Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli Ted Merwin. New York University Press, 2015.

Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli Ted Merwin. New York University Press, 2015.Before getting to the meat of the matter, first things first. Let's get all the puns out of the way. If you're looking for a platter full of culinary delights alongside a smorgasbord of American Jewish history, you need not look any further than Ted Merwin's Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli. No skimpy servings here. To the contrary, with so much to nosh on and so little to kvetch about, this book is the whole schmear.Divided into four parts tracing the history of the Jewish deli from the establishment of the first Jewish delicatessens in Eastern Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-to the glory years of the Jewish delicatessens in the 1920s and 1930s-to the role these Jewish delicatessens played on the home front and in the battlefields during the second World War and the transformations they underwent, afterward, in the postwar era-to the declining state of the Jewish delicatessen today, Merwin's cultural history of the Jewish delicatessen is encyclopedic in scope, rich in substance, and intimate in details.As Merwin frames it, "the history of the delicatessen is the history of the Jews eating themselves into Americans" (1). And as Merwin chronicles it, this history begins in the early years of the twentieth century as the New York Jewish delicatessen provides Jewish immigrants with an economic foothold in the New York restaurant and food services industries. It flourishes in the years between World War One and World War Two as the children of these Jewish immigrants transform that foothold into a fixture of American Jewish culture-and a symbol of American Jewish success-by establishing the New York Jewish deli as an integral part of the New York City social scene. It reconfigures itself in the postwar years as increasingly secular, upwardly mobile, second- and thirdgeneration American Jews, branching into the suburbs, rely on kosher Jewish delis to serve as one of their few remaining cultural connections to their Jewish heritage. And finally, it all but ends in the waning years of the twentieth century as a confluence of changing times, tastes, and traditions contribute to the demise of the Jewish delicatessen along with so much of the Jewish culture and community that, for so many generations, sustained it.Incorporating multiple methodologies and theoretical approaches, intertwining more than two dozen archival photographs and illustrations, and including over 500 supplementary notes, the scholarship in Pastrami on Rye is exemplary. But equally important for an academic study, Pastrami on Rye is also a very good "read." At the heart of this read is a uniquely Jewish yet very common American tale of the immigrant aspiration for assimilation without disassociation. Throughout Pastrami on Rye, Merwin tells this tale with verve and relish signifying, well, much more than nothing. Among the many substantive questions he explores and/or raises, for example, are what happens when immigrants come to a new country and they and their descendants transform-and are transformed by -that country's culture? At what point did "Jewish Americans" become "American Jews," not only in name but in identity, and with what consequences to that identity? In what ways has American culture become indistinguishable from America popular culture, and what historic role did the Jewish delicatessen play in the blurring of this demarcation?Like all good historical studies, Pastrami on Rye includes, literally, thousands of historical details about the Jewish delicatessen-more than enough to satisfy even the most meticulous of historians, while, at times, overwhelming its nonhistorian readers. …