Working Girl: The Early Years and the Christian Delicatessen

As I approach the finish line demarcating close to five decades of an uninterrupted working life—and here (and only here), I define “working” as inextricably entwined with the primary aim of earning something resembling an income—I find myself slowing down a bit to look back at my former working selves, who I left behind on that long-distance race course littered with numerous, sundry jobs along the way.  While the earliest years, say between 12 and 14, found me baby-sitting and even mowing lawns on a regular basis (the latter, my first but not my last foray into the unwelcoming realm of traditionally male jobs), I landed my first “real” job at the age of 14, at a newly opened restaurant in Bristol, Tennessee, named “John’s Deli.” John’s was a decidedly Christian (not to mention Southern) take on that ubiquitous New York eating establishment:  the Jewish delicatessen.  Why a small group of local, Christian investors decided that Bristol, in 1972, needed a restaurant modeled on the Jewish delicatessen was not mine to question.  At that time in my life, my family and I only barely, if at all, acknowledged our own Jewish background, never mind discussed it openly with others in our new home in the Bible Belt region that encompasses southwestern Virginia.  So with a newly minted work permit, as well as what would become my lifelong bureaucratic companion—a social security number—in hand, I officially began my journey as a working girl.

Despite my family’s more or less unintentional suppression of my and my siblings’ half-Jewishness, the dozen years I lived in northern New Jersey, prior to moving to Bristol, had provided me with a few occasions to eat at an authentic Jewish delicatessen.  Specifically, these were the few, very rare, excursions I recall taking in the neighborhood surrounding my Jewish, maternal grandmother’s apartment in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  Even the scarcity of those memories, however, did not prepare me for the dislocation and outright confusion I experienced when I began my first week of work at John’s Deli.  Yes, there were bagels (frozen Lenders, six to a plastic bag) and cream cheese, but where was the lox?  The matzoh ball soup?  The challah (to appear decades later in a major, northern Virginia grocery chain, labeled, much to my very Jewish, then-husband’s horror, “egg bread”)?   The Entenmann’s pastries, if not real cheesecake?  Yes, there was cheesecake, but it was a far cry from its authentic cousin that was readily available at any diner—Jewish or not—in those now halcyon Jersey days.  Inarguably, it was an exile to the culinary desert for any unlikely Jew who might stumble through the doors of John’s Deli.  To add insult to injury, my sense of place was further skewed by the lines of New Testament scripture which were painted like a decorative border on the walls below the ceiling line on all four sides of the dining room. 

I worked hard at that deli, though, hard enough to know that restaurant work, in particular food prep in the kitchen, was back breaking and relentlessly boring.  Moreover, I was not very good at it.  I could not chop fast, or uniformly, enough.  I was squeamish about touching meat (my conversion to vegetarianism was not too many years away).  I was revolted by handling strangers’ dirty dishes and utensils.  Still, I did learn how to bake the perfect baked potato (scrub the potato; prick it in a few places; and then bake it in a very hot oven, unwrapped—no foil (this was key)—for at least an hour).  And while John’s would not be my last restaurant job, it was the first one to direct my thoughts to considering the type of work to which I might be better suited.  So it was that, even at the age of 14, I began to envision a more white-collar profession in my future.  That this was a challenging prospect for a young woman who would be the first in her family to even attend college, not to mention step into a professional career, had not yet occurred to me.  Maybe that scripture, incongruously New Testament as it was, which was writ large on the four walls surrounding me as I worked, had some blessings to confer after all.