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Friday May 27, 2005

Author cooks up love story at the bakery

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

A red dwarf star is so dense, a spoonful of it would weigh several tons on earth.

And that’s nearly as solid as the knishes sold at author Mark Kurlansky’s favorite New York City joint.

“There’s a place on Houston Street where the knishes are the densest material known to science,” he said with a laugh.

“You eat one of those and you can’t eat again for another two weeks.”

Kurlansky is the Manhattan-based writer best known for his histories of the world-shaking impact of salt and cod — which, he’s quick to note, make up a staple of the Portuguese diet when combined. His joy for all things gastronomic is a major factor in his latest work, a comic novel titled “Boogaloo on Second Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt and Music.”

Nathan Seltzer, the novel’s Jewish protagonist, can’t walk by a restaurant without an intimate description of the foods emitting the enchanting odors ubiquitous in Lower East Side life.

“Food is just an integral part of the way I think. Some people would never imagine describing someone without describing their clothes; they think the way somebody dresses is very telling. I think the way they eat is very telling,” said Kurlansky, in San Francisco recently for a book tour.

“You can tell where they come from, what kind of life they lived, their attitudes toward life, so many things.”

The pastry portions of “Boogaloo” come via the descriptions of the Edelweiss Bakery (and in the recipes included in the back of the book). The guilt portions come via Seltzer’s affair with the none-too-attractive-yet-somehow-alluring woman behind the counter.

“I decided sex and pastry were the most sensual combo I could think of. And that’s one of the reasons I had him involved with a pastry maker,” said Kurlansky.

“You ever hear someone describe pastry as being ‘sinful’? There’s that sense of

it being voluptuous and indulgent, and I think the whole idea is, this woman is not incredibly beautiful but she smelled like butter and [Nathan] couldn’t resist her.”

Kurlansky, whose family may have been the only Jewish one in all of Newington, Conn., where he grew up, never much cared for desserts. But he loved making pastries, which is how he made his bread during his younger years as a struggling playwright.

And, he notes, anyone who spends enough time making pastries will begin to see the delicate balance separating the divine from dog food as a metaphor for life.

Kurlansky’s novel, set in 1988 at just the moment the neighborhood’s own delicate balance swung toward gentrification, is populated by a Technicolor-vivid cast of characters.

There’s the corner shul where the young guy is 68 years old and any passing Jewish man will be sucked inside to fill out a minyan. There’s Harry Seltzer, the kindly Jewish landlord who would rather belt out an Irving Berlin tune than evict a non-paying tenant. And there’s Chow Mein Vega, a boogaloo star from the 1960s who anointed himself the “Meshugaloo” and speaks in an odd amalgam of Spanish and Yiddish that Kurlansky calls “Spiddish.” Eso no dice bupkes (That doesn’t say s—-), for example.

Kurlansky, who spent years as a roving journalist and found fame and the bestseller list with his histories of how esoterica led to world-altering events, took a literary trip to his old neighborhood out of a desire to write a book about guilt.

And, in addition to Jewish guilt, Kurlansky also majors in Jewish angst. In fact, Kurlansky said he’s been told his passage, “Nathan woke up on Friday morning with the unshakable sense that, during this day, he would commit a catastrophic error in judgment” could “only have been written by a Jew.”

Having grown up a Jew among Catholics, he’s familiar with how different people deal differently with guilt.

“Jews who spend time around Catholics are in awe of Catholicism, because any time you want, you can get absolution. In Judaism, you have one day of the year, you can throw your bread in the water and cast off your sins. Jews aren’t let off the hook nearly so easily,” he said.

For the record, Kurlansky is unsure how Protestants deal with guilt, but offers up “paying retail” as a hypothesis.

Beyond all the pastry, boogaloo and guilt, Kurlansky is most at home delving into the tiny little personality details that make people tick.

“I was a journalist for 15 years. One day I was sitting around with a bunch of fellow journalists, and a non-journalist asked us what we thought was the most exciting story to do. Everyone said the same thing — except for me,” he said.

“They all said they really love to be there at an important moment in history, to be a witness to a great moment. But I said that what I love is to be somewhere where nobody else is and tell a story nobody else would know about if I hadn’t done it.”

“Boogaloo on Second Avenue” by Mark Kurlansky (319 pages,

Ballantine Books, $24.95).

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