97 Orchard:
An Edible History of
Five Immigrant Families
in One New York Tenement

By Jane Ziegelman

Smithsonian Books, 210 pages

Of all the startling developments that characterized postwar America, surely one of the most baffling had to be American Jewry’s newfound embrace of such traditional Jewish foods as gefilte fish and chicken soup and blintzes. These old-fashioned dishes, once the preserve of the immigrant kitchen, had been abandoned by a generation whose upwardly mobile members found them too déclassé by half. But throughout the 1950s, in suburban kitchens across the nation, these items received a new lease on life. Proudly Jewish cookbooks from the pen of Gertrude Berg (aka Molly Goldberg) and Jennie Grossinger jumped off the shelves and into the arms of young and seemingly with-it Jewish suburbanites, while synagogue sisterhood groups launched “Sabbath Institutes,” at which instructors held forth on the lost art of making gefilte fish.

Surveying these postwar developments, Ruth Glazer, whose mordant wit and keen eye steadily enlivened these pages throughout the 1940s and 1950s, couldn’t help wondering whether the “eggbeater is today the most effective weapon for propagating the faith.” Glazer was kidding, of course. But just barely. Her clever sentence hinted at a fundamental truth: food is one of the great conversational gambits of modern times. Where talk of religion, philosophy, and history falls short, talk of food wins people over every time. It’s the ultimate icebreaker.

Glazer’s observation came to mind as I made my way through Jane Ziegelman’s smartly conceived and well-crafted paean to the immigrant experience. Transforming the mean and gritty streets of the Lower East Side into a landscape of good eats, 97 Orchard explores the diets of those people who called the eponymous tenement their home. Her book, we are told, “chronicles what became of those immigrants, but from a special vantage point: it retells the immigrant story from the elemental perspective of the foods they ate.”

We meet up with the Baldizzis and the Gumperts, the Rogarshevskys and the Moores, learning where they came from, how they made a living (or didn’t), and most especially, what kinds of foods they ate—or more precisely still, might have eaten: the provisional tense is dominant throughout because we really don’t know what they had for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Unlike their grand- and great-granddaughters, the Baldizzis and Rogarshevskys didn’t take to their diaries to confide how many calories they put away on any given day.

But then Ziegelman is not really interested in what her characters actually consumed as much as she is in using them as a jumping-off point to discuss, in a most genial, comparative way, replete with lovely detail, what each immigrant group brought to the table. “The exploration of food traditions brings us eye to eye with the immigrants themselves,” she writes, introducing us to a universe in which the yeasty smell of freshly baked bread perfumed the local air, and pushcarts were heaped high with all manner of pickles, or “sours,” as visitors with delicate stomachs would have it.

Along the way, we read of the krauthobler, the so-called sauerkraut man, who made the rounds of Manhattan’s Kleindeutschland, shredding cabbage for the local hausfrauen; of Italian women foraging the city’s empty lots in search of dandelion greens to put into their salads and of their male counterparts who assuaged their hunger for the Old World by getting together for weekly spaghetti suppers. And if that weren’t enough to whet one’s appetite for the foods of yesteryear, Ziegelman punctuates her narrative with recipes for these old standbys, from hasenpfeffer and croccante to, yes, gefilte fish.

It’s all so very gemutlich: neighbors of differing and historically adversarial cultures living happily side by side, like peas in the proverbial pod. Tales of conflict, competition, and incomprehension do not mar these pages; tension between the neighborhood’s ethnic groups is boiled down to a matter of different culinary traditions: one group ate schav, the other pasta fagioli. Even the kosher-meat boycott of 1902, which shattered the economic and religious equilibrium of the Lower East Side, along with the bones of dozens of female protestors, is given a silver lining. The nearly month-long boycott, we are told, gave rise to Ratner’s and other beloved dairy restaurants as the momentarily meatless sought alternative sources of gustatory satisfaction. But surely there’s more to the story than that. In fact, if ever there were a whopping good food-related yarn, this is it. For close to four long weeks, kosher-keeping residents of downtown, along with those of Harlem and Williamsburg, went without meat, hoping to induce the city’s kosher butchers to lower their prices. When the latter dug in their heels, Jewish women kicked up theirs, taking to the streets in protest. “An excitable and aroused crowd [of women] roamed” the city’s immigrant neighborhoods, reported the New York Daily Tribune, adding that “armed with sticks, vocabularies and well sharpened nails, they made life miserable for the policemen.” Eventually, things calmed down on the yidishe gas, especially once kosher butchers agreed to roll back the price of kosher meat by a few pennies a pound. Before too long, meat resumed pride of place within the Jewish kitchen, and the story of those who, for a few weeks in May and June 1902, made waves was salted away.

Could Ziegelman have amplified her account of the kosher-meat boycott? Sure. But then she is not a professional historian, nor should she be held to the standards of one. Only once, and then in a footnote, does her text acknowledge that life downtown was not so hunky-dory. Ethnic food markets, it fleetingly relates, were often controlled by local gangsters and racketeers: Jewish thugs corrupted the kosher-poultry industry and Italian thugs infiltrated the sale of artichokes and the manufacture of pasta. But little is made of these sobering revelations.

What’s more, her book is clearly intended for a contemporary lay audience eager to learn more about its forbears rather than a scholarly one eager to test the latest theory about the determinants of culture. Of a piece with, say, Laura Schenone’s The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, a heartwarming account of how one Italian-American family came to terms with its past, 97 Orchard is but the latest in a series of books that not only personalize the immigrant experience but also define it entirely in culinary terms, as if to say that history is best served when it’s served as a dish.

And there’s the rub. While Ziegelman is to be commended for drawing adroitly and respectfully on a wide array of historical sources, from memoirs and cookbooks to the New York Times, what’s missing throughout is a larger context. Within the pages of her book, food stands alone, untethered to religious ritual and the ethnic economy, much less hitched to the uneven pace of modernization. As a result, the story told in 97 Orchard isn’t wrong as much as it is incomplete.

Long on detail and short on interpretation, Ziegelman’s account is intended ultimately as a celebration rather than a reckoning. Heralding food as the ultimate social good, the matrix of neighborliness, it seems to hold out the possibility that were we to make a point of learning about what happens in other people’s kitchens, we’d all get along just fine, thank you. A throwback to the kind of amiable, consensual history that once characterized the literature on immigration—a literature that highlighted the latter’s contributions rather than its emotional costs—97 Orchard also stands very much in the shadow of Israel Zangwill’s salute to America. It, too, stirs the melting pot.

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