// bouroughing //
Spring 2016
Same Recipe, Different Flavor
A Review of the Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery
Barbara Kaplan-Marans & Dani Lefkowitz
“One World. One Taste. One Knish.” We see this three sentence, six syllable slogan sprinkling the walls, joined with a mess of newspaper clippings and decrepit post cards. This cannot possibly be the same famous Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery we read about in the reviews. It looks more like the physical manifestation of the recent slew of whispers that the store was on the brink of closure. It is derelict and unadorned, even our cab driver almost flies past it.
We enter the century-old establishment and scan the empty space. It is dinner time, but there are no diners. A teenage boy smiles and greets us, he directs us to the menu on the wall. Contrary to the menu’s long list of knish varieties, the display case offers a meager selection. We order a Spinach knish and watch the boy place it into the microwave as he simultaneously offers us a seat.
We glance around the walls, taking it all in: signed autographs, traditional painted family portraits, photographs of Woody Allen and Larry David, loose newspaper clippings. There is no discernible organization to the memorabilia. They are lopsidedly arranged on the wall, clearly there for people to see, but not to satisfy any decorative purpose. The dates span decades, and the yellowing articles bespeak a history that is far richer than the food. We have our pick of the empty tables: we sit in the back right, although any of the tables would have sufficed. Sixty seconds pass and we hear a high-pitched ding.
Our knish is ready. The steamy scent wins over our noses before the knish even nears our table. The toasted brown, doughy nosh does not disappoint, and the rich filling immediately tingles the tastebuds and warms the palate. It is the perfect comfort food.
As we munch, we start to appreciate the tattered clippings and the chipping paint. This establishment is one of the last immigrant relics in a quickly gentrifying city. It is situated in what used to be the hub for émigré Jewry: the Lower East Side. It was here that thousands of Diaspora Jews, fleeing Russian and Polish anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, settled and started their new lives. Jews of all ethnicities took refuge in these teeming streets and crowded tenement apartments, and were united by Yiddish, poverty, and God. In the apartment buildings and parks around Yonah Schimmel’s, Jews from all over the world constructed a new Jewish-American identity.
As time passed, however, Jewish presence in the area diminished. When Jews found financial success and educational opportunity, they moved to the Bronx and Brooklyn, and later to the suburbs. All that remains is the trifecta of Jewish eateries: Katz’s Delicatessen, Russ and Daughters, and Yonah Schimmel’s. These eateries stand as vestiges of the Jewish experience on the Lower East Side—the heartbeat of American Jewry at the turn of the 20th century. All that has remained from a community built on religion, culture, and the American Dream is the food. Apolitical, uncomplicated, food.
Yonah Schimmel's hailed from Ukraine and, like so many other Jewish immigrants, settled on Houston Street. Armed with a knish recipe and an oven, he began his business selling his goods from a street-cart. In the beginning, the Knish Bakery had a kosher-certificate and was closed on Shabbat. Tradition encompassed practice, as well as culture. Over a hundred years later, through four generations of family ownership, the knishery endures. While the current generation of Schimmels embrace their history by keeping to the traditional recipes, the family admits that some things have had to change. The cashier’s Nike sneakers stand in stark contrast with the long skirt and shawl of his mother (the current owner of the store). But the business has changed in another sense as well, in a more substantial way than just the attire of its employees: the store possesses a far less reliable kosher certification and is now open on Shabbat. The religious dictums that were once paramount to Yonah Schimmel's have morphed into a less stringent set of realities for his descendants.
The knish stays the same, though. Paired with too-spicy mustard and tap water, the year could have been 1920. The effect is rather magical.
Or maybe the magic is that Yonah Schimmel’s has struck a precious balance between conservation and assimilation, between history and modernity. The characters on the walls—Larry David next to a Ukrainian rabbi—are part of a greater discourse about different Jewish identities in New York across decades, rather than just an arbitrary archive strewn about the store.
And this tension between retaining tradition and adjusting to contemporary demands persists today. When we asked the owner what the future has in store for Yonah Schimmel’s, she remarked that she hopes to expand. While this expansion is a sign of business health, we wonder if expansion might cause the knishery to lose some of the charm we experienced on our visit: animated nostalgia, a sense of living history, an active tradition. We didn't really go there for the celebrated potato puffs. We went there for the history. We went there to see how a knish shop could survive the changing scenery of its time. And what we saw was a survival, of sorts. The same recipe, but a different flavor.
Yonah Schimmel’s is the American Dream in bricks and mortar; beginning as an immigrant establishment, it has achieved widespread success and endurance. And as the knishery faces the pressures of assimilation, it maintains its roots. This give and take is rare. Tradition and assimilation typically exist in a stalemate, unable to simultaneously advance. But in Yonah Schimmel’s they don’t contradict one another; rather, they keep each other in check.
Perhaps this is because this store rests on food. Food that outlives those who eat it. The same food that connects us with our past and viscerally reminds us of who we are and where we come from. For this reason, it seems that Yonah Schimmel’s is here to stay.
The world we live in is vastly different than the one in which Yonah Schimmel began baking knishes in 1900. The customers then were Yiddish-speaking immigrants who sought a place of refuge—familiar comfort food and collegiality among friends and fellow travelers in a foreign land. We would have seemed like foreigners to the original clientele of Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery. But, even in our Lululemon leggings and with our iPhones on the table, we feel right at home. The “One World” knishery is very much one with today’s world, even though today’s world has so little in common with the world of the knishery.
We enter the century-old establishment and scan the empty space. It is dinner time, but there are no diners. A teenage boy smiles and greets us, he directs us to the menu on the wall. Contrary to the menu’s long list of knish varieties, the display case offers a meager selection. We order a Spinach knish and watch the boy place it into the microwave as he simultaneously offers us a seat.
We glance around the walls, taking it all in: signed autographs, traditional painted family portraits, photographs of Woody Allen and Larry David, loose newspaper clippings. There is no discernible organization to the memorabilia. They are lopsidedly arranged on the wall, clearly there for people to see, but not to satisfy any decorative purpose. The dates span decades, and the yellowing articles bespeak a history that is far richer than the food. We have our pick of the empty tables: we sit in the back right, although any of the tables would have sufficed. Sixty seconds pass and we hear a high-pitched ding.
Our knish is ready. The steamy scent wins over our noses before the knish even nears our table. The toasted brown, doughy nosh does not disappoint, and the rich filling immediately tingles the tastebuds and warms the palate. It is the perfect comfort food.
As we munch, we start to appreciate the tattered clippings and the chipping paint. This establishment is one of the last immigrant relics in a quickly gentrifying city. It is situated in what used to be the hub for émigré Jewry: the Lower East Side. It was here that thousands of Diaspora Jews, fleeing Russian and Polish anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, settled and started their new lives. Jews of all ethnicities took refuge in these teeming streets and crowded tenement apartments, and were united by Yiddish, poverty, and God. In the apartment buildings and parks around Yonah Schimmel’s, Jews from all over the world constructed a new Jewish-American identity.
As time passed, however, Jewish presence in the area diminished. When Jews found financial success and educational opportunity, they moved to the Bronx and Brooklyn, and later to the suburbs. All that remains is the trifecta of Jewish eateries: Katz’s Delicatessen, Russ and Daughters, and Yonah Schimmel’s. These eateries stand as vestiges of the Jewish experience on the Lower East Side—the heartbeat of American Jewry at the turn of the 20th century. All that has remained from a community built on religion, culture, and the American Dream is the food. Apolitical, uncomplicated, food.
Yonah Schimmel's hailed from Ukraine and, like so many other Jewish immigrants, settled on Houston Street. Armed with a knish recipe and an oven, he began his business selling his goods from a street-cart. In the beginning, the Knish Bakery had a kosher-certificate and was closed on Shabbat. Tradition encompassed practice, as well as culture. Over a hundred years later, through four generations of family ownership, the knishery endures. While the current generation of Schimmels embrace their history by keeping to the traditional recipes, the family admits that some things have had to change. The cashier’s Nike sneakers stand in stark contrast with the long skirt and shawl of his mother (the current owner of the store). But the business has changed in another sense as well, in a more substantial way than just the attire of its employees: the store possesses a far less reliable kosher certification and is now open on Shabbat. The religious dictums that were once paramount to Yonah Schimmel's have morphed into a less stringent set of realities for his descendants.
The knish stays the same, though. Paired with too-spicy mustard and tap water, the year could have been 1920. The effect is rather magical.
Or maybe the magic is that Yonah Schimmel’s has struck a precious balance between conservation and assimilation, between history and modernity. The characters on the walls—Larry David next to a Ukrainian rabbi—are part of a greater discourse about different Jewish identities in New York across decades, rather than just an arbitrary archive strewn about the store.
And this tension between retaining tradition and adjusting to contemporary demands persists today. When we asked the owner what the future has in store for Yonah Schimmel’s, she remarked that she hopes to expand. While this expansion is a sign of business health, we wonder if expansion might cause the knishery to lose some of the charm we experienced on our visit: animated nostalgia, a sense of living history, an active tradition. We didn't really go there for the celebrated potato puffs. We went there for the history. We went there to see how a knish shop could survive the changing scenery of its time. And what we saw was a survival, of sorts. The same recipe, but a different flavor.
Yonah Schimmel’s is the American Dream in bricks and mortar; beginning as an immigrant establishment, it has achieved widespread success and endurance. And as the knishery faces the pressures of assimilation, it maintains its roots. This give and take is rare. Tradition and assimilation typically exist in a stalemate, unable to simultaneously advance. But in Yonah Schimmel’s they don’t contradict one another; rather, they keep each other in check.
Perhaps this is because this store rests on food. Food that outlives those who eat it. The same food that connects us with our past and viscerally reminds us of who we are and where we come from. For this reason, it seems that Yonah Schimmel’s is here to stay.
The world we live in is vastly different than the one in which Yonah Schimmel began baking knishes in 1900. The customers then were Yiddish-speaking immigrants who sought a place of refuge—familiar comfort food and collegiality among friends and fellow travelers in a foreign land. We would have seemed like foreigners to the original clientele of Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery. But, even in our Lululemon leggings and with our iPhones on the table, we feel right at home. The “One World” knishery is very much one with today’s world, even though today’s world has so little in common with the world of the knishery.
\\ BARBARA KAPLAN-MARANS is a freshman in Barnard College. She can be reached at [email protected]. DANI LEFKOWITZ is a freshman in Barnard College. She can be reached at [email protected]. Both authors are Contributing Editors for The Current. Photo by Flickr user Gwenael Piaser. Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery is located at 137 East Houston Street.