Posted on

Beneath the Surface of Its Streets Beats the Heart of a City – The Atran House Cafeteria

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)!

Posted on

What Would Plato Say?….And Then There’s Noodle Kugel

Shtopf mikh nit keyn lokshen — a Yiddish expression that translates literally as “Don’t stuff me with noodles.” In traditional Eastern European households, feeding a guest cheap, filling egg noodles in place of something more substantial could be considered a cheap trick, even an insult. The guest might leave with a full stomach but little nourishment. 

Figuratively, the expression means: Don’t feed me nonsense. Don’t try to pass off something insubstantial as something of value. And please don’t insult my intelligence by expecting me to swallow it.

What has happened to our ability to think critically? To break down information, identify hidden assumptions, assess the credibility of sources, distinguish fact from opinion and propaganda, recognize our own biases, and, above all, ask questions? Have we forgotten how to exercise these faculties, or have we simply decided that doing so is too exhausting? Is critical thinking a kind of intellectual muscle memory that must be flexed continually to remain strong? And what happens to that muscle when it is confronted by fear, apathy, or the promise that someone else will do the thinking for us?

Perhaps the more unsettling question is not whether we can think critically, but whether we still consider it necessary.

We live in an age of relentless information, much of it delivered with the confidence of an oracle and little evidentiary foundation. Assertions arrive dressed as facts. Opinions acquire the authority of pronouncements. Repetition masquerades as proof. The loudest voice can drown out the most carefully reasoned argument, while a claim repeated often enough may begin to feel true simply because it has become familiar.

But familiarity is not evidence, and confidence is not credibility.

The first obligation of a thinking citizen is to beware of granting credence to inflammatory statements unsupported by facts. A rumor is not transformed into truth because it confirms our suspicions, flatters our prejudices, or comes from someone we admire. Indeed, the claims we most eagerly accept may be the ones that deserve our closest scrutiny. Critical thinking requires us to interrogate not only the assertions of others but also the assumptions we are most reluctant to question in ourselves.

This is an inconvenient discipline. It demands patience when outrage is easier, reflection when certainty is more gratifying, and a willingness to admit that we may be wrong. It also requires us to tolerate ambiguity. The world rarely arranges itself into the neat categories of heroes and villains, saints and sinners, friends and enemies that political rhetoric so readily supplies. Reality is untidy. It refuses to fit comfortably into slogans.

Beware of complacence, that comfortable state in which we convince ourselves that nothing requires our attention. We lean back, content that someone else is surely monitoring the situation. Institutions will take care of themselves. Someone else will challenge questionable assertions, investigate dubious claims, defend principles we have come to take for granted. What happens when everyone is waiting for someone else?

Complacence can become acquiescence: silent consent, quiet compliance, passive acceptance, perhaps even reluctant submission. We may not agree with what is happening, but we decide that protest is inconvenient, that disagreement is futile, or that the consequences of speaking up are too unpleasant. Silence begins as a personal refuge and can end as a public endorsement. Those who wield authority may interpret our failure to object as permission to proceed.

From acquiescence, the transition to obeisance is easy. Obeisance implies deference, a posture of submission before someone whose authority is treated as beyond ordinary question. The individual who once exercised independent judgment begins to defer automatically. 

And then comes subservience: the willingness to place another’s wishes above one’s own judgment, needs, or principles. Independent thought becomes an inconvenience and personal conviction becomes a liability. The individual learns to anticipate what authority wants and to accommodate it before being asked.

Finally, we arrive at obsequiousness, that excessive eagerness to please, flatter, and reassure those in positions of power. Honest disagreement gives way to calculated praise. The truth becomes less important than the reaction it might provoke. The courtier learns that approval is safer than candor and that a flattering lie may be more welcome than an inconvenient fact.

Consider the progression: credence, complacence, acquiescence, obeisance, subservience, obsequiousness. A descent into madness, from the initial willingness to believe an unsupported claim to the eventual surrender of independent judgment. The danger is in the gradual replacement of thought by deference, and of civic responsibility by passive acceptance.

It is worth remembering that the erosion of democratic habits need not begin with a dramatic event. It can begin with a small concession: overlooking an unsupported claim; excusing an abuse of authority; dismissing a question as disloyal; deciding that the truth is less important than winning an argument. Each concession may seem harmless in isolation. The cumulative effect, however, can be profound.

Which brings us to Plato.

In The Republic, Plato explores the relationship between knowledge, opinion, appearances, and the difficult work of seeking truth. His philosophical metaphor, Allegory of the Cave, imagines prisoners who mistake shadows on a wall for reality since shadows are all they have ever known. Their world is limited, but within that limitation it appears complete. When one prisoner encounters the possibility of a reality beyond those shadows, the experience is unsettling. What seemed self-evident must now be reconsidered.

What would Plato say about a society in which shadows travel at extraordinary speed, multiply across screens, and are endlessly reinforced by people who have little incentive to question them? What would he make of our willingness to accept the familiar image over the inconvenient evidence, the persuasive performance over the painstaking argument, the comforting fiction over the complicated truth?

Perhaps he would remind us that seeing is not the same as understanding, and that possessing information is not the same as possessing knowledge. A mind crowded with assertions is not necessarily an informed mind. One must still ask how those assertions were established, what assumptions sustain them, and whose interests are served by their acceptance.

Plato might also recognize the danger of confusing popularity with truth. A proposition does not become sound because a multitude applauds it. Nor does a speaker become wise merely because an audience is captivated. Persuasion can illuminate, but it can also manipulate. The distinction lies not in the volume of the applause but in the quality of the reasoning.

Yet Plato’s challenge is not confined to those who make pronouncements from positions of authority. It is directed at all of us who must decide what to believe. The prisoner in the cave is a reminder of our own susceptibility to habit, convenience, and illusion. We may congratulate ourselves on our independence while accepting, without examination, whatever reinforces our existing convictions.

Intellectual humility, therefore, is indispensable. To think critically is not to assume that everyone else is wrong. It is to recognize that our own conclusions are provisional, that evidence can change our minds, and that genuine inquiry begins with questions rather than predetermined answers.

Democracy depends upon this willingness to question. It depends upon institutions capable of restraining power, public officials answerable for their actions, courts able to operate independently, a free press able to investigate, and citizens willing to insist that authority be justified rather than merely obeyed. These checks and balances are not bureaucratic inconveniences. They are safeguards against the concentration and misuse of power.

A democratic society cannot function on blind trust, any more than it can function on universal suspicion. It requires informed scrutiny: a willingness to examine evidence, challenge assertions, acknowledge uncertainty, and hold those in authority to the same standards we apply to everyone else. Loyalty to a democratic system should not mean unquestioning loyalty to any individual who occupies its offices. Indeed, the capacity to question authority is one of the ways in which democratic loyalty is expressed.

There will always be purveyors of convenient explanations, ready-made enemies, flattering reassurances, and slogans that promise to make complexity disappear. 

The old Yiddish admonition still serves us well. Shtopf mikh nit keyn lokshen. Don’t stuff me with noodles. Don’t mistake volume for nourishment, insistence for evidence, or obedience for virtue. Don’t ask me to surrender my judgment.

Perhaps the most dangerous form of intellectual surrender is the one we scarcely notice: the moment we stop asking questions because the answers have become too comfortable, too frightening, or too inconvenient to examine.

Shakespeare understood the usefulness of the stage as a place where pretensions are exposed and hidden truths brought into view. In Hamlet, the prince arranges a play designed to reveal the king’s conscience through his response to a dramatized version of a suspected crime. Hamlet declares:

“The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

The scene is an experiment in accountability. Rather than accept appearances, Hamlet seeks a means of testing them. He understands that what people say about themselves may differ from what their actions reveal, and that observation, evidence, and scrutiny can expose what polished language conceals.

We need citizens who are neither dazzled by authority nor paralyzed by fear; who understand that skepticism is not cynicism, that disagreement is not disloyalty, and that questioning is not an act of hostility but a necessary condition of responsible citizenship.

Plato might ask us to leave the cave. Shakespeare might ask us to watch the play. And our grandmothers, with considerably less philosophical fuss, might simply remind us not to mistake a plateful of noodles for a proper meal.

After all, democracy, like the mind, cannot live on empty calories forever.

And then there’s my mom’s noodle (lokshen) kugel. A baked pudding with egg noodles, eggs, cottage cheese, sour cream, raisins, sugar, cinnamon (and love), it is the perfect side dish to a well-balanced meal.

Posted on

Of Fathers and Daughters and Mile-High Sandwiches

My father was 46 years old when I was born. My sister and I were his second family, a second chance at fatherhood after unimaginable loss. His first wife and young daughter had been caught up in the final liquidation of the Piotrkow Trybunalski ghetto during the Holocaust, herded onto trains bound for concentration camps, and piled into the crematoria that ended their lives in tendrils of smoke and ash. This was the penultimate grief that he silently carried for the remainder of his life.

After the war, my parents found each other in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Both had survived, though survival itself came with scars that could never fully heal. They married, hoping to build a future from the wreckage of the past. In 1950, they arrived at Ellis Island with my older sister in tow, carrying little more than resilience and a fierce determination to begin again.

Two years later, they opened a cafeteria on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. They worked tirelessly, pouring every ounce of energy into the business and into creating a stable life for their family. It was there, amid the bustle of New York City and the aroma of home-cooked food, that I was born—a first-generation American and a second-generation Holocaust survivor.

My mother rose before dawn each day. She would make her way from the Bronx into Manhattan, to the cafeteria’s kitchen, to ignite the enormous black stove, and begin preparing the nourishing meals that would feed her customers. Without discussion or ceremony, my father assumed responsibility for me and my sister each morning. Long before anyone spoke about shared parenting or challenging traditional gender roles, my father was doing what needed to be done. Each weekday morning, he woke us, made us breakfast, brushed and braided my unruly hair, packed our lunches, and shepherded us out the door in time for school.

My brown-bag lunch was a thing of beauty. Wanting to do things properly, my parents had asked our neighbors what an American school lunch should contain. “A sandwich,” they were told. Neither of them had ever encountered such a thing before. But once the concept was explained, my father embraced it wholeheartedly.

He approached the task methodically, much as he did everything in life. It began with slices of Levy’s Jewish rye bread. He would spread these generously with mustard, and then piled on layer upon layer of meat—pastrami, corned beef, salami, whatever happened to be at hand. The type of meat was irrelevant; abundance was everything. The sandwich would often stand two inches high. There were no vegetables added to dilute the experience—no lettuce, tomato, or pickle. Just pure protein sustenance. An apple was tucked into the bag as an afterthought, a token nod to the food pyramid. Looking back, I understand that those towering sandwiches were about so much more than lunch. They were an expression of love and protection from a man who had known hunger and uncertainty intimately and was determined that his daughter never would.

As I grew older, my father followed every step of my journey through school and into adulthood with unwavering attention. Every achievement was important. Honor roll certificates, awards, diplomas—each one was carefully mounted on a laminated wooden plaque and proudly displayed. The collection grew year after year, eventually culminating in my Juris Doctor degree. For a man who had been forced to leave school after sixth grade in order to help support his family, education was sacred. My accomplishments were not merely my own; they represented the fulfillment of his dreams that history had once tried to extinguish.

When my parents finally retired in their seventies, exhausted but undefeated, they settled in Miami Beach. By then I had children of my own, and our visits became treasured family rituals. My father would wait eagerly by the door of their condo for our arrival. The moment my sons appeared, he would open his arms wide. “Pupeleh!” he would exclaim, his face transformed by a rare, broad smile. In those moments, the hardships of his life seemed to fall away, replaced by pure joy.

Tatishi, I remember your hands—large, strong, and protective—holding mine as we walked along the Grand Concourse on warm summer evenings, heading to Krums on Fordham Road for an ice cream cone. I remember those same hands braiding my hair before school, hanging my diplomas on the walls of our apartment, and carefully constructing my mile-high sandwiches. I remember your quiet courage in choosing to have children again and giving them the world. Most of all, I remember your boundless love.