Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

feelings if you did not—they might even stop to talk to you, and the best of them combined the folk wisdom of Sholem Aleichem† with the resigned weariness of the shtetl.‡

The uncritical affection I felt for them is almost certainly a result of my unconditional failure as a Hebrew school student. My inability to learn the ancestral language, combined with a desultory performance at my bar mitzvah, caused me to be scorned as a dimwit in the Jewish community. I ended up uneasy with religious formality, but I loved the

*A waiter walks out of the kitchen, carrying a steak. A second waiter says to him,

“Moishe, what’s your thumb doing in the meat?” Moishe replies, “What, you want I should drop it again?”

† Pen name of nineteenth-century Yiddish humorist Sholem Rabinowitz—

which, by the way, is my mother’s maiden name, not that I’ve seen a penny in royalties.

‡ The isolated, backward Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, inspiration for many a sardonic joke that begins, “The rabbi of the shtetl was walking along when . . .” F O R K I T O V E R

1 9 5

waiters, who were living Judaic artifacts. That they came forth bearing food helped, because my family, like most Jewish families of Eastern European background, confused food with affection. The primary Jewish token of love isn’t a bouquet. It’s a brisket.

“Henny Youngman was a lovely guy,” says Jack Sirota, recalling the famous funnyman and Carnegie Deli regular, “but as a tipper he was a bum. He said to me, ‘Aren’t I a good tipper?’ I said to him, ‘If this was 1935, you’d be great.’ He said, ‘Jack, I tip a dollar here and a dollar at the Friar’s Club.’ I said, ‘You’re a bum here and a bum there.’ ”

After forty-one years waiting tables at the Carnegie, Sirota has become almost as much a symbol of the Manhattan restaurant as the eccentrically grandiose sandwiches—number thirteen, a turkey, corned beef, swiss cheese, and coleslaw combo, has been known to weigh in at three pounds. He’s six feet tall, and back in the days when he weighed 310 pounds, he was photographed holding an oversize sandwich for a promotional poster. The cap-tion read not all the skyscrapers in nyc are made of glass and marble. Woody Allen, who used to be a Carnegie regular, cast him as a waiter (no stretch there) in Broadway Danny Rose, but Sirota says, “Since he married Soon-Yi, I don’t see him.” A lot has changed at the Carnegie over the years. The sandwiches are bigger. Sirota is smaller, having taken off forty pounds.

Most of all, the regulars don’t come around as much, now that tourists line up outside and the wait can be forty minutes on weekends. “Now it’s ninety-nine and three-quarters percent transient trade, and maybe one percent Jewish,” he says. “We put out matzohs on Passover. They take a bite and say, ‘What’s this?’ ” Sirota was born in Brooklyn and started his career as a waiter in the Catskills, the modest mountain range north of New York City where Jews went to breathe fresh air but ended up spending most of their time in the dining rooms. The Jewish waiters who worked up there remember those days with affection. They 1 9 6

A L A N R I C H M A N

were all young, slim, handsome, and made a very good living.

Sirota recalls, with a rueful smile, that he weighed 150 when he worked at the Avon Lodge.

“During summertime the hotel was quite busy, with five hundred guests,” he says, “but after the Jewish holidays * I’d go to Canada, fishing and hunting. In 1955 I bought a brand-new Oldsmobile; it cost me twenty-eight hundred dollars and included a tank of gas. I had two guns, two fishing rods, and no shortage of girls. When I say I was a ladies’ man, I didn’t take them for pizza. For steak. I made a lot of money and lived well. In those days, three drinks cost a dollar.

“It was the best time of my life. One of my special guests in the hotel was Sid Caesar. He was a great guy, very nice. I even played pinochle with him. Sid Caesar was quite a marksman. I would go into town, buy cans of shaving cream, and he would shoot them to see how high they would go. He had a . 357 Magnum and a high-powered rifle. He wouldn’t kill a fly, but he loved to shoot. His best friend owned the Joyva halvah† company. They’d fill the halvah tins with seltzer, shoot at them. If you have money, you can do anything.”

Finally, Sirota met the woman he wanted to marry, the cousin of his brother’s wife. She didn’t want to live in the mountains, so they returned to New York City, and he went to work at Mirko’s Guitar Room, where he once waited on Carl Sandburg. “You can’t get any bigger than that,” he says.

His life is quiet now. He works only three days a week, this sweet, shambling man who seems at peace with the world. While I’m talking to him, a Chinese-American waitress who has been

*Jews divide the year according to the standard Gregorian calendar when speaking to Gentiles, but “before the holidays” and “after the holidays” when addressing other Jews.

† A delicious sesame-seed candy that rightfully belongs to the Arabs, unlike Jerusalem.

F O R K I T O V E R

1 9 7

at the Carnegie for fourteen years interrupts several times, angrily and forcefully, to point out how difficult Sirota was when she first arrived. Speaking of all the old Jewish waiters at the Carnegie, not just Sirota, she says, “They were so mean, they killed me.” He lets her speak, and then he says, softly, that times were different then. He had supervisory responsibilities, and it was