Some say that when the infamous Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky — born Lev Bronstein — lived in the Bronx at the beginning of the last century, he worked as a dishwasher in a beloved kosher eatery, Hyman Trotzky’s restaurant. According to one legend, the Bolshevik even adopted the famous restaurateur’s name because he loved his food so much. There were also rumors that the two men were related.

When asked about the familial connection, Hyman Trotzky once responded: “Bah! That fellow, his name isn’t even Trotzky. His name is Bronstein. When he lived in New York in 1917, he used to come here to eat. He liked my kosher dishes. He came often. He found that I was honest and respected… This Bronstein knows he is not trusted and wants to be respected, so he borrows my name. Bronstein calls himself Trotzky. What shall I do? Change my name every time someone takes mine? Bolshevik? Bah! How can an Orthodox Jew be a Bolshevik?”

While assertions of any meaningful connection between the two men have been debunked, the all but forgotten story of Hyman Trotzky and his restaurant is far more interesting than any tangential relationship he may have had with a controversial Soviet political theorist.

Like many, Hyman Trotzky immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century, working as a peddler before opening a humble cafe and later a legendary kosher eatery. He established the latter in the Broadway Central Hotel, which at one point had been the world’s most expensive hostelry, a meeting place for some of the era’s most well-known figures, including Mark Twain. It was also the place where baseball’s National League was officially established in 1876.

Yet with its heyday behind it, Trotzky was able to set up shop in the hotel, making it the “heimeshe” version of what it once was. If it previously served as a meeting place for the who’s who of mainstream America, Trotzky made it that for Jewish America — a place where the likes of Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt and Rabbi Meyer “Max” Manischewitz (yes, that Manischewitz) would kibbitz over some strictly kosher fare.

Ultimately, Trotzky would be muscled out of the premises by Manischewitz, who would transform the Broadway Central into America’s first luxury kosher hotel.

Trotzky, Rosenblatt and Manischewitz are a few of the colorful characters Henry H. Sapoznik introduces to his readers in his recently published book, “The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City.” The Broadway Central Hotel is just one of many sites he explores, and the pastrami presumably eaten by those men at Trotzky’s is just one small taste of food once enjoyed by the millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews who lived in New York about a century ago.

As its name implies, the guide is by no means run-of-the-mill. In fact, it would be hard to define it as much of a tourist guide at all. Many of the buildings and sites mentioned in it have not existed for decades. The people highlighted are largely forgotten, as is the language in which they conversed and lived.

Yet it presents a fascinating study not just for those interested in New York City history, but also, much more broadly, those who would like to better understand the foundations for much of what became the “mainstream” American Jewish experience over the last century and a half, from Dr. Brown’s to Al Jolson and much in between.

Since the 1970s, few have done more than Sapoznik to shed light on various facets of Yiddish culture and history. Sapoznik, a native Yiddish speaker himself, is an accomplished klezmer musician and renowned expert on Black cantors, among other things. For more than a decade, he served as the founding director of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. As a Grammy-nominated performer and producer and the founder of multiple Yiddish arts and culture organizations, including KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program and Living Traditions, he has managed to both help preserve and disseminate cultural elements that might otherwise be lost to history.

The Times of Israel recently interviewed Sapoznik about his latest book, which hit shelves in July, as well as the significance that a world so seemingly lost and distant holds for readers today.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

The Times of Israel: You are the child of Holocaust survivors, a prolific historian and a native Yiddish speaker. In the introduction, you mention the bloody October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion of Israel and skyrocketing antisemitism in the United States and worldwide, wondering if you “have written a book about one lost Jewish world on the eve of another.” Are you able to point to a specific element of your identity, personal experience or studies that led you to write this book specifically at this point in time?

Henry H. Sapoznik: I didn’t choose the time so much as the time chose me. By COVID, my work as a performing musician had slowed down, and I wanted another creative cultural outlet, so a friend built me a website and I started a blog. The first entry in 2020, on my recent discovery of a 78 rpm recording of Black cantor Thomas LaRue Jones for which I had been searching for 40 years, netted nearly 70,000 hits, a half dozen follow-up blog entries and a BBC documentary. My way was clear.

Subsequent blog entries, newspaper features and a series of lectures led me into areas of Jewish life about which I’d long been interested (food, architecture, film, crime, etc.) but about which I had never before written. In 2022, a friend who was acquisitions editor at a small academic press invited me to anthologize and expand these earlier essays and write new ones. About the time I was finishing one of the last edits, October 7 happened, putting my work in a radically different historical and cultural contextual light. It........

© The Times of Israel