City Desk: Navel Gazing

IN the Bible, Cush is a son of Ham and the father of Nimrod, and hence the namesake of tribes in Upper Egypt or Arabia—Scriptural geography can be hazy. In New York, Kush is a bar on Orchard Street below Houston. Its location is quite definite, though the demographic geography of the neighborhood flows and mutates. Once the Lower East Side was the densest concentration of Jews on the planet. Aroud the corner from Kush, like a fossilized trilobite, sits Katz’s Delicatessen, with its half-century-old sign: “Send a salami to your boy in the army” (in Ancient New Yorkese, this rhymed). Now Katz’s shares a block with a 24-hour restaurant for Turkish cab-drivers. If the deliveryman fails to bring my daily Turkish newspaper in the morning, I can always pick it up here. Even more numerous in the old neighborhood than new immigrants are the kids who, with luck and hard work, might become artists some day, or at least college graduates. On Tuesday nights, the new hangout offers belly dancing.

Even though New York (unlike Detroit) is not a major magnet for Middle Eastern immigrants, it has long had a small but lively belly-dance world. Before my time, there was Greektown, just west of the theater district. Belly-dancing is not a Greek art form, but Greeks owned the clubs. My wife once mentioned the name to her orthopedist, and his eyes shone with remembrance of flings past. I remember Fazil’s International, near the old Greektown, which was pretty mononational: wall- to-wall Turks. One year the hit song at Fazil’s, which must have been the hit song in Anatolia two or three years before, compared love to a dum-dum bullet. Now the hardy little scene has migrated downtown.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

IN the Bible, Cush is a son of Ham and the father of Nimrod, and hence the namesake of tribes in Upper Egypt or Arabia—Scriptural geography can be hazy. In New York, Kush is a bar on Orchard Street below Houston. Its location is quite definite, though the demographic geography of the neighborhood flows and mutates. Once the Lower East Side was the densest concentration of Jews on the planet. Aroud the corner from Kush, like a fossilized trilobite, sits Katz’s Delicatessen, with its half-century-old sign: “Send a salami to your boy in the army” (in Ancient New Yorkese, this rhymed). Now Katz’s shares a block with a 24-hour restaurant for Turkish cab-drivers. If the deliveryman fails to bring my daily Turkish newspaper in the morning, I can always pick it up here. Even more numerous in the old neighborhood than new immigrants are the kids who, with luck and hard work, might become artists some day, or at least college graduates. On Tuesday nights, the new hangout offers belly dancing.

Even though New York (unlike Detroit) is not a major magnet for Middle Eastern immigrants, it has long had a small but lively belly-dance world. Before my time, there was Greektown, just west of the theater district. Belly-dancing is not a Greek art form, but Greeks owned the clubs. My wife once mentioned the name to her orthopedist, and his eyes shone with remembrance of flings past. I remember Fazil’s International, near the old Greektown, which was pretty mononational: wall- to-wall Turks. One year the hit song at Fazil’s, which must have been the hit song in Anatolia two or three years before, compared love to a dum-dum bullet. Now the hardy little scene has migrated downtown.