Jewish Salami
By Salvatore DiVita
Among
my first recollections as a child is a tenement building on East First Street,
between First and Second Avenues, Manhattan, New York City, known as the lower
east side.
One
of the fascinating attributes of New York City is the fact that you don’t have
to travel very far to experience a culture different from your own, something I
learned at a very young age. New York
City had many sections of various ethnic groups who had a tendency to keep to
themselves. We lived among many other
Italians in our section, and we were familiar with our neighbors as well as our
surroundings.
I
have a strong image of the building in which we lived and I remember that it was
directly across the street from a narrow park where men, who smoked skinny
wrinkled cigars, played bocce and argued about the game in Italian.
On
the other side of the park was Houston Street, very wide and usually quite busy
with traffic. I was probably three or four years of age when I somehow, miraculously,
managed to cross Houston Street without being killed. I must have traveled east
several blocks to the southwest corner of Houston and Ludlow Streets. I know that now, because I learned more of
the terrain as I grew older but, at the time, I had no idea where I was. I had wandered too far and now I was lost,
but I was too young to know that I was lost.
I only remember that a wonderful aroma of food came out to greet me as I
stood there on the sidewalk. The aroma may very well have been the deciding
factor which compelled me to walk through the door of this little place called
Katz’s Delicatessen.
A kindly
man wearing an apron came out from behind the counter and asked me where I lived
and if I was lost. I don’t remember what
I told him, but he began to converse with another man and together they talked about
me, back and forth, trying to decide what to do with me.
It’s
possible that the kind man with the apron may have caught me staring at some of
the customers while they ate at their tables because he gave me a salami
sandwich on rye to eat and some kind of soda, probably root beer or celery
tonic, I’m not sure. It may have been my
first taste of soda and may also have been my first taste of Jewish
salami. And when it came to eating rye
bread, wow, it was quite different from any bread I had ever had before and I
loved it. We didn’t get any of those
things in our Italian household. I know one thing for certain: to this day I
have never lost my craving for Jewish salami.
Everything
was wonderful at Katz’s Delicatessen. I
couldn’t complain about the service and everybody was so nice to me that I was
ready to make it a permanent deal.
I
sat there at the table eating my salami sandwich and living it up when the cops
came in. They took me to the police station and when we got there I had another
wonderful time. I remember the cops playing with me and giving me ice cream and
lollypops. I have no idea how long I was
there or how long it took the police to locate my parents, but there I was
sitting behind the sergeant’s desk eating a lollypop when my mother and my
sister, Antoinette, walked in through the door to claim me. Antoinette had to do all the talking because
my mother spoke no English.
I
wished I could have lived there at the police station. It was so much fun, but that was not to be. My
mother and sister took me home. The
adventure was over, but I never forgot Katz’s Delicatessen and at that young
age, I secretly wondered if I could find the place again and tell them that I
was lost. But even if I could find it, it
would do me no good because, after that episode, my family would not let me out
of their sight.
As I
grew to maturity, I visited Katz’s Delicatessen a few times, once before the United
States Army sent me to Korea and a few years later before I moved to
California. I don’t know how many times I’ve told this story. It’s a memory that
stays with me and one that I recount to anyone willing to listen.
In
2005, after visiting relatives in upstate New York, I drove my rental car down
Second Avenue to Houston Street and turned left toward Ludlow Street. After circling the block a few times, I miraculously
landed a parking space on Houston right outside of Katz’s Delicatessen. I got out of the car and looked at the spot
where, sixty-seven years prior, I gazed into the little deli and absorbed the aroma
which drew me in from the sidewalk.
The
deli no longer had the ambiance which I once knew. It was huge. The owners had apparently bought out
adjoining properties and knocked down walls to expand the place to the demise
of its informal, folksy quality. Today,
the deli is more like a big cafeteria, quite different from the deli of days
gone by.
I only
recently learned that Katz’s Delicatessen was the site of Meg Ryan’s faked
orgasm scene in the 1989 romantic comedy, When
Harry Met Sally. In the scene, a
woman (Estelle Reiner) who is seated at another table, is apparently mesmerized
by Meg Ryan who is seated across the table from Billy Crystal and is seemingly in
the throes of an inexplicable sexual orgasm. In response to what Ms. Reiner is observing,
she tells the waiter, "I'll have what she's having.”
It
seems that the table, at which Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal sat, is marked with a
sign that says "Where Harry met Sally...hope you have what she had!"
A lot of time has gone by since my first visit to Katz’s Delicatessen and with the fleeting of time comes change. Our mind takes a photograph of what it last sees, and expects it to remain exactly as we had pictured it. And when it does not correspond with our memory, we suffer the pangs of an unreasonable desire to return home called nostalgia. The words of Thomas Wolf, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” have universal application, but regardless of all that has changed since I was a child, that which has not changed is my craving for Jewish salami.
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