In the years between the two World Wars, a group of Bundists made their way to the U.S. Here, they started anew, supported by the Workmen’s (now Workers) Circle, the Joint Distribution Committee, trade unions, and the Jewish Daily Forward. Frank Z. Atran, a prominent Russian-born Jewish businessman and philanthropist, and a major benefactor to Mount Sinai Hospital, donated a building on the corner of Madison Avenue and 78th Street – 25 E. 78th St. – to the Jewish Labor Committee. Offices were built and the newly named Atran House for Jewish Culture became home to a variety of Jewish organizations. Inside its walls, refugees from Europe who were fortunate enough to escape the Holocaust found shelter and support. The building became a vibrant hub for Jewish intellectual and political life. This is where my story begins.

The house is an imposing mansion on the southeast corner of Madison and 78th, originally designed by Stanford White and built in 1900 for Stuyvesant and Marion Fish, prominent members of New York society. It boasted a ballroom on its second floor that was described at the time as one of the largest and most beautiful in the city. And in that room, Mrs. Fish hosted wild parties for the Gilded Age elite.

Back in the 1950s, you would approach the residence by ascending a formal, sweeping set of steps that led up to two massive, metal-framed, glass-encased doors. Push one open, and you entered a shimmering marble lobby. To the right was a telephone receptionist perched at a wooden desk, operating a switchboard by pulling wires that guided incoming and outgoing calls. To the left was a cavernous room with a small door in its back wall, behind which a small servant’s stairway curved up to the ceiling. Directly ahead was a tiny elevator, capable of accommodating four and a half people at most. Take the elevator up to the second floor, and you accessed the grand ballroom, the sheer grandeur of which was breathtaking: floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking 78th Street, with Juliet balconies and a polished parquet floor. To the left was a sliding door that opened onto a library with a massive fireplace, a hint of cigar smoke lingering in the air. Continue to the third floor, and you found a rabbit’s warren of offices. The fourth floor housed a library with countless rows of lovingly preserved Yiddish books, along with more offices. And on the fifth floor – well, on busy weekends when my family catered back-to-back parties in the ballroom – this was where we set up cots to sleep on Saturday nights.

Now down to the basement. In a corner, to the left of the elevator, was a small office in which a tall man with thick glasses sorted donated clothes to be sent on to those in Europe in need. To the right of the elevator, following a brass sign to the Ess Tsimmer (dining room), was an unassuming no-name self-service cafeteria, reviewed in the Underground Gourmet, on local radio, and in the New York Times as one of the best lunch spots in an area that contained art galleries, high-end retail shops, wealthy residences, privileged schools, and several museums – a magic space where Fifth Avenue rubbed elbows with the Lower East Side.

At one end of the cafeteria was a brick wall with a pass-through opening into the kitchen. Roughly twenty-five tables were covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Grated windows on the left side of the room offered a view of the legs of passersby on the sidewalk above. The walls were covered with posters of Ben Shahn drawings and Chagall paintings, as well as original works by lesser-known Jewish artists. To the right of the pass-through hung a blackboard on which the daily specials were written in chalk: a bowl of homemade soup and bread, $.60; a quarter roast chicken, with kugel or kasha and vegetables, $1.25; stuffed cabbage, $.90; egg salad or chopped liver, $.75; and the best baked apples and rugelach in town. To the right of the board was a curtained door that led into the dishwashing area, which consisted of three deep sinks and wooden-slatted dish racks. Turn left in there, and you came to a kitchen containing two hulking black ovens, a cash register whose drawer opened with a ting, a prep area, and a spiral staircase that stopped at the ceiling. A door led outside to the grated stairs that creaked up to the sidewalk, down which my mother hauled fifty-pound sacks of potatoes, flour, and vegetables daily.

In the kitchen were my parents and their business partners, as well as a dynamically tiny lady who was the erstwhile traffic controller of the eatery – it was her role to encourage diners seated at the tables to leave as soon as they had finished eating to give room to the others waiting in the long self-service line. Once you made it to the pass-through window, you would kibbutz with my mom, decide what to order, and my mom would ladle out your dish and hand it to you to put on your tray. Then – try to find a spot to sit – not so easy.

My parents had arrived in the States in 1950, with my sister in tow, confused by a new country, a new language, and a chance at a life that, for some unfathomable reason, had been granted to them and not to others. They were struggling to make ends meet when my mother was approached by the Jewish Labor Committee – her first husband, who perished in Moscow in 1945, had been a leader in the Bund in Poland before the war. They had a proposition for her: there was this building with an unused kitchen in the basement and office workers who would like a home-cooked meal for lunch, or maybe just a sandwich – would you like to take this on? “What’s a sandwich?” my mom asked, and that was that.

And, so, the Atran House Cafeteria was born. My mother would get up at 5 in the morning, get on the number 6 train heading downtown into Manhattan, and, with her partner, begin to weave her magic before those hot ovens. Yes, there were the people from the offices upstairs. But word soon spread throughout the Jewish community, and artists and writers took up their spots in one corner of the cafeteria, nursing their glasses of tea through the afternoon, thin swirls of cigarette smoke coiling upward as they argued over the finer points of life, love, and art, their meals paid for in trade by their artwork, displayed on the walls. The intellectuals were soon joined by students from the NYU Fashion Institute down the block, who came for the filling – and cheap – soup and bread. And if they couldn’t pay for the soup – well, never mind,  my mom shrugged, “a child has to eat, no?”

Slowly, the owners and customers of the neighboring swank shops started trickling in, followed by staff from nearby embassies and, finally, visitors and staff from the surrounding museums. By the 1970s, there literally was a line out the door.

The 1968 edition of The Underground Gourmet described the cafeteria as “deep in an unlikely building in an unlikely part of the city”; “in an area of fashionable art galleries, fashionable shops and fashionable restaurants is hidden a truly out-of-the-ordinary dining room” at whose tables are seated “a cross-section of Jewish intelligentsia (male and female) of another era, young social workers, artists, students and an occasional art dealer” and, in which, “[T]here is a comfort and a warming nostalgia that makes this unpretentious dining room a rare find”. “The food is prepared and served in cafeteria style by two gracious ladies…who have been with the restaurant for 13 years. Time has not dimmed their pleasant and attentive manner.”

Unbeknownst to the ladies, the cafeteria was mentioned in the New York Times.

In her article “Soup Stops: Informal, Satisfying,” published on March 17, 1976, in the New York Times, Mimi Sheraton writes:

Uptown, in the environ of art galleries and antique shops, is the improbably situated Atran Cultural Restaurant at 25 East 78th Street which is open Monday through Friday. Walk down the seedy stairway and through the tacky hall and you are in a clublike dining room, with oilcloth-topped tables, a self-service open kitchen, and little old ladies who clear tables and ask why you haven’t finished your food.

The clientele is a mismatched combination of art dealers and clients, art students, antiquarians, and shopkeepers, all of whom know about the low-priced, superb, homecooked, Jewish kosher-style food and most especially, the vegetable, mushroom and barley soup, featured Monday through Friday at 60 cents per bowl without bread, 70 cents with.

The telephone in the kitchen, LE5-3700, started ringing off the hook as people asked whether reservations were needed. “What’s a reservation?” my mother asked. Zero Mostel came in for gefilte fish. A newspaper clipping from the NY Times dated May 3, 1974, describes Calvin Trillin’s visit to the cafeteria. Tour guides from the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought in groups of visitors who didn’t know their carp from their whitefish but always asked for more.

Weekends we catered parties in the ballroom. I think Marion Fish would have gotten a kick out of having her ballroom host bar mitzvahs, weddings, and dinners that celebrated the renewal of life borne from the ashes of war.

Having made it to 65, my mother retired in 1977, and the cafeteria and catering business closed. My parents moved to – where else? – Miami Beach. The building itself was sold a few years later, the organizations moving on elsewhere. The mansion’s interior, its secret hallways and spiral staircases leading nowhere, its ghosts and its sighs, were gutted and vanished. A series of sales led to its current owner, the Bloomberg Foundation.

The New York Post ran this Easy Streets article on Wednesday, April 4, 2007:

A stretch of the Upper East Side where Mayor Bloomberg last year paid $45 million for a six-story townhouse has been named New York’s priciest block.

The townhouse, on East 78th Street between Fifth and Madison, at the time set a record for a residential property sale.

In response to this article, in an email dated July 23, 2007, to my uncle Ben Giladi, the editor of “The Voice,” Howard Zar, then EVP at Porter Novelli, wrote:

I just received the most recent copy of “The Voice” and read with interest your article on the Atran House on the Upper East Side. While its history in the Jewish community is well-known, a lesser-known fact is that the haimishe cafeteria in the basement was one of the elite lunch hangouts for the Upper East Side art world and socialites. In 1974, during my freshman year at Princeton, our art history class was taken on a private tour of an impressionist painting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. Our guide was A. Hyatt Mayor, a very distinguished, elderly art history professor. For lunch, he took our group to a “secret” lunch venue only known by the cognoscenti in the art world. He described it as a place out of Mitteleuropa with checked tablecloths and a divine strudel. I thought I was going to a German restaurant.

It turned out, he was taking us to the basement cafeteria at the Atran House. Much to my surprise, once we got there, there were brass signs in Yiddish directing us to the “Ess Tsimmer”. There was probably not a woman serving food who was much above five feet tall or much below the age of a great-grandmother. Although the menu was familiar to me –as it was basically the same food my mother had made all her life – the “shiksas” who formed the bulk of our class had no idea what to order. The grandmothers would look at the girls and make them up a plate of food, which they all raved over. So, there I was in a group of WASPs explaining the intricacies of Jewish cuisine. Also, the mix of diners was truly eclectic. While there were those who probably knew every word of the writings of Emma Golding, the room also had its sprinkling of socialites. At one table, Tom Hoving, then the director of the Metropolitan Museum, was having lunch with Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s sister.

So, much to my surprise, one of my first outings to New York City to see the Metropolitan Museum turned into an opportunity to see one of the lesser-known monuments of Jewish culture.

A little secret – diminutive though these ladies appeared, they were actually a force of nature, with the fortitude and strength to survive the worst that humanity can visit on itself while maintaining their spirit of love and care.

End of an era.

And yet… Years later, after my sister and I had settled in Phoenix with our families, we decided to return to NYC for New Year’s Eve. As was our habit whenever we visited, we strolled past what would always be, for us, the Atran House and our home, paying homage to its past. Standing there in the fading light, we overheard the conversation of two women passing us by. One said to the other, “You know, you’d never guess it, but one of the best restaurants in the area was once down in the basement of this building.”

From its illustrious beginnings to its current philanthropic stance, the heart of this grandiose building pulsates with the disparate skeins, past and present, of a community’s fabric that could only be woven in a city with a soul and a nation rooted in democracy.

Recipe for mushroom barley soup:

• ¼ cup olive oil
• 1 cup chopped onion
• ¾ cup diced carrots
• ½ cup chopped celery
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1 lb. sliced fresh mushrooms
• 6 cups chicken broth
• ¾ cup barley
• Salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil in a large soup pot over medium heat. Add onion, carrots, celery and garlic. Cook until onion is soft and translucent. Stir in mushrooms and continue to cook for 5 minutes. Add chicken broth, barley and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer until barley is soft, about 50 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve. Es gezunterheyt (eat in good health)!