{"id":31203,"date":"2023-12-12T19:55:49","date_gmt":"2023-12-13T00:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=31203"},"modified":"2024-01-09T17:31:14","modified_gmt":"2024-01-09T22:31:14","slug":"deli-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/12\/deli-death\/","title":{"rendered":"DELI DEATH"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\nMy kids<\/strong><\/span> liked Corky\u2019s. The blintzes, the pickles, the halvah, the phosphates. But I\u2019m not here to write food nostalgia. Too cheesy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

C&L’s closed, for good, Tuesday. The word in the local press — Cleveland Jewish New<\/em>s and the Plain<\/em> Dealer<\/em> — is C&L’s had a problem getting good help. That ain’t news. I’m skeptical.<\/p>\n

My dad was a chocolate-phosphate addict.\u00a0So is my daughter, Lucy, who called the phosphates \u201cchocolate frost feets.\u201d Cleveland musician\u00a0Mickey Katz, in his autobiography,\u00a0called chocolate phosphates \u201cJew beers.\u201d (Katz\u2019s son is Joel Grey.) Katz drank \u201cJew beers\u201d at Solomon\u2019s Deli on East 105th Street in Glenville.<\/p>\n

My father, Toby, was a \u201cdeli Jew.\u201d That\u2019s typically a putdown in the Jewish community, meaning my father knew more about corned beef than Torah. Toby\u2019s favorite food was a \u201cgood piece of rye bread.\u201d<\/p>\n

My father<\/strong> <\/span>probably drank no\u00a0more than 100 real beers his whole life. He should have! In his retirement — when he drank more — he smiled a lot more. A bit\u00a0shiker\u00a0<\/em>at one party, Toby teed off on a watermelon fruit bowl with a golf club. The golf club was a driver, a wood. Solid.<\/p>\n

I grew up on chocolate phosphates, just like my dad and my kids. I drank many of mine at Solomon\u2019s in the Cedar Center shopping strip in South Euclid, where Solomon\u2019s had moved — from East 105th Street — in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

For some Semitic, semantic reason, goys occasionally called Cedar Center the Gaza Strip. This has nothing to do with the present war. It’s just the word strip, <\/em>as in Gaza Strip and shopping strip, made for an interesting juxtaposition. The north side of Cedar Center looked pretty bad, actually. In the early 2010s it was concrete chunks and gravel heaps, until a real estate developer knocked down the 1950s-era plaza and put up a Bob Evans and other national chains.<\/p>\n

Bob Evans is good. Not knocking it.<\/p>\n

The C&L’s<\/span><\/strong> at Cedar Center lasted until 1994. A second Corky\u2019s opened further east in 1973. That one — the “new” one — just closed. Confused? Simply put, there are no more C&L’s in Cleveland.<\/p>\n

At Cedar Center Corky’s, a couple small tough Jews hung out in the rear booth. One was Bobby (pseudonym.) Bobby did collections for a major landlord. Major<\/em>, to me, meant more than 500 units. I knew Bobby from junior high. Bobby sued my mother. <\/em>Mom, for health reasons, had moved from her Beachwood apartment, where Bobby collected rents, to an assisted living facility. She had a couple months left on her lease. She had lived in the\u00a0 apartment 27 years. Bobby went after her. Bobby\u2019s boss, by the way, loved my band. So what, my mother was collectable.<\/p>\n

Delis have been going downhill for decades. In 2010 journalist David Sax\u00a0<\/strong>wrote a book, Save the Deli, <\/em>about the decline of the deli. Here\u2019s something for your next edition, Mr. Sax; Delis went downhill when they added TVs. Why are we forced to watch sports while we eat?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m deli-famous. Listen to me. I once wrote a thank-you note which was posted in the entrance of Jack\u2019s Deli on Green Road in Beachwood. My letter was about the terrific tray Jack\u2019s had prepared for the bris of my first child, Teddy. (Jack\u2019s Deli is still standing.) Oh yeah, my first bris as a dad . . . fatherhood was about buying huge quantities of smoked fish. In my letter I complimented Jack\u2019s on their white fish, which my Aunt Bernice the Maven approved of. I used the expression \u201cAunt Bernice the Maven gives her seal of approval\u201d in my letter. Bernice worked for a food broker and knew food.<\/p>\n

Do you prefer Jack\u2019s Deli or Corky & Lenny\u2019s? I asked that question just last week at a gig. I queried a nursing-home crowd about their favorite deli. \u00a0Jack\u2019s and Corky\u2019s ran a dead heat. After my quiz, my keyboardist and I played the song \u201c16 Tons (of hard salami),” which is\u00a0 the Mickey Katz parody of Tennessee Ernie Ford\u2019s \u201c16 Tons\u201d (of coal).\u201d<\/p>\n

Yikhes <\/em>(lineage): <\/em><\/span><\/strong>My dad grew up in a deli on Kinsman Road.\u00a0<\/strong>His mother had a candy store \/deli at East 118th Street and Kinsman. The deli was called Seiger\u2019s — my grandmother\u2019s maiden name. She sold it to her half-brother, Itchy, when he came over from the Old Country. Something fishy about that deal. My grandmother went from being a candy store\/deli owner to simply a candy-store owner.<\/p>\n

I once <\/span>played the \u201cdeli card\u201d to establish my bonafides. In an odd place. I was working as a police reporter in Collinwood, and the cops at the police station on East 152nd Street considered me a Jewish hippie spy from the Heights. But when I told the cops I was a Seiger, as in \u201cI\u2019m from Seiger\u2019s Restaurant, you know, on East 118th and Kinsman\u201d — the older cops suddenly took a liking to me. The older cops\u2014mostly high-ranking guys — knew Seiger\u2019s Restaurant well. Seiger\u2019s had been like a Damon Runyon casting hall; all manner of hustlers, cops, businessmen, and schnorrers had hung out there. (Seiger\u2019s closed in 1968.) The schnorrers were Orthodox Jewish tzedakah<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>(charity) solicitors; they had their own booth in the back. My great-aunt, Lil Seiger, served the schnorrers kosher food from her apartment, which was in back of the store, because the schnorrers\u00a0<\/em>wouldn\u2019t eat the non-kosher food. The deli was kosher-style, not kosher. Cops ate well at Seiger\u2019s, and nobody ever got a ticket for an expired meter, and sometimes cars were parked two lanes deep on the street, an old cop once told me. Itchie Seiger, my great uncle, was the restaurant\u2019s maitre d\u2019, a k a kibitzer <\/em>(glad-handler). He was a former cloak maker from Galicia, a province in Austria-Hungary. My grandmother Anna Seiger Soltzberg was a Galitizianer, as well.<\/p>\n

I personally didn\u2019t see Itchie very often. My parents didn\u2019t consider a drive from our house in South Euclid to Kinsman the right direction for a Sunday cruise. We usually wound up going east, toward the Chagrin River metro park.<\/p>\n

My great-aunt, Lil, supposedly gave her recipe for mish mosh soup to Corky\u2019s. All the deli owners knew each other. So I’m connected to Corky & Lenny\u2019s. Pass the Jew beer. Slurp.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

A lot of\u00a0 this post originally appeared in Belt Mag<\/em> in 2014. The graphic is by Ralph Solonitz. <\/span><\/p>\n

I had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal<\/em> last week. \u201cMaimonides Goes Wrong.” It has the word schnorrer<\/em> in it, too. Link here<\/a>. No paywall.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  My kids liked Corky\u2019s. The blintzes, the pickles, the halvah, the phosphates. But I\u2019m not here to write food nostalgia. Too cheesy. C&L’s closed, for good, Tuesday. The word in the local press — Cleveland Jewish News and the Plain Dealer — is C&L’s had a problem getting good help. That ain’t news. I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cleveland-full"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31203"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31224,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31203\/revisions\/31224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}