.....I traveled with an elderly lawyer who told me how, when he was a boy, his mother took him to the tearoom of the Savoy-Plaza for bread-and-butter sandwiches. This seemed to me the apotheosis of gentility.

We enter first a storefront restaurant where
bearded old men in black hats sit quietly
at white marble tables bent
over their newspapers (The Forward)
and from time to time sipping tea
from glasses, tea sweetened with
a cube of sugar held on the tip of the tongue.

Then a passage through the steamy mists
of the kitchen between great black stoves and
cooks perspiring in white aprons
tall white hats bustling among pots
pans skillets meat grilling on fires

The dining room, tables set with white cloths,
flowers in art-noveau vases, seltzer bottles blown from
blue and green glass imported from Czechoslovakia
bowls of sauerkraut and pickled cucumbers green tomatoes.
Greeted by the proprietress, a little woman
with her black haired pulled up into a tight topknot
like a Spanish dueña, and with a flower in it.
An orchid? Yes, let it be an orchid.

Mendel, in his waiter's tuxedo, black bow-tie, a napkin
draped over his arm. My parents nod to friends--
the Ledermans, the Golds.

Sweet wine chicken noodle soup
chopped liver steak on a plank blood running in the grooves,
fried potatoes. For such a meal I could die.
(From such a meal I might die.)

A little orchestra. Fiddle flute balalaika.
The children drink spritzers eat the flowers,
watch the musicians floating in the air, borne on the lilt
of Old World melodies.

................................................................................................Israel Lewis