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'DER BEYGL" - A CHRONOLOGY
"Der beygl" means "the bagel" in Yiddish. Dr. Joyce Brothers says that "Bagels are the best teething rings ever devised." Actress Shirley Jones confided that her husband, Marty Ingels, said, "Eating bagels with someone other than your husband constitutes some sort of Hebrew adultery." Heloise ("Heloise's Hints") said, "Nothing's too strange to put on a bagel." And one of the Top 15 Jewish C&W Song Titles is " You're the Lox My Bagel's Been Missin.'"
In "Freakonomics," a new book by Levitt and Dubner, we read a true story about a research analyst named Paul Feldman. As a casual gesture, he began bringing in some bagels every Friday to his office. He set out a cash basket and a sign with the suggested price. (His collection rate was about 95%.) " Zeyer gut!" (Very good.) In l984 he quit his senior-level job in Washington, D.C. and went into business for himself. Within a few years he was delivering 8,400 bagels a week to 140 companies. The "gut nayes" (good news): he was earning as much as he had earned as a research analyst.
Again, he used an honor system. When he started his "gesheft" (business), he expected a 95% payment rate. Unfortunately, he did have to settle for less. He considered a company "erlekh" (honest) if its payment rate was above 90%. A rate between 80 and 90% was "annoying but tolerable." Some companies habitually paid below 80%--"a shande un a kharpe"-- a shame and a disgrace.
His data showed that a "kleyn" (small) office with a few dozen employees generally is more honest. In a big-office, bagel crime increases. And, an office is more honest when the employees like their boss and their work.
Shown below is a chronology of additional bagel facts and trivia:
Year Fact/Trivia
1610 The community of Cracow/Krakow, Poland, states that "beygls" will be given as gifts to women in childbirth. The ring shape may have been seen as a symbol of life. There is no mention of religion in this regulation. Apparently Christian women ate bagels, too.
1683 A Viennese baker wanted to bake special bread to honor King John II Sobreski of Poland for saving the city from Turkish invaders. He became known as "Vaneusker of the Turks." The King was a skilled horseman, so he baked the bread in the shape of a riding stirrup. The Austrian word for "stir-up" is "Beugel." The Buegels popularity spread throughout Eastern Europe.
1880 Thousands of Eastern European Jews immigrate to the USA. They bring with them a desire for bagels. On New York's Lower East Side street vendors are selling bagels. (This same year, Philadelphia Cream Cheese was marketed.)
1907 The International Bakers Union is founded in NYC. Only sons of union members could be apprenticed to learn the secrets of bagel making in order to safeguard the culinary art.
1920 Joseph & Isaac Breakstone market a new item called "Cream Cheese." It became a big hit with the New York Jewish Community and became a standard spread for bagels.
1927 Polish emigre, Harry Lender opens up Lender's Beigel Bakery in West Haven, CT.
1951 The bagel's status as a staple was fully recognized. New York's bagel bakers went out on strike, and the Times headlined its front-page story:
"BAGEL FAMINE THREATENS IN CITY/LABOR DISPUTE PUTS HOLD IN SUPPLY"
1962 Mr. Murray Lender sells frozen bagels in local supermarkets. His dream was a "bagel in every toaster."
1960s - 1970s Candid Camera interviewed people (outside of New York) and asked them to define a "bagel." One man thought it was part of a German sports car; another claimed it was a musical instrument. A housewife in Portland swore it was an extinct breed of sea bird that her grandparents had once warned her about.
1972 H&H Bagels founded. Their slogan: "Like no other bagel in the world." They have been featured on "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Saturday Night Live," "LA Law," and the film, "You've Got Mail."
1981 (Jan. 15) Teddy Kolleck, mayor of Jerusalem, shared the pulpit, wearing the red robe of an Episcopalian cleric, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. After the service, the Right Reverend James P. Morton, dean of the cathedral, invited the audience of 700 "to an informal reception with loaves and fishes-- otherwise known as bagels and lox." (New York Times, Jan. 16)
l984 Lenders Bagels are bought out by Kraft.
1988 Americans were eating an average of one bagel a month.
1989 Carl Alpert ("The Language of Jews," The Jewish Week, Sept. 15) writes about the influence of Yiddish on English: "Is there anynon-Jew who does not know the words goy, kosher, bagel, or shlep?"
1991 William Safire wrote an article for The New York Times titled, "Bagels vs. Doughnuts." He wrote, "Reaching to an ever-wider audience, the bagel has gone soft and spongy. Although sourdough and caraway and sesame seed were permissable variations, the lust for new markets has turned the flavoring frenetic. The low point was reached with the introduction of the blueberry-bagel - sweet, soft inky- colored and hard to tell from a stale doughnut."
1992 Zelda Shluker (Hadassah Maazine Nov.) wrote, "In New York you don't have to be Jewish to eat bagels, blintzes and knishes; to be a maven on the best delicatessen; to use Moishe's, Sabra's or Shleppers moving companies. Where else in the world can you find a frum female trader on the floor of the Stock Exchange?"
1993 Bagel consumption doubled to an average of one bagel every 2 weeks.
1999 Calvin Trillon (Shouts & Murmurs, The New Yorker, Feb. 12, "Killer Bagels") writes, "I've lived in New York--which is to bagels what Paris is to croissants--for a number of years, and I've never been injured by a bagel. {There are many cases of hand lacerations, cuts, gouges and severed digits by impatient eaters who try to pry apart frozen bagels.] "..in recent years some bakers in New York have been making bagels with some weird ingredients--oat bran, say, and cinnamon, and more air than you'd find in the Speaker of the House--but not dangerously weird."
David M. Bader ("Haikus for Jews") wrote:
Would-be convert lost - thawed Lender's Bagels made a bad first impression.
2000 Rabbi Benjamin Blech explains the Yiddish expression, "Er iz im shuldik di lokh fun beygl." (He owes him nothing. Literally, he owes him the hole in the bagel.)
Leon H. Gildin ("You Can't Do Business (Or Most Anything Else) Without Yiddish") wrote,
By this time, it should be universally known as a Jewish donut; however, I heard that when a Westerner visiting New York was offered a bagel and cream cheese, his only question was: which is the bagel and which is the cream cheese?
Clyde Haberman ("Lowly Bagel, Highly Priced; Nearly a Buck," New York Times) wrote, "The holidays required a stop at H&H, the bagel emporium on the Upper West Side. This produced a discovery that, since the last visit a few weeks earlier, the price of a babel had gone up a dime. It now cost 95 cents...at Zabar's, across the street, bagels sell for only 39 cents each."
2002 In the book, "Meshuggenary" by Stevens, Levine, & Steinmetz, the authors say that "you can find bagels in Bali and Bogota. There are even chocolate-flavored bagels, and, green ones on Saint Patrick's Day...Bagels have been called doughnuts with a college degree."
Cindy Adams (Aug. 3) writes, "And while we're talking aberrations, enough with those skinnymalinks who take a healthy, full-grown flawless perfect lovely bagel and scoop it out. Tear out its insides. What're they planning to do with it, give it an MRI?"
Prof. Barbara Kirshnblatt-Gimblett presented a lecture about the social history of the bagel at Rutgers Univ.
2003 The Health & Nutrition Letter (July) states that a plan bagel from Dunkin' Donuts contains 550 calories and 13.5 grams of saturated fat.
MARC MUSING contained a piece titled, "A Hole-Y Heresy." He wrote, "Some entrepreneurs have had a a modicum of success in marketing a pizza bagel. Purists may one day come to accept the pizza bagel, this half-breed child of two robust, passionate cultures. It may, indeed, more quickly bridge the gap between Rome and Jerusalem than a Papal visit to Miami Beach. Mario Puzo and Philip Roth are collaborating on a position paper."
2004 Alex Witchell wrote a piece (New York Times) about catered brises. It was titled, "Bagels, Lox, Lollipops and Smelling Salts."
2005 Eating a bagel helps 200,000 women who are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. Every time someone purchased a "Pink Ribbon Bagel" at Panera Bread, a donation of 25 cents was made to the Florida Cancer Institute.
The Metropolitan Diary, New York Times, Oct. 10) contained this letter from Dale Burg:
Dear Diary: As she ended our early-morning phone conversation, my friend Gail Furgal said she was going to run across the street to pick up bagels for her houseguests' breakfast.
"Go to H & H," I heard her 23-year- old son, Scott, say in the background.
"I don't have to," Gail replied.
"They're from D.C. They won't know the difference."
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Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe's favorite definition of a bagel: A doughnut with rigor mortis.
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