It was very funny, the Czechs, next to the Hungarians, next to the Germans — just as it was in Europe

from: http://hungaria.tribe.net/thread/576ca251-a910-4d5f-85f6-58d67a72c9af
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April 7, 2006
My Manhattan
On the Upper East Side, Memories Fueled by Strudel
By JOSEPH BERGER

ONCE, New York's Mitteleuropeans lived side by side along Second Avenue, with the Czechs and Slovaks lodged in the walk-ups of the upper 60's and the 70's, the Hungarians occupying the low 80's, and the Germans in the high 80's and 90's.

"It was very funny, the Czechs, next to the Hungarians, next to the Germans — just as it was in Europe," is the way Jan Hird Pokorny, a courtly 91-year-old Czech, put it, with the kind of droll appreciation of life's odd arrangements that itself was an emblem of that Old World culture.

The days of ubiquitous Gemütlichkeit on the Upper East Side seemed to vanish toward the last decades of the 20th century, as terraced high-rises replaced working-class tenements, and the striver children and grandchildren of the immigrants fanned out to Queens and the suburbs.

But those immigrant cultures are not entirely dead. A weekend anthropologist can find more than a few wizened survivors and still pulsing cultural remnants scattered among the raucous singles bars, nail salons and fusion restaurants.

Walk along Second Avenue or the blocks branching off it, and you'll spot churches with services at least partly in Hungarian (Hungarian Reformed Church), German (St. Joseph's Yorkville) or Slovak (St. John Nepomucene). Sadly, Paprika Weiss, once the Hungarian Zabar's, has been missing for roughly 10 years, its barrels of creamy apricot and prune lekvar a haunting taste-bud memory. But there are two ethnic food shops where pork sausages and salamis hang in the windows like vertical Venetian blinds, two heart-clogging bakeries, an irresistible marzipan shop and perhaps the nation's only Hungarian bookstore, a hole in the wall rather grandiosely named Blue Danube Gifts.

The little that is left emerges more fragrantly this time of year, as those who remain prepare for services and get-togethers on Easter, and stores like Schaller & Weber — German products since 1937 — and the slightly older Elk Candy Company decorate their windows with bunnies and eggs made out of things bunnies and eggs were never meant to be made of. Glaser's Bake Shop is already fashioning its funny bunnies — confections that combine cake and chocolate and sell for $3.50 each. Yorkville Meat Emporium, once unapologetically Hungarian, is bringing out smoked hams dried for four months, especially for Easter. Throughout the neighborhood, Hungarian boys are preparing to celebrate the day after Easter with an old custom — going to the homes of girls and spraying them with a scent of spring — even if it is cheap perfume. At the First Hungarian Literary Society, a 117-year-old private club on East 79th Street, whose members, mostly Jewish, generally don't celebrate Easter, there are nonetheless more hands of gin rummy played and more plates of wiener schnitzel served because the snowbirds are returning from their Florida sabbaticals. The long-dormant Bohemian National Hall (Narodni Budova), the gray-stone shrine of Czech life, is in the midst of renovation. But its Dvorak Room — an exhibition space with a fireplace rescued from the composer's demolished Manhattan row house — as well as a library with a sizable Vaclav Havel collection are already in use.

The neighborhood has always resonated for me, even though my roots are among the Jews of Poland. After all, the dignified manners and the dense food — goulash, dumplings, horseradish, schnitzel, strudel — did not obey national boundaries, which kept shifting in any case. It was always a wistful return to a region I tasted only in infancy to dine at Mocca on goulash and nockerl — slender dumplings my parents called kliskelekh — and on palacsintas, a more refined variant of blintzes. The restaurant's molded tin ceilings, naïve Hungarian crafts and a jaded blond waitress, known to all as Magda, gave the place the proper Continental coziness.

Mocca closed in 2004, facing rising rents. But, displaying American pragmatism, it merged with a diner a few doors down, and the unlikely alloy is called Frankie's and Mocca. You can have goulash, while the table next to yours is having a tuna melt. Magda is gone, but a younger Hungarian, Gabriella Zadori, is there, as is a Mexican chef who has been cooking Hungarian for 20 years. The nockerl was as good as I remembered, and the palacsintas only slightly less so.

A more colorful remnant of Hungarian life is Blue Danube Gifts on East 83rd Street. Its owner, Melinda Bartos, will sell you novels by Hungarian writers like Imre Kertesz, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner, and Sandor Marai, but it also has "The Da Vinci Code" in Hungarian. It has Playboy and Cosmopolitan in Hungarian, newspapers like Magyar Szo (The Hungarian Word) and CD's by the gypsy singer Apollonia Kovacs. There aren't enough Hungarians left in the neighborhood to support even so tiny a shop, but Szolt Rozsavolgyi, a construction company driver from Brooklyn, was there the other day to buy a present for his wife's name day.

Francesca Sagi, a resident East Side Hungarian, remembered that when she came from Hungary in 1971, she could stroll Second Avenue, and "it reminded me of walking around Budapest." She still goes to Yorkville Meat Emporium for potato bread and stuffed cabbage, but her jauntiness is muted.

"This one died, and that one died," she said. "It's sad when you see it getting smaller and smaller and smaller."

The First Hungarian Literary Society should be pickled; its way of life is endangered. Every afternoon, elderly Hungarians gather to play gin rummy or backgammon and reminisce about the old days, in the actual Budapest as well as in Manhattan's vanished Little Budapest. With Old World formality, men put on ties, and the women splash on jewelry just to play cards. The Hungarian talk is salted with a tart wit, though it sometimes touches on Auschwitz or Buchenwald, where many members spent time.

"As they lose a husband or wife, it's the only place they can come," said Steven Kaldor, the club's chairman. "It's their second home."

The club is down to 350 members who pay an annual fee of $100. It would go under if it didn't own the building; there's a rent-paying restaurant on the ground floor.

The exodus of white ethnics really began with the tearing down of the Third Avenue El, which meant affluent people could think of moving east rather than confining themselves to Silk Stocking avenues like Park. The ensuing juggernaut of terraced high-rises swallowed many of the working-class walk-ups and the mom-and-pop shops where the Mitteleuropeans lived and went about their routines. Old age did the rest.

Even into the 1980's and 90's, the neighborhood supported Czech and Hungarian restaurants like Csarda, Praha and the Red Tulip; German places like Cafe Geiger and Ideal; and pastry cafes where Germans could indulge their custom of a formal afternoon tea with good china and heavy cake. Mr. Kaldor reminisced how Zsa Zsa, Eva and Magda Gabor and their mother held court 45 years ago at Budapest, which regulars called Mrs. Terhes after a compatriot who whipped together the chicken paprikash. Those places are all ghosts.

Mr. Pokorny, born in 1914 in Brno, came to the United States in 1940 as a young architect to escape the Nazi occupation and to deepen his architecture studies at Columbia University. At that time, he estimates, the East Side had 40,000 Czechs, many of them workers at two Czech-owned cigar factories.

"When you walked the streets, you heard Czech spoken," he said, with a delighted glint behind his tortoise-shell glasses.

The center of social life was Bohemian Hall — which had a restaurant, a bowling alley, even a shooting range. Mr. Pokorny, a specialist in preservation, is spearheading the renovations so that Czechs can preserve some culture. He himself is a preserved specimen of the gallant European, a breed that has almost vanished in the razzle-dazzle of modern life.

At Jan Hus church on East 74th Street, built in 1888 and named after a Czech martyr, the Rev. Moira Ahearne told me that the active Czech congregation was down to two members and that, as her Irish name suggests, the church hadn't had a Czech pastor since the 1960's. One of the two Czech congregants, Rose Luchart, 94, who has lived in the same red-brick walk-up on 73rd Street for 70 years, remembered with affection an after-school that they called the "soup school" because it offered soup along with lessons in Czech to the mostly poor children. She used to translate letters from the homeland into English but seldom gets called to do so now.

"The city started to build these big houses, and we had to move," she said. "Everybody was sort of angry about it."

The neighborhood is down to one genuine Central European dining spot — the Heidelberg, on Second Avenue, just off 86th Street, where dark timbers, antlers and steins of dark beer provide the Teutonic atmosphere. My wife and I dined on a crispy roast duck and sauerbraten, both served with red cabbage by waiters dressed in lederhosen, though one admitted that he was from California.

The hearty ambience was almost enough to obscure a historic stain on Yorkville's reputation. The city's German community established Turnverein gymnastic centers and hatched industrialists like Pfizer in drugs, Ruppert in beer and Steinway in pianos, but in the years before World War II, it also provided fertile ground for the pro-Nazi German-American Bund.

The sad fact is that the remaining authentic Mitteleuropeans are very old and hidden away. The Rev. Stefan Chanas was imported from Slovakia in 2002 to help out at St. John Nepomucene, a barrel-vaulted church on First Avenue and 66th Street, built when the neighborhood had 7,000 Slovak families and seven Slovak restaurants. Now he visits the neighborhood's Slovaks in their railroad flats because they can no longer walk to church.

"I go visit them to hear confession," he said.

There is, however, at least one great survivor: Glaser's at First Avenue and 87th Street, a family bakery founded in 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, and a loaf of bread cost 4 cents. The proprietors are the founder's grandsons Herbert Jr., who works the day shift — and John, who takes nights. Herbert, 53, remembered when he had a half dozen sturdy competitors, like Kramer's and Kleine Konditorei. Now he is king of the heap, but alone at the top. Once, customers with teeming families bought large cake wheels for dessert. Now, with so many singles in the neighborhood, his most popular item may be black-and-white cookies — not ethnic at all.

"Now people come in and say, 'I'll have one of those and one of those,' " he said.

Cockeyed optimists may even see a glimmer of rebirth. Last year, Andre's Cafe, a branch of a 30-year-old bakery in Forest Hills, Queens, opened on Second Avenue near 85th Street. Its owner is Andre Heimann, a Hungarian immigrant whose mother worked for the now extinct Mrs. Herbst's, a Hungarian bakery on Third Avenue whose flaky strudel filled with apple, cherry or even cabbage was legendary. The new Andre's also serves a flaky strudel. It too is filled with apple, cherry or even cabbage.