The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City by Henry Sapoznik

The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City

 by Henry H. Sapoznik

State University of New York Press 2025

On the face of it, a tourist guide to the culture of a lost language in a city that never stops changing is absurd as a new maintenance guide for a push-cart. But look closer and you’ll find that the influence of early 20th-Century Jewish immigrants to New York is, if not ubiquitous, at least persistent. The title of Henry Sapoznik's new history of Ashkenazi Jewish business and culture in America will strike most as a joke: how can a tourist visit a lost place? This is no Lonely Planet guide: most of the places covered are long gone. But not all; with a little work, a nice walking tour of lower Manhattan (with stops for lunch) could be assembled from it.

Henry Sapoznik is well-known as a historian and performer of klezmer, the music of Eastern European Jews that was preserved by emigrants and “revived” in the 1970s. His Klezmer!: Jewish Music from Old World to Our World (1999) and The Compleat Klezmer (1987) respectively stand as the definitive one-volume history and the essential tune collection for that art. Working mostly Yiddish-language periodicals and ephemera, the current book examines the wider context in which the Ashkenazi immigrants who came to the United States from Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania in the late 19th and early 20th century did their preservation.

In most cases, the entrepreneurs, impresarios and artists profiled in this book, were creating that context. The book’s relatively brisk chapters are grouped into sections for food, architecture, music, and theater. Within these sections are shorter chapters that cover the contested standard of “kosher,” the construction of a grand hotel for Jewish business travellers, the small trend of female cantors, and the twisting development of the Jazz Singer.

The discussion of food includes many products that can still be found on well-stocked grocery shelves: Manishewitz kosher wine and matzo, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic, Yonah Shimmel’s Knishes, Chunky chocolate bars. As would be expected, the old world products were not just re-created in the new, but were also transformed. One such example is the potato-filled pastry called the knish, as sold by the Yugoslav-born Elia Gabay (1889-1971):

What Manischewitz did for the matzo–industrializing what until then had been an entirely bespoke food while maximizing its portability, storability, and shelf life, therby stabilizing profits–by altering its traditional shape from round to square, is what Gabay did for knishes. But Gabay went one step further and altered not only the traditional shape but also the traditional preparation from baking to deep frying…. By 1932, Gabay switched from handmade knishes to knishes made on machines he himself designed with internals so proprietary, they were never patented for fear of revealing their workings. Gabila would soon produce a million knishes daily.

When it comes to brick-and-mortar establishments, the survivors are thinner on the ground. Katz’s Delicatessen has become a tourist magnet, but try to find a Roumanian restaurant, appetizing store or dairy bar.

As always with immigrant communities, the fact of cultural survival in the new environment is only part of the story. The way the new land changes the immigrant is another. Sapoznik is the son of a cantor and has probably listened to more Yiddish archival audio than anyone. His chapters tell over and over of the effect of American culture and technology on old world tradition, whether by the possibility of broadcast and recording. From the beginning, there were “European-born Jewish musicians–klezmorim–who, upon arrival, were obliged to learn two new languages: English and jazz.”

In addition to new technologies and musical sounds, American pluralism made possible two phenomena that probably would never have arisen in the shtetls: female cantors and black cantors, each of which get revealing chapters. Thomas LaRue Jones (1894-1954), an African-American born in Virginia and raised adjacent to a Jewish community in New Jersey, learned the traditional liturgical songs of his neighbors and was sought after to perform that role, though it is still unclear whether or not he ever fully converted to Judaism. Jones was a popular traveling performer and sang on the Yiddish theater stages of New York. The Yiddish-language press, we are told, loved him. His fame carried him as far as Europe, where he was not as popular. A protest gathered outside a German theater where LaRue was scheduled to perform:

Some claimed LaRue was not a Jew and simply learned a few cantorial pieces…. A provocateur then called out that in order to prove it, LaRue Jones should be taken to the mikve (ritual bath) and undressed, to see if he was circumcised. Despite LaRue’s tearful protestations, the mob took up the chant and demanded he expose himself before they would let him perform. LaRue refused and left the country, never to return.

This book is filled with deep original research leavened by lively writing and good humor. Anyone with an interest in New York City or Yiddish language and culture will read it with pleasure.

James Ruchala is a banjo player with a YouTube channel.