddle. Once I bent down to peer into the oven as he slid a new batch through the door. The first batch was over at the far right now, and they looked crisp and brown. A minute later, the baker picked them up on his paddle and slid them out of the oven. He looked at them for a minute with an expression of judicious satisfaction, then pointed his paddle at a wicker bin that stood next to the oven and let the bagels slide into it. They looked good enough to eat without cream cheese.
I went over to take a closer look, and the baker interrupted his work for a moment to watch me.
“Try one,” he said encouragingly. “That can’t hurt you, a bagel. After all, every one is cooked twice.”
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