“EatMor Dairy”: Ben Katchor’s Genealogy of the Dairy Restaurant

Abstract

For Jews of a certain age who grew up in New York during the tail end of its Jewish gastronomic heyday—in my experience, the late 1950s through the ’70s—and who dream of sizzling potato pirogen and the aroma of gorgeous cheese blintzes surrounded by generous dollops of pillow-smooth sour cream, the graphic artist Ben Katchor’s deeply personal, exhaustively researched cultural history, The Dairy Restaurant, is required reading and viewing.Fans of Katchor’s brilliant graphic archive (his achievement was recognized by a MacArthur “genius” award in 2000) have been hungering for The Dairy Restaurant to appear since the volume was announced about fifteen years ago. Katchor’s was among the first titles listed in the inaugural Nextbook Jewish Encounters Series, guided by Jonathan Rosen, a publishing venture devoted to re-thinking the range of Jewish cultural history by inviting well-known scholars and artists to explore a particular area or historical figure of their own choosing. After years of Katchor’s rummaging the archives and ruminating over the rich history of the dairy restaurant, his Jewish Encounters volume has, at last, arrived. In the words of fellow cartoonist Mark Newgarden, The Dairy Restaurant amounts to “a bountiful steam-table of history, myth, religion, biography [and autobiography], sociology, linguistics, hard data, speculation, obsession, digression, confession, eyewitness recollection and imagination” (Katchor 2020b).A Brooklyn-born walker in the city, Katchor’s Jewish soul vibrates in solidarity with New York’s early and mid-twentieth-century luftmenschen, its tribe of traveling Jews who somehow survived on the margins, doing business. Above all, Katchor is obsessed with the residues, the remnants of urban life on the threshold of vanishing. “I’m fascinated,” he explained in a 2004 interview, “by watching people disappear from the scene” (2004).A Katchor strip is immediately recognizable. Drawn in various shades of grey wash, it captures the surreal edges of the city, revealing fantastic liminal spaces inhabited by forlorn, unmoored Jewish souls, barely hanging on. Like his most famous graphic invention, the real estate photographer Julius Knipl, Katchor peers into every shadowy crevice, his eye tracking the ephemeral, quirky zones of city life, absorbing what he terms “the pleasures of urban decay.” The critic Anthony Grafton observes, Katchor “teach[es] us to see with new eyes the fragments of an older New York” (2001). “Most of New York is in my memory,” Katchor has acknowledged. Resisting the pull of nostalgia, Katchor confesses that he “has no yearning to live in the past”; he has no desire to return to a sepia-toned New York saturated with the sounds and smells of early twentieth-century East European immigrant Jews because, he claims, “The layers of history I see walking the streets of Manhattan are deep enough” (2004). Katchor’s subject, his structure of feeling, is thus the city’s subterranean history. Jewish memory flows through him; his assignment is to channel New York’s Jewish spirit, to convey, in words and drawings, its yiddishe tam: its taste, its flavors.To understand the largest cultural meanings encoded in the dairy restaurant’s genealogy, Katchor begins in the beginning (so to speak), in the “vegetarian-based,” pastoral Garden of Eden, “a defunct eating place that one can only know from memory” (25). Katchor mavens will no doubt recall his wry allusions to the paradisaical origins of a dairy world drawn in previous strips. For example, walking the city, Knipl comes upon the “Garden of Eden Cafeteria.” This ur-dairy emporium should not be confused with the legendary Garden Cafeteria (closed 1983) on the corner of Rutgers Street and East Broadway, where I. B. Singer always ordered the rice pudding (65 cents, according to the menu Katchor reproduces) and whose iconic sign is now embedded within the interior walls of the Eldridge Street Synagogue. An ad for “Golden Calf Brand Pot Cheese” appears in another panel.1 Perhaps it’s a potential (if hilariously ironic) menu item for one of the future milkhedike (milk-based) eateries along Second Avenue; or, possibly, it is Katchor’s sly prophecy to fleyshik (meat)-inclined, backsliding meat worshippers: a rebuke to those unchosen Jews who will never be able to order “pot cheese with sour cream” for 40 cents at Steinberg’s Dairy Restaurant (2270 Broadway, between 81st and 82nd street; closed 1969) in the future Promised Land of New York City, the Zion of dairy cuisine.The Dairy Restaurant thus performs a loving act of ethnic-gastronomic-institutional recuperation, the fulfillment of Katchor’s long-nourished, decades-long project to mine the layers of Jewish history sedimented in the story of this uniquely Jewish American eatery. Katchor traces the advent of dairy from its pastoral origins in Eden to the peripatetic world of traveling Jews, precursors of Knipl, who worried, while on the road, whether their meals were prepared by observant landsmen according to the rules of kashruth. “Who’s in charge of the food?” (74) was, perhaps, the most urgent question when a Jew arrived at a place to eat and rest for the night. Was the Mosaic prohibition concerning the mixing of milk and meat being observed? What could a traveling Jew safely eat without transgressing the taboo, “Do Not Seethe a Kid in Its Mother’s Milk”? (43). As it turns out, the various options (with daily specials) would eventually be inscribed on the packed vertical columns of milkhedike-based restaurant menus, huge tablets, like the ones Katchor reprints from emporiums like Rapoport’s (91–93 Second Ave.; then moved to Forest Hills; closed 1970) and Ratner’s (various locations along Second Ave.; moved to Delancey St.; closed 2002) listing “the endless possibilities of dairy eating” (143).An avid collector of New York arcana, Katchor possesses a comprehensive knowledge of the various intersecting histories relating to the dairy restaurant; his aim is to animate, through hundreds of drawings, its long-disappeared sites of memory. Katchor’s breadth of knowledge dazzles. At times, however, the sheer amount of information in this thick description can be overwhelming, its various narrative threads hard to untangle; his turns in perspective (restaurant genealogies, culinary traditions, historical actors) can induce reader whiplash.Yet we can only marvel at Katchor’s (over)flowing catalogue of anecdotes, startling factoids, and cultural contexts. In this respect Katchor’s mode of analysis recalls a famous passage in Saul Bellow—who loved the blintzes served at New York’s dairy cafés, and who makes a brief appearance in The Dairy Restaurant—from his 1956 comic novel, Seize the Day. Reflecting on the challenge of discussing mundane things with the self-styled philosophers of the Upper West Side, with whom “you had to translate and translate, explain and explain,” Bellow’s narrator observes: “If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water” ([1956] 1976, 79).For Katchor, in order to talk about the dairy restaurant, he needs to explain a lot. Here’s a partial list, culled from the almost five hundred packed pages of The Dairy Restaurant: that Abraham, an early example of Jewish hospitality, ran the first dairy restaurant, which was blessed with a good corner location; the emergence of the restaurant in eighteenth-century France; the rise of milk spas, “Milchhallen,” and the milk cure in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the 1908 “sour milk craze” in New York; a list of 29 dairy-related Jewish establishments located on the Jewish streets of Warsaw, as listed in the 1929 Business Directory of Poland (129); that Tolstoy was a visionary vegetarian who inspired Jewish radical sympathies as a “figure of the ideal ethical intellectual” (206); how “milk was covertly delivered to the Warsaw Ghetto by a pipeline” (193) and that the Emanuel Ringelblum Archives, which preserved the history of the Ghetto, were miraculously hidden in large milk cans; that many famous Yiddish actors and writers of the early twentieth century—like the modernist poets of the Di Yunge group, who frequented the Levin & Goodman Milkhiger Restaurant on East Broadway—made dairy cafés their convivial salon of choice; the Kosher Meat Wars of the early twentieth century; that scenes from Martin Ritt’s The Front (1976) were shot at Steinberg’s Dairy, and that members of the cast and crew, many of whom, like Zero Mostel and Herschel Bernardi, were blacklisted in the 1950s, convened there regularly; the differences and variations among East European cuisines and their respective restaurant locations on the Lower East Side; that the original Ratner’s on 103 Second Avenue stood next to the famed rock ‘n roll music venue the Fillmore East, where in 1969 Leonard Bernstein and Frank Zappa dined after a concert; Zappa, we’re told, sampled gefilte fish for the first time, which he apparently enjoyed.Perhaps most poignantly, at its core The Dairy Restaurant offers a topology (or perhaps a midrash, ultimately, alas, a threnody) filled with hundreds of remarkable backstories in blessed memory of long-vanished dairy restaurants, famous and obscure, organized by geographical region, by borough, and for Manhattan, by neighborhood—a granular mapping of virtually every dairy eating possibility in New York.2 For many, proof of their existence can be documented only by the ephemeral remains of matchbook covers (in this regard Katchor is grateful for “the tenacity of matchbook advertisement salesmen of that era” [232]); or extant sugar cube wrappers, modest but still material evidence of a restaurant’s existence; or via ads for restaurants buried in old Yiddish newspapers—like the one for “EatMor Dairy Restaurant” appearing in the Yidishes Tageblat in June 1919, announcing its opening on “84 Nassau St. bet. Fulton and John St. For the convenience of those who have their business or work in the neighborhood” (362). “EatMor Dairy”: a name as well as an injunction, it’s a phrase that sounds like one Katchor might have invented decades later; it may be, however, that the dairy restaurant invented Katchor.The most interesting speculative theme in The Dairy Restaurant, especially for students of Jewish American literature like myself, is Katchor’s idea about “a specifically milkhedike personality” (169), a figure who “expressed the qualities of the dairy culture” (169). Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman is its avatar, a character who “lives in an eternal present” (177), bespeaking “modesty and humility” (86) before his Maker, yet not hesitant to argue with God’s indecipherable ways. Above all, Tevye’s hallmark, the defining quality of his “milkhedike” self, is his “ruminative” nature: modest, reflective, embodying a “milky”-ness akin to the nourishing, life-sustaining foods made from his cows. Later, in the character of Menachim Mendl, Sholem Aleichem would situate his journalist-alter ego in the popular dairy café—a “mleczarnia” in Polish—a recreated pastoral world, in Katchor’s estimate, “a paradise of pure rumination” (193).By contrast, Katchor speaks—critically—of an “appetive” self, associating this personality with meat-eating. In one telling drawing Katchor depicts a man (Katchor tends to sketch men) bent over a table in a restaurant devouring a large plate of meat. Eating strenuously, beads of sweat flying off the sides of his head, he seems driven in an act of mindless consumption, a non-stop fresser surrounded by truncated waiters’ arms pushing plates loaded with various meats at him (271). Discussing his unsavory experience of delicatessens, Katchor recalls, “The walls and windows dripped with sweat and condensation. The floors were thick with fat. . . . To counter the atmosphere of murder and death, some diners accompanied their meal with a celery-tonic soda” (426).In another drawing, Katchor shows two men, animal-like, mouths open wide, scarfing down large hot dogs at a stand advertising “100% Grade A Pure Beef/25 c large hamburger” (298–99). In the same scene we observe “A Vegetarian on Pitkin Ave” passing by. With hands clasped tightly together at his waist, he moves, anxiously, down the street, his body angling forward, his eyes focused ahead, fixed, ignoring the surrounding advertisements for “Kishke King” (“kishke” is stuffed animal intestines, a Jewish delicacy), “Hot Dogs,” “Fresh Killed,” “Blood Bank,” and “Ex-Lax Stool Softener” (298–99). We are meant, it seems clear, to interpret this tiny stretch of Brooklyn as a threatening fleyshik hell of temptation and chaos, a dairy anti-world overflowing with dark, putrid fluids.3Katchor does not investigate what might be termed the “fleyshik”-masculine character in Jewish cultural history; but the recent film Uncut Gems would be a good place to start; its opening night celebration took place, fittingly, at Katz’s Delicatessen, the temple of pastrami and corned beef worship. Applying Katchor’s theory, “fleyshik”-identified Jews act before they think; they’re tough; they eat ravenously; they are ravenous. Katchor, it appears, can’t tolerate their aggressive style, or the indigestion-producing foods they love to eat. Yet Katz’s still stands, a shrine to fleyshik power. Was the milkhedike promise of Jewish New York overcome by carnivores? Dairy, it appears, had no future in the city.4As it turns out, scenes—in effect, discourses—involving dairy foodways, nostalgia, table manners, and the rituals of Americanization abound in early Jewish American writing, especially in various Anzia Yezierska stories and in her under-read novel, Arrogant Beggar in with The Dairy Restaurant, her Katchor’s that their eating by a in the a or a of new world is Arrogant largest the with who her Lower East to the old to open a that the sounds and smells of the A about her this is this . . . This place makes of the where my to to dairy and an milkhedike structure in is always to a of and all the history of his previous back in the is of his in the new world by the For a however, his As a of served with by his he in is what I he the on the I was a In a of the of the into a of from his as a a milk on the Lower East For his memory his with history; was one of the the narrator observes, had of his In his popular Jewish foodways, in Yiddish about “a and you can A . . The was by popular The The and among his own memory of dairy when he in a Lower East for the name of his street, to return In an a of his milkhedike meals he with his as a of his of his of and As he with we a of what a dream of to to on a dairy how a milkhedike character to revealing the the of Katchor’s dairy as a mode of being with its the the end of a to his from the in the city’s the his to overcome the of his and by the with the ultimately, remains his will to the and he be in a his a and the on has been by an from the city’s then some milk and a like . . . then to and it . . . in and dream of his In dairy foods nourishing, In this respect his Jewish as another of Katchor’s the of The Dairy Restaurant the of New dairy history my of dairy deeply about this project over the decades was the appearance and atmosphere of dairy restaurants that in of Dairy Katchor offers brief but of dairy restaurants, their and some of whom he was able to while they were still We for example, about who at Steinberg’s as a in the late in he in we are told, for to of his in in a in the West of the was a figure in took his to the and a to of Steinberg’s biography the of a Jewish American story of East European origins and does Katchor on life the of Steinberg’s in 1969 with the that same of their it seems clear, has power. Katchor not his to the restaurant and in never took him to eat at For perhaps, this is an but it’s that the American the end of the dairy the of my own dairy Dairy Restaurant between and closed In the most of a dairy we the history of and from who their in the old world and the and and opening they in a in after the then for in in they the most restaurant, at in my memory. In a revealing from age how prepared the at the same to the you could through and every not the daily of sour and the of sour “The sour in would be to know The was We made own sour a of sour with the it and it makes sour about the of the beginning they served but as it they it from the Katchor the the restaurant their not to into the business. we it for but they to work as hard as we restaurant work is a hard Jewish in the of the Katchor the of gastronomic there can be no return to a pastoral of dairy Jews have what he terms “The Second the he “the dairy restaurant had to be an eternal in the restaurant of New York it was the end of its The remarkable of their . . was for that threshold in New York history, in a famous of I. B. Singer and the world of the Garden Cafeteria he the photographer that in the of the of urban are deeply but their to an in the man before his roll and of that recalls the a to the Yiddish story by I. out, from the a and his and then the of her with of with the of Jewish history, a of her before The Garden Cafeteria a a place where can on to The Dairy Restaurant Ben Katchor us to explore a rich of intersecting cultural a remarkable historical narrative and graphic took the milkhedike he at the end of this mapping of an overflowing dairy over the for many grateful that Katchor took for the of his decades-long rummaging Yet Katchor his are still in “the history of the dairy he to be hard to to perhaps, to Katchor’s confession, the ones I never I.