The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest BreadA “scrumptious little book” about the cultural and historical background of this humble and hearty treat (The New York Times). If smoked salmon and cream cheese bring only one thing to mind, you can count yourself among the world’s millions of bagel mavens. But few people are aware of the bagel’s provenance, let alone its adventuresome history. This charming book tells the remarkable story of the bagel’s journey from the tables of seventeenth-century Poland to the freezers of middle America today, a story rooted in centuries of Polish, Jewish, and American history. Research in international archives and numerous personal interviews uncover the bagel’s links with the defeat of the Turks by Polish king Jan Sobieski in 1683, the Yiddish cultural revival of the late nineteenth century, and Jewish migration across the Atlantic to America. There the story moves from the bakeries of New York’s Lower East Side to the Bagel Bakers’ Local 388 Union of the 1960s, and the attentions of the mob. Maria Balinska weaves together a rich, quirky, and evocative history of East European Jewry—and the unassuming ring-shaped roll the world has taken to its heart. “Thought-provoking and fact-filled . . . Uses the bagel as a way of viewing Polish-Jewish history.” —The New York Times “Gives readers plenty to chew on . . . Thoroughly entertaining.” —The Wall Street Journal |
Contents
| 1 | |
CHAPTER 2 Of Bagels and Kings | 20 |
How the Bagel Lost its Worth but Kept its Value | 44 |
CHAPTER 4 Bagel Polemics in an Independent Poland | 69 |
The Immigrant Bagel and the Struggle for Workers Rights | 96 |
The Story of Bagel Bakers Union Local No 338 | 120 |
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Common terms and phrases
Abraham Cahan Author’s interview bagel bakers Bagel Boys bagel factory bagel hole bagel pedlars baked bagels bakery workers basket Battle of Vienna became Beigel boiled bosses bread business agent cent century Christian ciambelle city’s consumed country’s cream cheese culture customers dough Eastern Europe ethnic European frozen bagels gentile ghetto historian I.L. Peretz International Jan Sobieski Janusz Tazbir Jewish artisans Jewish bakers Jewish community Jewish immigrants Jews Józef Piłsudski Kazimierz Kraków Lender’s bagels living Lower East Side machine Marvin Mattoon Montreal Montreal bagel Mordechai Gebirtig Murray Lender non-Jewish obwarzanek obwarzanki ólkiew one’s organised oven Piłsudski Plumka Poland popular Puglia rabbi ring-shaped roll Russian sell bagels shops Shtetl Skolnick Special Collections St Viateur Statute of Kalisz story street strike supermarket Szyk taralli tarallo tion town town’s trade union Vienna Warsaw wheat words Yiddish YIVO York York’s