At first blush (especially if garlic pickle induced), Manny’s delicatessen wouldn’t seem a likely site for philosophical musing on the nature of hunger from an migrant generation to today. This Near West Side temple of plenty is dedicated to the proposition that the human esophagus should always be stuffed to the approximate consistency of the hard salamis hanging behind its steam table. Decline a counterman’s offer to lay two or three vegetables, plus a semicircle of kishke, alongside your brisket or pastrami sandwich and he recoils defensively, as if a Cossack were coming down the cafeteria line.
Yet each age knows its own form of hunger, as author Jonathan Rosen observed between bites of a flying-saucer-scale potato pancake. He was in Chicago recently to plug his first novel, “Eve’s Apple” (Random House, $24), which revolves around anorexia – a problem unknown to the historical epoch from which the kosher delicatessen as a culinary art form and cultural marker descends.
“At the beginning of the century, Jews couldn’t afford to starve themselves,” Rosen said. “For them, it was a different kind of hunger – a hunger for fitting into the life of their adopted homeland.”
He had wanted to lunch at Manny’s because it sits a few blocks from Halsted and Maxwell Streets, once the crossroads of Chicago’s immigrant Jewish neighborhood. Rosen’s day job is cultural editor of The Forward, a New York-based newspaper that has long chronicled the American Jewish experience.
When it was founded as a Yiddish-language daily a century ago, hundreds of thousands of Russian and Polish Jews were pouring into America, seeking refuge from the grinding poverty and religious persecution of their native lands. They crowded into tenement neighborhoods, like Chicago’s Maxwell Street and New York’s Lower East Side, where they found that the streets were far from paved with gold. Yet despite near-starvation wages and physical privation, they remained convinced that the Almighty had with good reason brought them to a New World and would presently smooth over the rougher spots in their new existence.
Abraham Cahan, The Forward’s founding editor, once came across a meeting of striking members of the Vest Makers Union. They were using their unaccustomed spare time for a little Talmud study, he reported to his readers.
“It is for the bread of our children we are struggling,” one of the strikers explained to Cahan. “Saith the law of Moses: `Thou shalt not withhold anything from thy neighbor nor rob him.’ So you see that our bosses who rob us and who don’t pay us regularly commit a sin, and that the cause of our union is a just one.”
Cahan, too, juggled his editorial duties with a novelist’s career. One of his novels, “Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto,” was, 80 years afterward in 1975, made into the film “Hester Street.” On a straightforward level, the world of Cahan’s books is light-years distant from that of Rosen’s new novel.
Cahan populated his books with characters, like those striking vest makers still attempting to understand the dilemmas of their transplanted lives through the religious perspective of their ancestors. Others strive and connive trying to find a short cut from poverty to prosperity.
In 1917, Cahan published the most renowned of his novels, “The Rise of David Levinsky,” an immigrant’s rags-to-riches story. Cahan’s words could be read as a prologue to “Eve’s Apple.”
“I can never forget the days of my misery,” Levinsky says in his final soliloquy. “My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher’s Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinksy, the well-known cloak-manufacturer.”
“Eve’s Apple,” by contrast, is set in definitively post-tenement times. Rosen’s characters are Jews, but of the upper middle class and the Upper West Side (in Chicago’s cultural geography, say, Broadway and Belmont Avenue). Joseph, the novel’s protagonist-narrator, is college educated — an experience that put the capstone on a process through which his family has become progressively amnesiac about its past. Lacking the drive that carried his forebears out of slums, he is drifting. He works part time at an English-language school for Russian refugees, a job with an unexpected fringe benefit.
“I felt carried away by my students to the places of their birth: Tashkent and Kiev and Moscow and Leningrad, back through time and the gates of Ellis Island into an immigrant past I had never known,” Joseph tells us.
At Columbia University, Joseph had been an indifferent student. No subject captured his intellectual fancy enough for him to plow much energy into it. But by the early chapters of “Eve’s Apple” he has become a dedicated scholar, prefacing his time in the classroom with hours of pouring over medical and psychological volumes in the New York Public Library.
The young woman with whom he shares his life and bed (increasingly on a platonic basis), is becoming anorexic, getting up in the middle of the night to skip rope if her daily weigh-in reveals that she has gained so much as a pound. Joseph is fascinated by the idea that someone could take a psychological vow of perpetual hunger pains, and her compulsion not to eat is soon matched by his compulsion to understand the disease, which he researches with an intensity his ancestors reserved for Talmudic studies.
Rosen dates his own fascination with the phenomenon of anorexia to his college years at Yale. “I encountered women just like my character Ruth, liberated but essentially uncomfortable with the idea of having a body,” he said. “They had discarded eating in a culture of consumption.”
Ruth, readers of “Eve’s Apple” learn, is the product of parents driven to overachieve in their professional lives and marital discord. After their divorce, her businessman father dropped out of her life; now he doles out the monthly checks that enable her to think of herself as an art student by taking an occasional course. Her mother went back to college to study film, making herself a minor academic star of that field. Ruth’s childhood was put on hold while her mother liberated herself from a homemaker’s fate by flitting from screening rooms to film festivals.
“She wanted to have her kids and eat them too,” Ruth says, in a Freudian-slip insight into her own fear of eating. “She wanted to escape, which is fine except that I had already been born. How could I compete with Katharine Hepburn when I was only five?”
Driven to comprehend Ruth’s self-starvation, Joseph becomes a disciple of a maverick psychologist, Dr. Ernest Flek, who has lost his faith in Freud just as the novel’s other characters have shed their religious commitments.
Flek considers anorexia part and parcel of the “strange melancholy” that afflicts prosperous societies.
In one of the novel’s best drawn scenes, Joseph makes a mental test of Flek’s theory via a sentimental voyage to the Lower East Side, where his great-grandparents lived during the family’s poverty years. But he doesn’t know which tenement they inhabited, the address was forgotten in their descendants’ migration to suburbia. Also the ethnic landscape has so changed it’s hard to find signposts of his people’s history.
“You had to look hard to find Jewish stores at all amid the Chinese and Hispanic street life,” Joseph tells us. “The Jewish Lower East Side was hidden, an overgrown garden.”
Joseph’s dilemma, his creator noted, is one shared by lots of educated and affluent Jews of the present thirtysomething generation.
“Joseph hungers for the energetic beginning of the 20th Century,” said the 34-year-old Rosen, “rather than our own, dislocated end of that century.”
But, of course, Joseph can’t find the spiritual food to satisfy his hunger. It has been destroyed, ironically by the very prosperity that ended the material hunger his great-grandparents’ generation knew, Rosen noted.
Indeed, just beyond the shop windows of the deli where he was lunching, the last traces of Chicago’s immigrant Jewish experience abruptly end. The Maxwell Street market, where Old World pack peddlers transformed themselves into New World shopkeepers, is a fast fading shadow of itself. The neighborhood’s founding generation once argued religious orthodoxy and reform and debated socialism versus Zionism on every street corner. Their descendants have long since moved into the American mainstream and out to the ideological quiet of suburbia. The West Side building where The Forward once printed a Chicago edition has been reduced to the rubble with which much of the inner city is now paved.
In fact, Rosen’s Forward is a different paper from Cahan’s. It still publishes a Yiddish edition, but for an ever-aging readership, the handful of Jews who can still read their ancestral language. Rosen helps edit a newer English-language version that has given The Forward a new life — but at the cost of surrendering the utopian dreams of its socialist founders for a free-market political philosophy more appropriate to an affluent generation of new readers.
“There is a kind of hunger that comes with prosperity,” Rosen said, echoing the characters in his novel — and perhaps unconsciously fulfilling a prophecy made long ago by his paper’s founding editor.
Cahan, Rosen recalled, felt strongly that The Forward owed its readers lessons in the cultural citizenship of their adopted homeland. Writing in Yiddish, he taught them how to become assimilated Americans. Yet even as he did so, he had a prescient vision that the very success of that project could leave a later generation of American Jews as psychologically stranded as the characters of Rosen’s novel.
