New York Bagels

The bread most emblematic of the Polish Jewish bakery is also one of the least available in modern Poland. A food that thrived in twentieth century New York, it all but disappeared in postwar, post-Shoah Poland. But the bagel in Poland once formed its own economy. The bagel baker was a special, lower class of baker, separate from the general bakeries, both in Poland and New York City. Often renting out the filthy basements of bakeries, bagel bakers in Poland wholesaled to peddlers, who in t