(Margarita Korol)

Margy Horowitz, a 37-year-old mother of two whom I know, is a private piano teacher in Los Angeles. She is an Orthodox Jew, as are about a third of her students. Paid per lesson, she forgoes up to $300 of income on each day she can’t teach. And in the fall, when Rosh Hashanah ushers in a month-long series of multiday holidays, that adds up: seven missed workdays in just over three weeks, if no holidays fall on a weekend. “The income I lose,” Horowitz said, “is an entire month’s rent.”

Observant Jews cannot work for two days on Rosh Hashanah, which this year starts tonight. Then eight days later there’s Yom Kippur, two days of Sukkot five days after that, and two days of Simchat Torah another week after that. What’s most troubling for people like Horowitz is that this financial hardship is twice as bad as it needs to be: Only one day of the two-day holidays—yom tov, in Hebrew—is mandated by the Torah; the other is rabbinic tradition from another era. Horowitz has thought about teaching on the second day of these two-day holidays, but the rabbis won’t allow it. “If I started working on yom tov, I wouldn’t feel as much like part of the Orthodox community anymore,” she told me.

***

It started as a clerical issue.

Rabbinic Judaism—that is, the Torah as interpreted by the rabbis, and the mainstream form of Judaism for more than a millennium—follows a lunar calendar. After the destruction of the Second Temple, but before the establishment of a formal calendar, Jews who had left Israel for Babylon, Egypt, and Rome needed to be informed of the new month. This happened via smoke signal or messenger dispatched from Jerusalem, depending on where you lived. Once the start of the month had been determined, you’d know when the holidays would take place. (more…)

The author’s grandparents, Theo and Ann Berman.
Courtesy of the author.

When my grandfather went to Jerusalem for the first time, in 1968, he was given the grand tour of the city, but after just two hours, he’d had enough. “Take me to see cows,” he said to the guide, or at least that’s the family legend.

I am the inheritor of a strange and somewhat obscure legacy. I come from a long line of Jewish cattle dealers. Our family history has been tied up with cows since at least the 19th century. In fading family photographs, you can see cows as well as ancestors. In my own childhood snapshots, I am smiling, hair cropped and parted, boots high, a calf sucking on my fingers.

I grew up in Hollywood, Florida, an affluent, largely Jewish suburb of Fort Lauderdale. My father still resides for most of the week on the family farm that my grandfather founded in Okeechobee, a two-hour drive away. When I was a child, my father came home one night a week and then again, for weekends, usually a few minutes before the sun set on Friday. Some 4,000 cows live on my family’s farm. There is much to do and the days are always long. But before my father leaves the house each morning in darkness, he makes sure to put on tefillin and say the shacharit prayers. He is, as far as I know, the only full-time Orthodox Jewish farmer in the United States.

Growing up, my friends were the daughters of cardiologists who took their children to Disney World. My summers were spent in the hot Florida sun, milking cows, sorting through tool sheds, cleaning calf cages, chasing after wayward heifers, and seeking the small comforts of air conditioning in my father’s Ford F-150.

****

In Germany, Jewish cattle dealers abounded. Considered the de facto bankers of the countryside, they were particularly targeted by the Nazi propaganda machine. My grandfather, born in 1907, had been groomed to take over the family’s prosperous cattle business, based in Ellingen, a small town in Bavaria, which had branches throughout the region. Then Hitler came to power.

My grandfather escaped in 1938, and, after a few years in Cuba, he found refuge in Miami. When it came time to stake out his American dream, my grandfather turned to what he knew best. Though Bavaria is a long way away from Florida, Holsteins are Holsteins and farmers everywhere speak the same language. When he arrived in Miami, the area surrounding the city was still farm country. With an old pick-up truck, he slowly built a business buying and selling cows throughout the state. Around 1945, he decided to deviate slightly from the family tradition; he began to produce and sell milk, rather than just buy and sell livestock. It was a gradual process, and for a while, he did both simultaneously, establishing his first farm in Miami Springs, where the international airport is now located. “Cattle dealing was in his blood,” my father told me. “He was good at it, he loved it, and he could have made a very good living if he had continued.” But he made an intentional decision to shed his cattle-dealer past, a decision I learned more about when I visited his German hometown last summer.

***

I had been to Germany twice before: as a college student on a research grant, and later, as a journalist covering a conference in Berlin. But my interest in this period was always confined to my maternal side—my grandmother, who was born in Frankfurt, is a survivor of Bergen Belsen. My paternal grandfather, who never spoke about his childhood, died months before I was born and his wife—my grandmother—was a fifth-generation American who knew little of her late husband’s German past. Some photographs survived, and with them, small scraps of information about a small Bavarian town and a once-thriving business, but beyond that, we knew nothing. For the most part, my grandfather, an aloof figure, wiped a clean slate when he stepped onto American soil.

About 15 years ago, my brother went backpacking through Europe and decided to take a detour to Ellingen. There, he met a retired veterinarian named Bruno Buff who had heard of the Berman family from the farmers he worked with in the countryside. Buff also volunteered his time working in the city archives and took an interest in our family. In the years since, the family has stayed in periodic contact with him, mostly through Christmas cards.

But recently, Buff began corresponding more frequently. He told us about a German doctoral student named Stefanie Fischer, who had unearthed archival information about our family and was writing her dissertation on the relationship between Jewish cattle dealers and German farmers. He also sent us a copy of a book about the town’s Jews that had just been published by a ragtag group of amateur historians. He asked: Would we want to come to Ellingen for a visit? After some convincing, my father agreed; this would be his first trip to Germany.

Ellingen is a small, picturesque town just a short train ride from Nuremberg. We arrived from the United States, Israel, and England—more than a dozen in all, from my two-year-old nephew to a 70-year-old cousin who was born in Germany but now refused to speak the language. Ellingen boasted cobblestone streets; flowers spilling out of windowsills; the constant, somewhat maddening din of church bells; and a castle looming at the entrance of the town. Walking through the idyllic streets, I couldn’t help but think that ours was a particularly painful exile; Ellingen in the summertime seems too good to be true.

For most of us, it was our first trip to the town. My aunt was one exception; she had been to Ellingen in the 1980s, and as the story goes, she asked for directions to the Jewish cemetery. When the town’s German-speaking residents drew a blank, she started yelling, “Dead Jews! Dead Jews,” repeatedly at the top of her lungs.

Our arrival in Ellingen was a much talked-about novelty. Before World War II, the town had just a handful of Jewish residents, and now everyone—from the carpenter to the mayor to the innkeeper of a local bed and breakfast—seemed to know the name Berman. Buff, in his 80s, organized the three-day tour for us. He had fought in World War II, and won us all over with his warmth, kindness, and deep-seated regret. It was Buff who introduced us to the entourage of locals who accompanied us along nearly every stop: the retired baker, didn’t speak English, but communicated through strudels, thrusting baked goods our way with smiles; the town’s lawyer and self-appointed historian, who co-authored a book about the town’s Jews, despite what appeared to be no special affinity for Jews; and the makeshift archivist, a middle-aged, unemployed woman with bright orange hair who lived alone with her dog and spent hours sifting through the old papers, documenting the lives of the town’s Jews.

She told me that sometimes she walks the streets of Ellingen and sees the faces of the town’s Jews who have since vanished from its cobblestone pathways.

“They have become my friends,” she said with a sad smile.

***
In the years leading up to World War II, the German countryside was intensely poor. A farmer who wanted to buy cows was dependent on credit that he received from his local cattle dealer, not the bank. My family’s business, Berman-Oppenheimer, emerged as the leading cattle operation in Bavaria in the southeast region of Germany. On any given week, they would send upwards of 150 cows to market, an astronomical number for most German farmers.

“No other group was assaulted so much when the Nazis came to power,” Fischer, the German doctoral student, said of Jewish cattle dealers. “They became synonymous with ripping off farmers.” Nazis mythologized the struggling farmers in the heartland who worked the soil, and pitted them against the relatively well-off Jewish cattle dealers.

German municipalities tried to promote “Judenfrei” cattle markets, but many farmers boycotted them—not because of philo-Semitism, but because “Aryan” prices were deemed too high. For a time, German farmers prohibited the distribution of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer at their cattle auctions because it kept Jewish cattle dealers away.

Soon, Der Stürmer began to publish names of German farmers who continued to do business with Jews, branding them enemies of the state. “Jews had no soil,” Fischer explained. “They didn’t milk cows. They only traded. People looked at Jews as if they didn’t work.” The aging farmers Fischer interviewed for her dissertation told her that it never occurred them that the Jews couldn’t own land. “They saw trading as part of the Jews’ nature,” she said.

***
Walking the streets of Ellingen, our guides pointed to various buildings where Jews had once lived, and to the former synagogue, which is now a private home. The deputy mayor gave us a tour of City Hall and then invited us to show off his elaborate garden and in it, a tiny but ornamented garden shed.

“This comes from Bernard Berman’s house,” he said, pointing to the letters “BB” formed out of the wrought iron that now decorates the shed’s window sills. Bernard is the name of my great-grandfather, but also my own father’s namesake. “My father got it, but I’m not sure how,” he said.

We tried to pry more information out of him, but we didn’t make much headway. “My father bought it after the war,” the deputy mayor repeated several times in his limited English, surprisingly unselfconscious. It angered me; I waited for the deputy mayor to put on a work shirt, take the tools out of his shed, cut through the wrought iron, and return the decoration to its rightful owners—but of course my waiting was for naught. He never offered it, and we didn’t ask. In fact, he never invited us in inside his home.

Later, I asked my father about that moment; wasn’t the decorative piece his rightful inheritance? “I didn’t want it back,” my father replied. “I don’t need anything from him.”

***

One afternoon, we were sitting outside our hotel, enjoying the crisp Bavarian afternoon and sipping German beer in the cool shade when Hermann Seis, the town’s lawyer-turned-historian, came to greet us. My parents had corresponded with him via email, but this was our first meeting with a man who seemed to know more about our family than we did. Seis talked a great deal, but when he took a newspaper article out of his binder and started to pass it around, our large and somewhat unruly crowd sat in rapt attention.

What he passed around was a copy of Der Stürmer, dated December 1937, which none of us had ever seen. There, featured prominently on the front page was an article about my great-grandfather—“the greatest and most cunning of these Ellingen Jews”—who was arrested after he was accused of paying a farmer he worked with to murder a leading Nazi.

The article features three mug shots of my great-grandfather, presumably taken upon his arrest. We sat there, speechless, dumbfounded. My father had heard about an arrest once—not from his father, but from a distant relative who provided no details—but he didn’t know anything beyond that, and certainly not that it was front-page news. No one knew about the article’s existence. (It’s nearly impossible to get a copy of the paper in modern day Germany—wartime propaganda is kept under tight wraps by the country’s anti-Nazi laws—and so researchers need to jump through extensive hoops to prove their interest in the newspaper is purely academic.) To this day, we don’t know how long my great-grandfather sat in jail.

The article is long—more than 2,000 words in the English translation we commissioned—and it is extensive in outlining my great-grandfather’s alleged sins: betraying and displacing farmers, expropriating farms, destroying property, and causing poverty across the countryside. In the article, my great-grandfather is described as a “man of foreign race who corrupted farmers.”

“The Jew is a born criminal,” the article continues. “The strongest laws will not be able to change him.”

Later we learned that my great-grandfather was released soon after and fled with his daughter to London. He died there in 1943, but not before he settled his Ellingen city taxes from exile. If he were to return after the war, my great-grandfather wanted to be sure it would be as a citizen in good standing.

Presumably, my grandfather saw the article on the newsstands in Breslau, where he moved to establish another branch of the family cattle-dealing business in the mid-1930s. But he never mentioned it to his wife, children or grandchildren; we only heard of it for the first time over beer in Ellingen, church bells ringing in the background, from a man who was a stranger.

***
The next afternoon we visited the nearby town of Markt Berolzheim, home to another branch of the family cattle business. Hermann Bauer was our host. He had been mayor of the town for three decades and his father was the town’s leading Nazi politician during the war years. We talked in his garden and drank fresh apple cider. He asked my father how many cows he owned and when my father answered, the mayor blanched.

“That’s four times as many cows as in the whole village,” he said.

My father tried to downplay the success; he tried explaining how for Florida the farm is considered midsized. But it didn’t make much of an impact. Later, when we visited the home that once belonged to my grandfather’s cousins, the man who lived there shared with us a rumor that was floating through the town. “I heard that there is a man named Bill Berman who has more than 2,000 cows,” he whispered, wide-eyed, to my sister. Bill, of course, is my father, and the man’s estimate was off by half. Jews were reviled for their success in the pre-war years and here was my father being forced to return to the same situation; his discomfort—laced with pride, among other things—was palpable.

Before we left, my father took Fischer aside. “Tell the mayor we don’t sell cattle anymore,” he insisted.

Fischer obliged and the mayor nodded, as if in comprehension. But I’m not sure he understood what my father was trying to say. My father, and his father before that, were no longer traders. Family legend has it that until the day he died, my grandfather could look at a cow and remember where and how much he bought her for, even if years had passed. And though trading was clearly his passion, he wanted something else, felt it was essential to become something else. And here in Germany, my father—who has watched each of his five children choose career paths that have taken them away from the family farm—wanted to be sure that the distinction was clear.

Daphna Berman, a former Jerusalem correspondent for Haaretz, is now a senior editor at Moment magazine.

Tonight marks the start of Shavuot, and one way we celebrate is by enjoying all things dairy. To learn more about the milk that is the heart of this holiday, Tablet Magazine visited Bill Berman’s farm in Okeechobee, Fla., which produces about 18,000 gallons of milk daily. Berman is an Orthodox Jew with deep roots in the cow business; his grandfather and great-grandfather were cattle dealers in Germany. In this audio slideshow, Berman takes us through a day on the farm, from morning prayers and a trip to the maternity barn, where about 20 calves are delivered each day, to a livestock auction and a minyan at the Palm Beach synagogue he attends.

PRODUCED BY ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO. PHOTOGRAPHY BY AMANDA KOWALSKI

The Tsene-Rene, a Yiddish version of the Bible, published in Amsterdam in 1751. (YIVO)

Most Jewish holidays have a ritual or physical symbol connected with them, a means of accessing the import the day. In the spring we rid ourselves of leavened products; in the fall, we build temporary structures; in the winter we light special candelabras. The holiday of Shavuot is an anomaly. There are no rituals that need to be performed, no special blessings to be pronounced. This is a holiday of pared-down simplicity, symbolized by the custom in Eastern Europe of making paper-cuts (called “shavuoslekh” in Yiddish) to decorate the home and synagogue.

The one custom for Shavuot is to stay up all night studying Jewish texts. This custom itself was enabled because of a particular innovation in food technology, as historian Elliot Horowitz has explained: the availability of caffeine. Horowitz discusses how once the stimulant became widely available in the 16th century, it enabled even the most sluggish among Jewish scholars to remain in a roused state through the early morning hours of Shavuot. Somehow this tension, between the corporeal (of our need for stimulants, or at least rest) and the spiritual aspects of awaiting revelation feels particularly Jewish to me, given the way our religion is rooted in the body.

The study of text on Shavuot takes no fixed form. Compilations of texts for this nocturnal holiday do exist, and they contain excerpts from the Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, and kabbalistic texts, but these are suggested modes of study. You could read anything really—Art Spiegelman’s Maus or stories by Amir Gutfreund. Shavuot is a time for Jews to focus on what it means to have a text and grapple with it, to be and to celebrate being the people of the book.

But what does it mean to be the people of the book these days? Recently, I went with my 10-year-old daughter to our local Borders, which was having a going-out-of business sale. My daughter looked at me and said, “I don’t think there will be any bookstores when I’m grown up.” This is a child who is notoriously pessimistic; she often fears that she will miss the school bus or doubts that she’ll able to finish her homework. I am usually quick to reassure her. In this case, I couldn’t. I think she’s right.

I appreciate so much about our electronic world, but I worry too, particularly the way it might be changing our approach to reading. Sven Birkerts writes of reading as an “ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself.” In Ethics of the Fathers, Rabbi Ben Bag-bag (whose own name is probably a play on Torah with its repetitive use of the second and third letters of the Hebrew alphabet) writes, “Turn it over and turn it over for all is in it.” How do we do that, how do we manage that sustained attention, let alone valuing one book, our Hebrew Bible, above all others, in our times?

Another historian of the book, Anthony Grafton has written of his Kindle that it “liberates” him because he always has a text to read on a long flight. Yet he also expresses his concern that postmodern reading is “rapid, superficial, appropriative and individualistic.” Physical objects give us information that we can’t glean electronically. Grafton writes of a scholar in an archive noting the smell of vinegar on a text which makes him aware that it had been disinfected during a cholera epidemic, giving us clues about the spread of disease.

I believe that Jewish books as objects will endure even if we move, as we seem to be doing, to a culture in which our texts are wholly electronic. We have been a culture that places a value on hiddur mitzvah, on the aesthetic value behind doing any commandment, so I believe Jews will continue to find value in lovely books for ritual use. Most of Jewish literature—from the Bible through rabbinic literature and modern halachic responsa—is available in electronic form. Yet we still handwrite scrolls and create beautiful book objects. It’s difficult to imagine the Torah ever being read from a Kindle for a congregation; we need rituals around our readings. So, we will have to stay in the corporeal and spiritual once again, using modern book technology as it is valuable, while taking time to sniff the ink on our handwritten Torah scrolls.

The revelation of Shavuot in the Bible, the Ten Commandments, begin with the letter aleph, of the word anokhi. Aleph is a silent sound, so all language that emanates from this revelation begins in silence. The text of the revelation is itself smashed and re-written. Moses creates one set of tablets, which he destroys; then he is told to recreate them; and then the destroyed tablets are still placed in the Ark of the Tabernacle, rendering it in effect the first geniza, a repository for a Jewish text. I think it’s essential that both old and new versions were placed in the ark. Perhaps this most ancient of biblical models can serve as a guideline for the ways we produce and consume texts today, that we can find a way to make an ancient desire to immerse oneself in a text to enlarge and deepen our experience, along with the liberation we find in the information instantly available at our electronically charged fingertips.

Beth Kissileff has taught Hebrew Bible and English literature at Carleton College and has received fellowships from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

(Flickr/Andy Logan)

The holiday of Shavuot brings with it unique forms of observance. In addition to the consumption of dairy-rich delicacies, many people participate in a tikkun layl Shavuot, an all-night study session. During a tikkun, it’s traditional to peruse and discuss a portion from the Bible, the Talmud, or the Mishneh. To mark Shavuot this year, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry asked novelist Nathan Englander, musician Alicia Jo Rabins, Rabbi Phil Lieberman, and theologian Avivah Zornberg what text they’d most like to think about in the early-morning hours, and what makes those hours particularly well-suited to explorations of the mind and spirit. [Running time: 11:40] 

Bella Meyer in her store. (Allison Michael Orenstein)

Flowers take on a special role during next week’s holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates a central moment in the formation of the Jewish people: the revelation at Sinai, when the Israelites received the Torah. During the holiday, synagogues around the world adorn their halls with green branches, plants, and blossoms. The custom dates back to our agrarian ancestors, who would make their holiday pilgrimages to Jerusalem with the first of their fruits in baskets decorated with greenery. According to one midrash at the time of the revelation, Mount Sinai suddenly burst into blossom—a desert miraculously flowering.

Bella Meyer, the owner of Fleurs Bella, an elegant flower shop near New York’s Union Square, calls the flower the true miracle. “To discover its essence—opening, life, death—is to experience an unimaginable mystery,” she says. Meyer traces her love of blossoms to her childhood and to time spent in the company of her grandfather, Marc Chagall. The artist is best known for his depictions of the shtetl—shabby houses, sad-eyed musicians, and melancholy goats—but, according to his granddaughter, he loved flowers, and he took great pleasure in capturing them in his art.

Meyer, 55, grew up in Basel, Switzerland, but spent her summers with Chagall in Southern France, where he lived until his death in 1985. The outdoor markets then overflowed in the warm months with great varieties of flowers and produce, and Meyer recalls delighting her grandfather with the bouquets she brought home. He saw in the “upward-reaching motion of each individual flower a symbol,” Meyer says, and for him, painting flowers may have been “the most visual way to express spirituality.”

Meyer earned a doctorate in medieval art history from the Sorbonne and moved to the United States in 1980. She held a smattering of jobs—from designing props for the theater (which she continues to do, on occasion, for productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) to working as a puppeteer—but none have satisfied her as much as floral design, she says. A number of years ago, she designed a blossom-laden chuppah for her friends’ wedding and she realized that flowers—in their variety and richness, she says, they’re natural art supplies—are a particularly powerful medium for her. She started Fleurs Bella in 2003 as a floral design company and set up the shop just under two years ago.

“Cut flowers,” she says, “have no other purpose aside from being given.” She always keeps a stash just outside the shop, with a sign that says “take one please.” About once a month, she ventures out onto the streets with what she calls “flower graffiti,” tucking small bouquets into alleyways or subway stations. Occasionally she’ll thrust her flowers at random strangers. Not everyone is thrilled. She recalls one man who yelled at her: ”’I don’t want to be happy!’”

Traditional Judaism doesn’t place much of a premium on beauty or happiness. And so it is especially heartening that flowers are so much a part of the festivities on Shavuot; more than decoration, they infuse joy and a sense of aesthetics into the holiday, suggesting that these are not, after all, anathema to Jewish beliefs and practices, and that even as we mark a particularly solemn moment in our history we can find room for both beauty and happiness.

Click below to see images of Fleurs Bella, Bella Meyer’s shop.

Shavuot FAQ: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Festival of Weeks, by the Editors

Frum Farmer: Though born to a family of cattle dealers, Bill Berman is an anomaly among South Florida’s dairymen, few of whom start their day by putting on tefillin, by Tablet Magazine

Inheritance: First as cattle dealers and now as dairy farmers, the author’s family has long been defined by their cows. A trip back to their Bavarian homeland revealed this legacy to be more unusual—and fraught—than she’d ever imagined. By Daphna Berman

All Night Long: Shavuot is celebrated with all-night study sessions. We asked four people we admire—a novelist, a musician, a rabbi, and a theologian—what texts they’d like to read in the early-morning hours. By Vox Tablet

Fading: The one custom for celebrating Shavuot is to stay up all night and study Jewish texts. But will we continue celebrating the printed word as more and more of what we read is electronic? By Beth Kissileff

Full Bloom: Bella Meyer traces her love of flowers to time she spent with her grandfather, Marc Chagall. Now as the owner of a Manhattan shop, Fleurs Bella, Meyer is creating her own art with blossoms as her medium, by Shoshana Olidort and Jake Marmer

Field Study: Why the holiday of Shavuot is all but ignored across America, by Marissa Brostoff

At Sinai: A recent convert to Judaism discusses why Shavuot is her favorite holiday, by Siân Gibby

Mothers’ Little Helpers: Guidebooks quell the anxieties of raising up a child, by Lynn Harris

DAWN 2010 Celebrates Shavuot: At the mystical intersection of Judaism and science, by Marissa Brostoff

Food

Got Milk? The complicated history of Jews and dairy, by Liel Leibovitz

Dairy Heirs: Shavuot and cheese, past and present, by Joan Nathan

Light and Sweet: A slice of life at a Bronx cheesecake factory, by Blake Eskin

Blintz Binge: One woman’s search for the perfect cheese-filled pancake, by Katie Robbins

Cheese, Glorious Cheese: A taste of Shavuot, by Sara Ivry

Today in Tablet Magazine, Benjamin Balint reports on the would-be Jews—the small community of Samaritans who have lived uninterruptedly on what is now the West Bank for thousands of years. Books critic Adam Kirsch deals with the legacy of Irène Némirovsky. Our special Shavuot-themed Vox Tablet podcast involves … cheesecake. Mmm, says The Scroll, cheesecake.

Novelist Gary Shteyngart and editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse at DAWN 2010.(All photos by Dan Coplan)

Moses among the penguins, rabbis beside the swamp! DAWN 2010, the late-night Shavuot arts festival that Tablet Magazine cosponsored (along with Reboot) Saturday night at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, was full of surprising juxtapositions of Jews and fauna. (For all photos, check our our Facebook album.)

One of the first of the evening’s dozens of events was the world’s second performance of Everything’s Coming Up Moses, which tells the story of the Exodus in under an hour—with inspiration from the music of Gypsy. The musical, premiered by Tablet Magazine in New York this Passover and written by contributing editor Rachel Shukert, was, naturally, performed in the African Hall beneath a taxidermied leopard that was hanging out in a tree overhead. (The very-much-alive penguins strutted at the other end of the hall.) (more…)

(Len Small/Tablet Magazine)

Fred Schuster opened S&S Cheesecake in 1960; he now has help from his son-in-law, Yair Ben-Zaken. Together, they supply steakhouses and gourmet shops around the country—Dean & Deluca, Morton’s, Smith & Wollensky. Reporter Blake Eskin decided to make a pilgrimage, by subway, to their windowless one-story brick bakery at 238th Street in the Bronx, home to what many consider to be the best cheesecake in the country. Here’s his audio postcard, from our archive.