Zabar's is still thriving

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, June 2022

Zabar’s is still thriving

on “Broadway’s longest running show”

You might expect Zabar’s, the world-famous “appetizing” store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to have become a shadow of its former self. This seems to be the case for most of New York’s other independent specialty shops. Fairway, Balducci’s, H&H Bagels, Dean & Deluca: the food purveyors of my youth have gone kaput. They were bought, leveraged, expanded, overextended and oversold. They expired past their sell-by dates.

But somehow Zabar’s survived. For the Upper West Sider, Zabar’s is our Yale College and our Harvard. Like many I make my way down to 80th Street and Broadway most weekends for continuing education. I head to the appetizing counter and take a number. This is the heart of the operation, where it began in 1934 and where things still move at a historical pace. As I wait my turn, I collect my pickled herring and whitefish salad from a nearby refrigerator. Maybe I dart over to the cheese counter for Oma, d’Affinois, and gorgonzola. If I employ some Zabar’s calculus I could even take a number at the delicatessen counter for meats and prepared foods, such as the creamed spinach and truffled mortadella. Each counter comes with its own seasoned attendant, who collects my order in a waxed bag. They might even give me a sample.

My turn comes up at appetizing, the counter that sells the salted and smoked fish. There was a time in Jewish gastronomy when appetizing stores and delicatessens operated separately, because Kosher customers cannot purchase meat and dairy from the same purveyor. Zabar’s has only ever been “Kosher-style,” but the separation remains in house. My order is a quarter-pound “novie” (Nova Scotia-style smoked salmon, a less salty variant of lox), a quarter-pound sable (a tender whitefish that melts in your mouth), maybe a quarter-pound sturgeon (the king of the sea, flaky and pure), and just maybe a jar of the sturgeon’s jewel-like eggs. Behind the counter they are pros. If I am lucky, my namesake James will be the one to do the slicing. Once you see how thinly these Zabar’s guys hand-slice a fish, you cannot go appetizing anywhere else. When I was growing up, my Italian father placed a similar order most Sundays.

Zabar’s is chaotic by design. Food is everywhere, people are everywhere, announcements are frequent. “The lady who was looking for half a pound of chicken liver please come to the front,” I hear over the loudspeaker. While some items are self-service, many are not. You must line up just right. The aisles can barely fit your own small cart, which is a problem as shoppers press in from all sides. “You are out of Seder plate kits?” “Are we out of Seder plate kits?” “I ordered mine days ago.” “They are sold out of brisket!” From a service door, out comes Saul Zabar himself, the patriarch in his white smock pushing a cart. When his father Louis died in 1950, Saul took over Zabar’s at the age of twenty-one and has worked for the family store ever since, partnering with his younger brother Stanley and their relative Murray Klein. Over the years Saul expanded Zabar’s into the best of everything, including introducing New Yorkers to gourmet coffee. At ninety-three years old, he is still the one to wake me up with his “Zabar’s Blend” each morning. The man deserves a monument.

A few years ago, I found myself at dinner sitting next to an unassuming woman named Lori Zabar. Was she related to the famous store? Indeed she was — Stanley’s oldest daughter. How is Zabar’s still thriving? Because the family never sold out and four generations now work for the business. Please make sure that continues, I begged.

It turned out that Lori, who died in February at age sixty-seven, was well positioned to make the case. The family historian, she cooked up a reserved and at times harrowing new book on her name and the store that bears it. Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes ($28, Shocken) conveys the importance of what her family created.

Drawing on her grandfather’s own testimony taken at the time of his displacement in the early days of the Soviet Union, the beginning was anything but appetizing. In 1920 Cossacks allied with the Red Army were terrorizing the Jewish enclave of Ostropolia, now Ostropol in present-day Ukraine. During the pogrom, a husband tried to defend his wife. The Cossacks stabbed him to death. They shot his wife in the face. They murdered his daughter in front of him in his home. Their surviving son, Mordko Leib Zabarka, then chased the soldiers off with a gun and went into hiding. Two years later, the young man arrived in New York as Louis Zabar.

Louis worked in New York food retail from the bottom up. He married another Ostropolitan exile, Leika Teitelbaum, who became Lilly Zabar. In the Zabar’s origin story, Louis began in fruit and veg but developed an allergic rash to the skins. “As he toiled,” writes Lori, “he noticed that only one thing helped: when he put his hands in a barrel of pickled herring, the brine soothed his rash.”

So Louis became an “appetizing man” and rented a small retail space on Broadway. From this Capitoline Hill between 80th and 81st Street, a food empire was born. At first Louis set out to build a chain of everyday markets. When he died at age forty-nine, it was the vision of the next generation of Zabar partners — Saul, Stanley, and Murray Klein — to consolidate the business and turn it into the gourmet flagship of today. As they watched the gastronomic tide of home cooking rise in the second half of the twentieth century, they floated to the top with the finest fish, the freshest bread and the smoothest coffee.

Lori Zabar serves us a concise history of Jewish food retail. She explains the difference among pickled and matjes and schmaltz herring. She tells of Uncle Eli’s defection to retail on the Upper East Side, where he developed his own appetizing restaurant called E.A.T. and a bakery called Eli’s Bread. She also recalls seeing a carp and a herring swimming in her grandmother Lilly’s Upper West Side bathtub. “They were destined for her delicious Shabbat gefilte fish.”

The joys of watching the “longest running show on Broadway,” as Lori calls her family store, contrast with the sorrows its creators once faced. The Cossacks were but a prelude to the Nazi invasion of Ukraine and the extermination of 1.6 million Jews there in 1941. The terrors of Ostropolia a century ago now seem all too familiar in Ukraine today. In this light Zabar’s becomes a new Garden of Eden. Here on a corner of the Upper West Side, she writes, her family celebrated “personal exodus from religious persecution in the Old World to America — their promised land of freedom and dignity.”

Reaching

THE NEW CRITERION, April 14, 2022

Reaching

On the Dance Theatre of Harlem at the City Center Dance Festival.

New York has an abundance of ballet companies. Last summer five of them took the Lincoln Center outdoor stage for the first time together. The initiative—restoring live performance after over a year of pandemic closures—was called the BAAND Together Dance Festival, an acronym of the New York–based companies taking taking part in it: Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem.

New York’s cultural institutions can be notoriously siloed, often competing for the same donor dollars. The unusual five-day event therefore turned into what I might call a friendly battle of the bands—or make that “Baands.” The evenings exposed both performers and audience members to repertoires they might not otherwise see, with different companies performing alternating works. And on my night, evening number two, the winner in my mind was Dance Theatre of Harlem with its New Bach. Created by the company’s resident choreographer Robert Garland in what he calls “post-modern-urban neoclassicism,” here was classical ballet with street rococo, George Balanchine by way of “Soul Train.”  

Dance Theatre of Harlem in Odalisques Variations from Le Corsaire, by Dylan Santos after Marius Petipa. Photo: Theik Smith.

Founded in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell, the first black principal dancer to join New York City Ballet, and his teacher Karel Shook, Dance Theatre of Harlem has brought classical ballet uptown for over half a century. At the same time, Dance Theatre has incorporated uptown into classical ballet, promoting dancers and works that have expanded the classical repertoire. 

The greatness of Balanchine, the co-founder of City Ballet, can be explained in part by how he incorporated various dance vernaculars into the classical language of ballet. As principal dancer, Mitchell proved to be a particular inspiration for Balanchine, who choreographed the famous pas de deux for him in Agon and the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When Mitchell then set out to found Dance Theatre, Balanchine gave him the rights to several works and co-choreographed others to add to his new company’s repertoire. 

Billing itself as a “neo-classical ballet company,” Dance Theatre has preserved the ideal of Balanchine in its own luminous frequency. It hasn’t been easy. Mitchell and his colleagues had to revive the company after an eight year financial hiatus between 2004 and 2012. In 2013, founding dancer Virginia Johnson became the school’s new artistic director. In 2019, a year after Mitchell’s death, the company crossed its fifty-year milestone with the dancers, the school, and the repertoire thriving. 

The Dance Theatre of Harlem in Balamouk by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Photo: Christopher Duggan.

Recently Dance Theatre returned to the New York stage with four performances as a centerpiece of the first City Center Dance Festival. Anchoring the program was the New York premiere of Higher Ground, Robert Garland’s latest work, set to the music of Stevie Wonder. Also on the bill was Balamouk, by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa featuring live accompaniment by The Klezmatics. Rounding out the run was Passage, by Claudia Schreier with live music by Jessie Montgomery, and Odalisques Variations from Le Corsaire, by Dylan Santos after Marius Petipa, which were presented in alternating performances.

At a time when new ballet seems to be minimal, cerebral, and “forward-thinking,” Garland is an unabashed retrospectivist. He draws on a sincere appreciation of dance history, one that includes both classical ballet and the soul of his youth. He has described waking up as a child in Philadelphia to the clock radio and hearing Stevie Wonder. It is remarkable to consider that this music is now as distant to us as the music of the 1920s was to the 1970s. And the differences between 1970s Stevie Wonder and the music of today can be just as profound. Here was genuine instrumentalism, not electronic sound, performed at a pace and rhythm that is slower and fuller than today’s rapid auto-tuned beeps and bops. Wonder is also anything but cold and minimal. If the music of Stevie Wonder had a color tone, it would be yellow, orange, and red. The songs recall smoggy city summers, the scent of the unairconditioned bus. This music gives heat.

Over the years, Wonder has been reluctant to license this work, but Garland got his hands on six of his songs for a new ballet named after the final number, “Higher Ground.” With six dancers on stage in earth-toned costumes by Pamela Allen-Cummings, bathed in a warm light by Roma Flowers, the ballet could be called Wonder variations. 

The Dance Theatre of Harlem in Higher Ground by Robert Garland. Photo: Theik Smith.

The first dance, to “Look Around,” seems unnecessarily restrained, too withholding of the dancers’ virtuosity. By “You Haven’t Done Nothin” and “Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away,” the following songs, the energy was up. At times the dancers gestured to the audience, amplifying the rhythm and miming the street poses of the past. “Village Ghetto Land” then connected past to present, with a nod to the illusions of modern culture as dancers posed with smartphones. 

You might not think the “up” direction of pointe work would lend itself to the downbeat of soul, but “Saturn” well deployed its pirouettes for the celestial song. Then for “Higher Ground,” the final number, the company came together in a joyful, spiritual ensemble. Here was ballet with feeling, with the dancer Anthony Santos a particular standout. In the program, Garland describes his work as a “Sankofa-esque reflection on our current times.” What does this mean? “Sankofa” can refer to a mythical bird that looks back—an appropriate symbol for a choreographer who reaches back to what is left behind.      

The Dance Theatre of Harlem in Passage by Claudia Schreier. Photo: Theik Smith

It was something of a disservice for Passage and Balamouk to be programmed after the high of Higher Ground. Choreographed by Claudia Schreier, Passage has its passing moments. This is  especially true for its ominous beginning, as dancers emerge from the fog like three prows of a ship and then fall in acrobatic waves. According to the program, the work is meant to reference “the first documental arrival of enslaved Africans” and reflect “in abstract the fortitude of the human spirit and an enduring will to prevail.” With live music by Jessie Montgomery and costumes by Martha Chamberlain, this ballet was more head than heart, with symbols lost in its treacherous woods. 

If such a ballet would seem too on the nose for Dance Theatre of Harlem, Balamouk should have been a welcome and worldly departure. The work calls for Klezmer music, and a live band called The Klezmatics performed. I did not know they were there until they took their bow. The music was so over-amplified, it was unclear this was live accompaniment. Musicians should make themselves known at a ballet performance. Wave from the pit. Or better yet, have them perform from the stage. This music was wonderful, energy-filled, exotic. We are grateful they are there. 

With choreography by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, this was the “extended version” of Balamouk. The ballet is a goulash of Slavic movement, with gypsy, Russian, and Ashkenazi influences. The title is Romanian for “house of the insane.” The bright costumes by Mark Zappone and uptempo rhythms by Les Yeax Noirs, Lisa Gerrard, and René Aubry were there to amplify the mania. Even in its extended version, the ballet never seemed to develop, but again here was Dance Theatre of Harlem looking to tradition—even “Tradition!” (as in Fiddler on the Roof)—and making it their own. 

Holbein at the Morgan

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, April 2022

Holbein at the Morgan

Holbein’s heroes have arrived in New York City

There’s a moment in portraiture when people started having a mind of their own. All of a sudden you see it in the faces: the eyes, the brow, the lip. We are no longer looking at a figure for all time — or even a sitter in a moment in time — but at something more like “me time.” The focus is not on outward appearances but inward looking. These people are lost in thought.

That’s just where Hans Holbein the Younger, the great portraitist of the early sixteenth century, found them. The German artist, born into a family of painters around 1497, could conjure the smallest details at his fingertips. He quickly became the most sought-after portraitist in Europe and, by 1536, the court painter of Henry VIII (at a time when Henry himself was courting).

What set Holbein apart was what he saw in his sitters and what he chose not to see. He radically edited down the background of his paintings and removed the trappings of possessions. Instead he captured his sitters, simply put, capturing themselves. Holbein: Capturing Character, an exhibition gathered from twenty lenders of more than thirty paintings and drawings by Holbein, as well as paintings, books and jewelry by his contemporaries, is now on view at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum.

Europe of the early 1500s was having a moment of its own. Technological revolutions, after all, can be even more life-altering than political revolutions. If you think today’s digital revolution has been something, consider the Gutenberg revolution of the later fifteenth century. While Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible came out in 1450, the German metalsmith from Mainz remained largely unknown in his lifetime. He died a financial failure. But his invention of movable type sent shockwaves through much of Europe. Thirty years after his Bible’s first revelatory run, there were 110 printing presses across Europe. Fifty of them were in Venice alone. By 1500, European presses had already produced over twenty million books.

All of a sudden, literature became personal. A new bumper crop of classics in translation brought the wisdom of antiquity to a wider public. Scholasticism and the oral tradition gave way to more direct intellectual engagement. Rather than scribes copying manuscripts generation after generation, book printing made authorship instantaneous and individual. The act of reading also became silent. At the same time, contemporary writers became the world’s first bestsellers as they overturned Europe’s religious and cultural order. Luther distributed 300,000 of his printed tracts. Meanwhile the humanist Erasmus — something of a centrist in a schismatic age — sold 750,000 copies of his books.

A former priest who popularized philosophy and attacked modern superstitions, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was the Jordan Peterson of his day — at least when it came to his reach and popularity. He was the “prince of the Humanists” for his book In Praise of Folly, written while he was visiting the English statesman Thomas More. He was also a champion of Holbein and sat for several portraits, both large and small, throughout his later life. It was Erasmus who introduced Holbein to More and the inner circle of the English crown. Whenever you think of Henry VIII looking like the King of Hearts, with his head a quarter turned in playing-card profile, recall that it was Holbein who painted that original portrait.

There is no Stout Harry at the Morgan, but Holbein’s More is here, the 1527 painting lent by the Frick Collection as the 70th Street museum undergoes a lamentable “renovation.” Removed from its Frick pairing with Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, More now strikes us as, well, even a bit more. The painting is now hung close to eye level. You can just about make out every stubble of More’s five-o’clock shadow. With a mixture of focus and fatigue, England’s future Lord High Chancellor stares over our shoulder into space. A wrinkle of his furrowed brow connects between his eyes on the bridge of his nose. At its corner, his lip turns down in the hint of a frown. A luminous green curtain hangs behind him.

A humanist philosopher, More argued against the reformation of Martin Luther and John Calvin. When it came to acknowledging Henry’s own claim to be the supreme head of the Church of England after the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, More also dissented. “I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first,” More said as he was executed for treason just five years after sitting for Holbein’s portrait.

You can already see the weight of history in More’s world-weary face. His expression contrasts with his sumptuous fur collar and the red-velvet sleeves of his doublet shimmering in the light. Holbein rendered the S-shaped links of his gold livery chain, a symbol of More’s royal service, with a jeweler’s detail. Originally trained in miniature, Holbein could decorate his portraits as though he were adorning their very surfaces with precious metalwork. (For those who caught Capturing Character at the Getty Museum, where this exhibition curated by Anne T. Woollett originated, it was the portrait of Cromwell, More’s rival, that got the all-expenses-paid trip from the Frick to Los Angeles.)

Be sure to bring your reading glasses when visiting the Morgan. There is an abundance of small detail here that calls out for close looking: roundel portraits, rings and coins, even a tiny portable portrait still with its original lid. Holbein could add just the right evocative detail, especially to his sensuous portraits of women. Books are never far from the mind in this exhibition. Holbein designed a suite of tiny woodcuts for a book on “The Dance of Death” (c. 1526, published 1538) — a memento mori of dancing skeletons. Figures are also shown reading, or writing, or at the very least holding the book that was occupying their attention until we walked in the room. “Mary, Lady Guildford” (1527) looks like she is about to whack us over the head with the small hardcover now clasped closed in her hands.

Books are not unique to Holbein’s paintings. We can see them in the work of contemporaries exhibited alongside him: Albrecht Dürer, Quentin Matsys and Jan Gossaert. But unlike these windows on the world, all packed with details and distractions, Holbein’s portraits reflect a more direct literary experience — of that inner voice, not just speaking, but reading and dictating thoughts in our heads.

Sometimes these words illuminated the very portraits themselves. “The year 1533, at the age of 39” (ANNO 1533 AETATIS SVAE 39) reads the gold lettering seemingly tooled right into the surface of Holbein’s “A Member of the Wedigh Family.” Or how about the sign tacked to the tree on the portrait of “Bonifacius Amerbach” of 1519: “I am not inferior to the living face; I am instead the counterpart of my master, and distinguished by accurate lines. Just as he completes three intervals each lasting eight years, this work of art diligently renders his true character.” Below, the sign reads: “Jo[hannes] Holbein painting Bon[ifacius] Amerbach on 14 October 1519.”

In other words, Holbein is the painter of the portrait. The young man depicted is the author and master of the twenty-four-year- old life therein. For those sitting for a portrait by Holbein in the turbulent early years of the sixteenth century, it must have seemed like they were all the authors of their fates, probably more than ever before. Henry VIII certainly thought so, as did Erasmus. In the thoughtful depth of his arresting portraits, Holbein painted the dust-jacket images for all their books of life.