SLIP SLIDIN’ AWAY

Slip Slidin' Away

Losing and finding home in Paul Simon and the kosher deli

I. Setting Out

Kathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping / I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why

The record sleeve of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends is emblazoned with a huge black-andbeige spiral. At least mine is. I suppose it may have once been white, now faded with age and fingertips, or maybe it was designed like that, preemptively yellowed.

When the pandemic hit, I propped the Bookends record sleeve on a chair opposite my bed at home and stared at that endless spiral as the album looped over and over on my tinny record player. I got out of bed only to flip it over and over and over. I became familiar with the jarring transition between “Bookends Theme,” and “Save the Life of my Child,” learning to brace for the latter’s crashing synth after the quiet meandering guitar of the former. Fragments of “Sounds of Silence” echoed eerily out of the cacophonic depths of “Save the Life of my Child,” (Hello darkness my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again). I sank into the imposter syndrome that so mirrored mine in “Fakin’ It,” the bittersweet melancholy of “Old Friends.” In the open, empty space at the start of “Overs”— the flaring of a match, two half-breaths, almost gulps—I would always take a deep breath of my own and listen to the record spin.

I couldn’t stop listening to the album. The first three quarters of my freshman year of college had rent me apart and then unceremoniously spat me back home, a home turned upside down and utterly unfamiliar, a self I could no longer recognize. In that fracturing, I relished just how much Bookends works as a coherent whole: the way the “Save the Life” synth buzzes at the start of “America,” oh my Grace / I got no hiding place melting into humming about, perhaps, hiding everywhere. The generosity of “Voices of Old People,” a recording that teeters on the line between infinite wisdom and complete nonsense, suturing the album together.

It was certainly not the first time I had turned to Simon & Garfunkel that year; in my first months of college, I listened to the boys from Queens whenever I needed comfort. “Keep the Customer Satisfied,” a song about the exhaustion of performing whose upbeat rhythm, enthusiastic vocals, and full brass section sound like a forced grin, took on new meaning as I tried to play myself for a new audience. “Homeward Bound,” the former’s melancholy partner, played when I realized I missed my parents. And, when I came home in March, empty and aching and not knowing why, I turned to Bookends.

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At the same moment, the pandemic was working to hasten the decline of an already-threatened cultural institution: kosher delis. These delis once numbered in the thousands on the streets of New York City, prevalent most of all in the Jewish enclave of the Lower East Side. But they have been in decline since the ’50s, due to the concurrent rise of Jewish suburbanization (part of a wave of white flight from New York), a collective turn toward healthier food, and the increasing assimilation of Ashkenazi Jewish Americans. Thousands of delis have disappeared in the past half-century, and the pandemic sent a few more to their graves; only a handful remain. As I grappled with personal instability, New York’s kosher delis fought off an destabilizing tide of their own. One that, I fear, might hint toward the loss of something much larger than the institutions themselves: the loss of cultural Jewish memory.

I have again and again turned to Simon & Garfunkel in the face of the unknown; I turn again. In their twisting lyrics and fluid harmonies, and particularly in Paul Simon, the man behind the music, I search for an answer to this existential instability.

II. Slipping Away

half of the time we’re gone / but we don’t know where / and we don’t know where

Kosher delis in New York didn’t feed Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants exactly what they would’ve eaten in the old country. Emerging out of the tradition of German delicatessens (a word that means something like a place to find delicious things to eat) and influenced by an influx of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they served luxuries that tasted something of the past: most emblematically, rye piled high with hot pastrami, maybe with some sauerkraut and deli mustard. Pastrami, indeed, was invented by Jewish American immigrants, who applied imported Romanian curing techniques to cheap American beef. At these initially Yiddish-speaking institutions, flavors drawn from various countries of immigrant origin met for the first time and were filtered through their new home.

In those years when Kosher delis proliferated in New York, they served as joyful hubs of cultural Judaism—perhaps the most visible Jewish third space, if you will—playing no small part in the consolidation of a secular Jewish American identity. As Ted Merwin writes in Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli, “the cramped, bustling delicatessen became a focal point of Jewish identity and remembrance—a capacious, well-trodden, metaphorical homeland for the Jewish soul.” They became both what French historian Pierre Nora would call lieux de mémoire (memory spaces), sites of collective—sometimes invented—remembrance, and the site of assimilation, folding the tradition of the past into the context of the present.

For me, and surely for other entirely assimilated Ashkenazi Jewish Americans, the “kosherstyle” (but often no longer kosher) deli today performs a doubled nostalgia: for the place where these flavors came from, and for the time when the deli fostered a vibrant cultural Judaism. Stepping into Katz’s these days feels like stepping onto the set of an ’80s rom-com: The decor seems not to have changed meaningfully in decades; banners hanging from the ceiling still implore you to “send a salami to your boy in the army,” a relic of World War II patriotism. At 2nd Ave Deli (now with locations only on 1st and 3rd Avenues, notably), the nostalgia is less obvious but no less present. They set the table with pickles (both sour and half-sour) and sauerkraut, offer jellied calves’ feet and lots of tongues alongside matzo ball soup and sandwiches. The menu is frozen in time, perhaps as a result of dwindling immigration, and the pictures decorating the walls honor the deli’s heyday. I can’t help but feel that the decline of this memory space and dispersal of community has transformed the remaining delis into living artifacts, commemorating a past Jewish experience and city rather than ushering in a contemporary one.

For the deli is for me also a site of anxiety and vague, unplaceable mourning. A reminder of so much tradition left behind, the shreds of which we cling onto in the deli. I search here for myself, for my ancestors, hoping the flavor of things pickled and cured will connect me to a past I lack other evidence for. Just like the delis, I sit in the space between presence and absence. My maternal great-grandparents only spoke Yiddish; my mom knows a litany of phrases; I say shtick and schlep a lot. I joke that this is the generation in which Yiddish will die and yet do nothing about it. I know little but the names of my great-grandmothers—Essie and Pearl and Jenny and Ella— who fled their homes in Ukraine and Belarus, traveled across great oceans to reach Philadelphia and New Jersey. I can do little but trace around the edges of what used to be, grasping memory only secondhand through the scrapped-together stories of family, the taste of pastrami. There was memory here, but I struggle to hold it.

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I don’t know if my parents were always playing Simon & Garfunkel when I was growing up, or if it just feels that way. Sometimes I can remember the first time I heard one of their songs. My brother and dad and I, seven-years-old, waiting in the car on 3rd and 70th for my mom to return from an errand. The sunroof is open, and Joey and I jostle for a spot on the center console to poke our heads out, reveling in illicitness. “America” comes on the radio; my dad tells us that this is our mom’s favorite song. I suddenly scan the street, anxious for my mom’s return, eager for her reaction. But when she comes back to the car, she barely notices, and my heart sinks. It’s only now that I know that my mom has many favorite songs, that this would not have been notable, though at the time my kid brain told me favorites must be singular.

I don’t know if this actually happened. I wonder, in the act of remembering and re-remembering this moment each time I hear “America,” whether the memory gets hardened in truth or reinscribed in degrees of falsehood. My associations with every word in that song are layered down to that first listen—childhood visions of an invented New Jersey Turnpike sit beneath a more mature, complicated grasp of Simon’s malaise— and yet I suspect those first impressions to themselves be false.

They might as well be; I realize that the project of parsing degrees of accuracy in memory is futile. Because of the mind’s elasticity, memory is always a reconstruction of the past, never an exact replica but rather the past seen through the prism of the present. The importance of these memories derive far less from their total accuracy than from the resonance with which they imbue the music. There need not be anxiety in the slipperiness of memory: it is in fact the process of reconstituting that childhood experience through all I have lived since that allows the memory to take on greater meaning. Through the weight of this reconstructed memory, Simon & Garfunkel become a link to my childhood, a way of understanding myself today, and a connection to my parents that cuts across decades. I learn “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on piano; years later my dad tells me he had to sing it in middle school chorus—the high notes so high they hurt his head. I soak up my parents’ reminiscences of the time when Simon & Garfunkel were “of the moment,” my dad’s stories of playing his own father’s record of Bridge Over Troubled Water over and over and over. I return constantly to Bookends because of all the memory it carries, find myself in it at 20 in ways I never could have at age seven.

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There is real mourning in the loss of familial memory, in assimilation long past. I will always wonder how my ancestors practiced Shabbat, if my great-great-great grandmother wrapped her hair, what they ate, how they made a living and where. The decline of kosher delis is still a loss. But the elasticity of my childhood memories of “America” offer a way to come to terms with my anxiety about the preservation of a stable Jewish past. If we can understand cultural memory to be, as Nora says, “by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual,” then the memory of a collective past can, too, be understood as always imperfectly reconstructed. To preserve one Jewish past in amber—honing in on, say, 1940s New York or 1870s Ukraine— would be to deny that “Jewish culture” has forever been fluid. To be Jewish, to me, has always meant to redefine what it means to be Jewish. I mourn those centers of community lost, but cultural preservation has never meant freezing relics of community past. There is resilience and beauty in what comes of moving forward, in doing what deli owners in their prime did: reimagining elements of the past in the context of the present, inventing pastrami.

Besides, despite no longer being the cultural hubs they used to be, the kosher delis of my home still kindle memory. Last weekend, my family made a pilgrimage to 2nd Ave Deli, lacking a good deli in our own neighborhood; my parents and I shared potato knishes and piles of smoked meat on rye. In the space made by the deli, the call to memory of the space, we speak for the first time of their immigrant grandparents’ culinary traditions: brisket, so much brisket, and stuffed cabbage, gefilte fish, kasha varnishkes, sour cherry vareniki. We call my grandma and my dad’s cousin and learn that great-grandma Pearl was born in Zhmerynka, Ukraine.

Interviewed for “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli,” an exhibit that opened this month at the New York Historical Society, the owner of 2nd Ave Deli proudly quoted his customers: “I’m so glad you’re here. They’re talking about the deli. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad I have a connection to the past.”

III. (Re)building

I may be obliged to defend every love, every ending / or maybe there’s no obligations now

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel both grew up in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, a neighborhood with a long Jewish history that is today an enclave of Orthodox Judaism. Garfunkel learned to sing growing up as a cantor at his local synagogue. Simon’s connection to music is far less explicitly grounded in his Jewish upbringing. When asked by Malcolm Gladwell where he sees his Judaism in his music, he responded: “In my songwriting? Hard to say. Because it’s a cultural sensibility that you grow up with, and how exactly you define that, I don’t know. It’s there, but it’s only there because that’s the world I grew up in.”

I can’t help but search between the notes for that elusive sensibility, attempting to locate myself in his music. I hear it in “Voices of Old People,” recorded in a Jewish retirement home, in Simon’s imagination of his life in the old country in “Fakin’ It” (“Prior to this lifetime / I surely was a tailor”) and identification with his grandfather, indeed a tailor in Vienna. And I find it walking arm in arm with two friends on a dark city street, belting “The Boxer” and realizing how much the wordless hook—lie la lie—mimicks a nigun, a wordless, repetitive melody chanted collectively in Jewish prayer and song. Simon claims the sounds were originally meant as a placeholder, but that “we love to sing nonsensical sounds, that’s a deep human pleasure. There’s a communal atmosphere that it evokes.” Indeed, I have found this pleasure most of all in Jewish song: sitting shoulder-toshoulder on a living room floor, eating challah and drinking wine and singing in the round, nonsense sounds and words I can’t understand but can feel ringing in my chest. Song is what brought me back, after years of my rejection of regular practice, to a version of Judaism I could begin to find myself in.

But Simon’s Jewish sensibility is just that: a sensibility. He is notably less reticent about his other influences, able and eager to identify the diverse traditions folded—sometimes all at once— into his work, down to the style of guitar-plucking or the origins of a single lyric. His embrace of influence is evident in his sound: in the drumming of Rhythm of the Saints, the slapback guitar in Graceland, the gospel influences in Bridge Over Troubled Water. Growing up in Queens at the time that he did, Gladwell claims, both exposed him to a swath of musical traditions and allowed his own identity to melt into the background: “To be a New Yorker of that era was to sit in a wonderfully ambiguous place, where all those different traditions … literally intersected.” Simon’s genius lives in his ability to collect bits of histories and sounds and influences—especially through collaborations with artists from around the world—and transform that patchwork into something cohesive and completely new. It is his instability of identity, not his grounding in a particular place or culture, that renders Simon’s music singular.

This freedom to explore instability is in no small part made possible by the shifting of what it has meant to be Jewish American in the past century. His music is emblematic of the space between Jewish past and future, an example of what may be created through the reconstruction of past tradition into something new altogether.

This process—made personal—creates, indeed, new tradition. As I’ve tried to find and create my own spiritual spaces these past few years, how I learned to be Jewish growing up has become just one piece of a patchwork of influence informing my practice. Like Simon, with distance from ancestral tradition comes the flexibility to create something new, something fully my own.

In slipperiness, I find myself at home.

IIII. Bookending

then I’m laying out my winter clothes / and wishing I was gone, going home

There is something universal, anthemic, even genius in Paul Simon’s 60-something-yearlong career. But it is not grandeur that keeps him playing in my kitchen. It’s his deep, ordinary joy and sadness, the way he sits quietly in the regular delights and disappointments of a life lived. He loves deeply and is honest about how very tired he is.

So much of his music is steeped in that which is just about to end—the space between having and having had. In “Overs,” a married couple lives as a pair of ghosts, no longer meaningfully sharing space or love but unwilling (or unable) to stop haunting each other. His lovers are always just behind him or on the doorstep. He is the secret king of the road song—in the most expansive sense of the word—of leaving and traveling away as he looks back, but never quite reaching anywhere else. Where are they going in “America,” in “Graceland”? Away from here, to look for something that is everywhere and thus elusive. Those pilgrimages are about the search far more than the arrival.

Every time in the past few years that I’ve ached for home, I’ve listened to “Homeward Bound.” When I hear Paul Simon long for comfort on a train platform, I feel his words echoing in my throat and stomach and chest. I too want, so badly, to be homeward bound. But home is too often a shifting target, fragmented across space and time by many moves, by switching schools, by college, by the pandemic, by disorientation in myself. When I wish for home, I do not think of a particular place, but rather long to be held by that in which I know I belong.

In “Homeward Bound,” Paul never reaches home. It is a song perpetually in transit, living forever on the road, in the missing and the yearning. Perhaps that’s what speaks to me so strongly—the act of missing home without having to have a grounded place to locate the want. He also doesn’t describe his home. He doesn’t need to: An image emerges in the negative space of his longing. Home is anywhere where not everyone is a stranger, where you don’t have to perform, where your love lies, where music plays just for you.

Maybe this is the music that is playing wherever home is for me.

ELLA SPUNGEN B’23.5 can be your long lost pal.