Places I've Never Been, But Would Like To Have.

A lot of the stories that continually swirl around in my head, and which I never actually get around to writing, either begin or take place within a place the official name of which is Rosenberg's Dairy Cafe, and the unofficial name of which is "Shtarkers" (shtarker being Yiddish for "strongman," or "thug").

I think I first thought up Shtarkers when I heard this song: the Amsterdam Klezmer Band's "Sadagora Hot Dub," and I wondered in what kind of place I'd like to hear it played live. Shtarkers leapt into my head, fully-formed and populated. It's easier to imagine it with this song playing in the background.

Shtarkers, of course, never existed. I made it up. But I'm sure countless places like it did at one time. The Yiddish-speaking world, in cities like Lvov, Bialystok, London, Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Miami, Cleveland, and especially New York, was punctuated with places like Shtarkers--watering-holes and gathering-places of the old Yiddish underground. They were places as colorful as the communities they served, where socialist firebrands, ghetto poets, newspaper editors, cartoonists and funny-book men, workers and shleppers, businessmen and bagmen, rabbis and atheists, and gangsters--especially, in my imagination, the gangsters--congregated to eat, laugh, fight, kvetch, kibitz, wheedle, plead, lie, brag, beg, bust balls, tell tall tales, pontificate, do business, and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk with the peculiar intensity, ferocity, and humor which marks Yiddish discourse.

But that's all gone now. I'm sure there are still a few places like this around--in St. Louis, it's Kopperman's--but they're mere shadows of what they once were, and the clientele is people like me, nudniks and nebbishes nostalgic for a world that was long dead decades before we were gleams in our papa's eyes. No more the makhers and shvitzers, the greenehs and the lantzmen fresh off the boats, the nogoodniks and shnorrers, the handlers and the tzaddiks, who used to frequent them. But I like to think about the kind of place where Abe Reles, Big Maxey Greenberg, Gyp the Blood and Lefty Louie, Morris Dickstein and Abe Cahan, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, might have congregated, for the sake of the stories that were told there, the stories that began and ended there.

You can tell I'm a phony because I left the jars of pickles off the tables.