One of the most iconic photos of the Jewish experience in New York is the 1953 photo of Kishke King, taken when Brooklyn’s Pitkin Avenue had a sizable Jewish community. It is the cover image of Henry Sapoznik’s new book The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City, which takes readers back in time on a virtual tour of places in the city where the mame loshen was spoken.
“I was born around the corner from the Kishke King the year after it was taken. It was a personal thing, and I got to meet the photographer’s daughter when working on the book,” Sapoznik said. “He was N. Jay Jaffee, the vernacular photographer. Also a native of Brooklyn, he documented Brownsville and East New York between 1947 and 1956, twilight years that featured crowded kosher shops that would be gone within a decade as people moved to the suburbs.
“My family came there in 1950, after the war. By then, Brownsville was in decline. There was still a Yiddish theater, a delicatessen, and shuls. It had all of the infrastructure, and in the photograph, the customers were all Black.”
Sapoznik noted that when talking about the demographic transformation of the neighborhood and the larger city, there were many examples of cultural crossover between the two communities.
“There’s a chapter in the book about Black cantors, Yiddish Uncle Tom plays, and Jews in jazz. There was a lot of overlap. Manischewitz was a late product for them. Three-fourths of their wine advertising was in Black newspapers. That Man-o-Manischewitz with Sammy Davis Jr. was long after.”
Sapoznik’s familiarity with African Americans who sang Jewish folk songs goes back to his time at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, where he founded and directed the sound archives from 1982 to 1995. In this role, he found a rare recording of tenor Thomas LaRue, the best-known “Shvartzer Chazan” of that time.
“It’s a Yiddish culture. I didn’t call it Jewish because that’s a much broader ethnographic community. The founder of the best-known knish – Gabila – spoke Ladino. He did not grow up with the knish, and he reinvented it.” The brand’s name is a portmanteau of Elia and Bella Gabay, who made the square knish on the Lower East Side, then relocated to Williamsburg, followed by Long Island, where they are made by machine.
When asked about Knish Nosh in Forest Hills and the late Ben’s Best of Rego Park (neither of which was certified by the Vaad Harabonim of Queens), Sapoznik said that Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx have more examples of historical Yiddish-speaking delicatessens, theaters, and music.
“Though I do mention Knish Nosh, the book starts in the 1880s. There wasn’t a freestanding Yiddish theater in Queens, no parallel to Pitkin Avenue, East Broadway, or the Grand Concourse. I was surprised at how little tribalism there was in Queens compared to other boroughs.”
Some of the continuity in Yiddish culture results from “non-natives” producing its elements. “The last restaurant reflecting old-time dairy food is the B&H Dairy, made by Arabs and Latinos. It’s a typical New York story. They didn’t grow up with the food, their customers did not, and they’re recreating it.”
A native Yiddish speaker, Sapoznik said that Yiddish as a subject extends beyond Jewish because it resonated with gentiles who listened to Yiddish music, ate Ashkenazi food, and laughed at Jewish jokes. He noted that contemporary attempts to teach Yiddish in universities lack the cultural element, while attempts by today’s Jewish progressives to adopt this language lack the spiritual element, as they were largely raised without religious observance.
“The Jewish anarchists and Bundists were against religion; but if pressed, they could lead a Seder and know how to daven because they grew up with the language inside the culture. Young people learning Yiddish in the universities surgically removed Yiddish from the rest of the culture, making it its own thing.”
Living up to its title, the book includes Yiddish institutions that stood the test of time and revivals of old recipes and literature. “It’s more about places that have persistently survived and continue to be a destination. That’s what sustains it, but I don’t see new growth of that kind of culture. It’s different. It doesn’t have the influx of new generations steeped in the culture. Today’s people elect to have the culture.”
When he mentioned that he lives in the Catskills, I noted that the grand resorts are mostly gone, but many chasidim continue to spend their summers in these mountains, along with the upcoming Yamim Ba’im concert at Bethel Woods, headlined by Ishay Ribo and featuring the duo Zusha and Avraham Fried. Sapoznik spoke of Fried and Lipa Schmeltzer as authentic, because Yiddish is their native language, and they sing its words before young audiences who are not Yiddish speakers. The appeal of Yiddish in today’s New York includes performances of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, in which audiences may not know the words, but they understand the meaning based on how they are expressed.
These examples have precedents with the swing version of Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen and the Barry Sisters topping the music charts. “There was always a very strong connection of Jews in popular culture. Molly Picon went back and forth between Yiddish theater and television,” Sapoznik said.
With online resources, studying the impact of Yiddish has never been easier. “I was shocked to find out that 65 percent of Ashkenazim have lactose intolerance considering how central dairy is to Ashkenazi food. I was learning stuff from old records. There is an audience for that kind of thing. You don’t require a brick-and-mortar community – there’s an online audience.”
“This couldn’t have been done in the previous era. I looked at Yiddish newspaper articles. It’s a revelatory time to do research with so much more to dig up. It’s an exciting moment.”
