Strolling the Lost Yiddish City

These days, if you happen to find yourself on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on a Sunday afternoon, you’ll have lots of company. Walking tours clog the neighborhood’s narrow streets. Training their sights on a particular theme, say, architecture or food, dramatic incidents, colorful personalities, or the underbelly of immigrant life, their guides promise an immersive encounter with Jewish immigrant history. Though not nearly as numerous as they were in their heyday of the 1990s and early 2000s when finding one’s roots was all the rage, history on the go still appeals to those in search of affirmation and connection. Or something to do on a Sunday.

Once you’ve signed up for a walking tour of the Lower East Side, several viewing options await. One is to stand at attention in front of a still-existing historic site, as the tablet-wielding guide, perhaps a graduate student working for Seth Kamil’s Big Onion Tours, narrates its claim to fame. Another is to gather in front of an empty lot where you’re encouraged to squint long and hard enough so that you can make out the faint outline of a shul building on a still-standing adjacent wall. And the third is to gaze at an age-old structure that’s been so thoroughly gentrified that its original function is entirely obscured, at which point you’re called on to conjure what this immigrant Jewish neighborhood must have looked like back in the day. Before long, frustration sets in, compounded by your increasingly weary feet, growling stomach, and the pressing need to find a bathroom.

Or you could stay home, curled up with Henry Sapoznik’s amusingly idiosyncratic The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City. Arranged in terms of four capacious subject areas, food, architecture, music, and theater, it focuses on aspects of the day-to-day immigrant Jewish experience in the Big Apple that rendered it distinctive: its cuisine, sounds, and public face. Some of the sites he singles out for attention are either still with us, well known, or both, among them Katz’s Delicatessen, Russ & Daughters, Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery, the Forward building, and S. Jarmulowsky’s bank, which gave its journalistic neighbor a run for its money when it came to being the tallest structure on the Lower East Side

Even with these familiar subjects, Sapoznik surprises. Here’s one example: Before it was widely known as Russ & Daughters, the store called itself Russ’ Cut-Rate Appetizing Market. Here’s another: The New York Times, unsure of whether the plural of knish was “knishes” or “knishi,” resorted to both. And a third: Sender Jarmulowsky’s two sons, Meyer and Louis, went into business for themselves, creating a bank so fanciful in design that the New York Tribune, its imagination afire, described it as “something the Sultan of Morocco would get into his head if he wanted to have a tall building in Algiers.”

The usual suspects are far outnumbered, though, by “lost Yiddish New York”: a constellation of restaurants, music halls, and theaters, none of whose names ring a bell—not anymore. Their once memorable ranks include Kishke King of Brownsville, whose Pitkin Avenue emporium not only sold four thousand pounds a week of the stuff, even as late as the 1940s, but also featured a kosher “frank built for two.”

Over on the Lower East Side, at the corner of Chrystie and Delancey Streets, Libby’s Hotel & Baths had tongues wagging back in the day. Glorious, if short-lived, the twelve-story “Ritz with a shvitz,” was named after founder Max Bernstein’s mother, who died when he was a child. Libby’s elevators, it was said, “fly up like harnessed rockets and drop down like oiled meteors”; the lobby’s furnishings were “beyond Park Avenue” and its aquatic facilities happened to be so deluxe that “all the builders of Babylon could do no more.” The Libby lasted three years, until the Wall Street crash of 1929, along with a very shady mortgage holder with ties to Tammany Hall, brought it down: The building was razed in 1930.

It’s here, amidst the unknown of today, that Sapoznik is in his element. Drawing energetically on the digital bounty of the Yiddish press, canvassing thousands of advertisements, he does for place what he’s done for klezmer music and Yiddish radio: endow it with presence and weight.

All the same, this is no conventional guidebook. Sapoznik is a guide who follows his own interests. For one thing, there’s not a synagogue in sight, nor too many labor unions, for that matter. For another, the narrative doesn’t follow a straight line so much as meander, zigzag, leapfrog, and detour from one arresting detail to the next. His organizing principle seems closer to serendipity than sentimentality, rendering this guidebook more of a shpatzir than an itinerary.

Stay-at-home strollers or their real-life counterparts may not learn exactly how to get from point A to point B, but along the way they’re sure to be entertained, amused, heartened, and, above all, reminded that “lost Yiddish New York” was once a thriving metropolis of immigrant Jews who lived full lives and enjoyed their “knishi.”