Death by Pastrami-- In Seventeen Short Bites

In 1955, an English major just out of the University of Michigan was forced to go into the family business, making pajamas in New York City's garment center.

Leonard S. Bernstein wanted to be a writer. But his Dad was ill and Leonard was asked to step in and save Candlestick Pajamas. Sixty years later, the Brooklyn-born Bernstein is back to his first professional passion-- writing short stories from his home in Westbury, Long Island. Now his kids are running the company--with a few new personnel policies.  One is that the sewing machine operators no longer take the subway to work from lower Manhattan, Spanish Harlem and Brooklyn. Now, the Bernstein kids visit them three times a year--in China.

Death by Pastrami is fiction--I guess you could call it historical fiction. Here are seventeen short stories--most based in the Garment Center of yore. Bernstein tells a Fordham University college radio interviewer on WFUV that any of the things that he writes about could have really happened back in Garment's Glory Days----the 1950s through the 1990s.
(You can hear the interview here) 

But there is a lot of magical realism and fantasy in the vein of Isaac Bashevis Singer--as in the title story, where a funeral salesman named Fleishman haunts Jewish delis, seeking future customers who will die of heart attacks.

Here's the hook: 
"Anyone eating a pastrami sandwich in a New York delicatessen is taking his life in his own hands. The smoked pastrami, piled six inches high, defies any digestive system short of a Bengal tiger. The fat content is enough to shut off the arterial system for a month. Blood has as much chance of reaching the heart as a car has of getting through the Lincoln Tunnel on Thanksgiving Day...So instead of camping out at the Blue Horizons Senior Citizen's Home, Fleishman headed for the Criterion Deli, figuring that if people are not dying on the spot they can't have long to go."

There is a story about a beautiful and elegant young Puerto Rican lace stitcher, Elena, a catalyst for both lust and respect in a factory foreman. The story, fittingly is called, "At Home I Would Have Been A Princess."

And there are tales of partnerships gone sour, bar room wagers, and a ragman who steals underwear.

And what of the rags themselves?  The leftover scraps on the garment cutting room floor?
Says Bernstein:
The rags would be sold for paper pulp, eventually recycling themselves on to the front pages of the New York Times. I always had the notion that the very rags that were lying carelessly in the cartons would soon appear before my eyes as a James Reston column.

I am going to buy ten copies of this book to give to friends who remember the time and place that Bernstein writes about.  My uncles "worked garment". Uncle Hy sold beads, Uncle Dave was a presser. Grandpa Willie supervised police and military uniforms.  George's Mom was an office manager at Smith Monograms.

People who remember when the apparel industry was known as the Garment Center--and Seventh Avenue was, well, Seventh Avenue, not Fashion Avenue--will enjoy the collection for the nostalgic value.
People who walk through the area on their way to and from Penn Station might want it for reading during the commute.
Those who love Jewish American fiction will enjoy it too.

Not sure who else this will especially appeal to, but I first learned about the collection from a report by Maureen Corrigan, the book reviewer for National Public Radio.
You can read/hear it here