Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

About 1890 Yonah Schimmel, a Jewish immigrant and part-time Hebrew teacher, used a pushcart to start his knish bakery on the Lower East Side, New York's traditional home to new immigrants.¹ When business expanded, Yonah and his cousin, Joseph Berger, rented a small store on Houston Street. Two years later Yonah returned to teaching Hebrew, while Joseph and his wife (Yonah's daughter, Rose) took over the business, retaining the original name. In 1910 the Bergers moved the business to the opposite side of Houston Street, where it remains to this day, still under the family's management.² It is as much a landmark as an eatery and has frequently been an artist's subject.

Hedy Pagremanski has carefully rendered details of modern-day -and probably traditional -tenement life: a stick propping open the third-story window, tenants' use of the fire escapes as a balcony, and plants flourishing in window boxes. She has also portrayed the diverse population of the area. The clusters of young and old, white and non-white gathered around Yonah Schimmel's implies that the knish, a specialty of Eastern European Jews, has, like other ethnic foods, permeated the diets of many immigrant groups. Her accuracy extends even to copying the name Shimmel as it appears on the shop sign, misspelled by a sign painter who did not know the correct spelling, Schimmel.

As in many of Hedy Pagremanski's works, the figures here are portraits of actual New Yorkers who live or work in the setting. Incorporating these likenesses is as important to the artist's sense of realism as are her detailed renderings of the founder's portrait, visible in the extreme right window of the shop, and the sign of the adjacent monument maker, out of business since the mid-1980s.

Notes:

1 Traditional knishes consist of boiled buckwheat groats or mashed potatoes wrapped with dough, then baked and served hot. Today knishes have an amazing variety of fillings, such as broccoli, spinach, and cheese.

2 Information about the founding of the business and the family's continued role in it come from a letter from the artist to the curator, Museum Archives, and from a telephone conversation in December 1994 with Mrs. Lillian Berger (now retired), Yonah's granddaughter and the third generation of the family to run the business.


Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery 1976 Hedy Pagremanski (b. 1929) Oil on canvas, 32 1/8 X 22 1/8 Signed lower left: © H.Pagremanski 1976 Inscribed lower right: Houston Street, New York City Gift of the artist, 79.50
About 1890 Yonah Schimmel, a Jewish immigrant and part-time Hebrew teacher, used a pushcart to start his knish bakery on the Lower East Side, New York's traditional home to new immigrants.¹ When business expanded, Yonah and his cousin, Joseph Berger, rented a small store on Houston Street. Two years later Yonah returned to teaching Hebrew, while Joseph and his wife (Yonah's daughter, Rose) took over the business, retaining the original name. In 1910 the Bergers moved the business to the opposite side of Houston Street, where it remains to this day, still under the family's management.² It is as much a landmark as an eatery and has frequently been an artist's subject. Hedy Pagremanski has carefully rendered details of modern-day -and probably traditional -tenement life: a stick propping open the third-story window, tenants' use of the fire escapes as a balcony, and plants flourishing in window boxes. She has also portrayed the diverse population of the area. The clusters of young and old, white and non-white gathered around Yonah Schimmel's implies that the knish, a specialty of Eastern European Jews, has, like other ethnic foods, permeated the diets of many immigrant groups. Her accuracy extends even to copying the name Shimmel as it appears on the shop sign, misspelled by a sign painter who did not know the correct spelling, Schimmel. As in many of Hedy Pagremanski's works, the figures here are portraits of actual New Yorkers who live or work in the setting. Incorporating these likenesses is as important to the artist's sense of realism as are her detailed renderings of the founder's portrait, visible in the extreme right window of the shop, and the sign of the adjacent monument maker, out of business since the mid-1980s. Notes: 1 Traditional knishes consist of boiled buckwheat groats or mashed potatoes wrapped with dough, then baked and served hot. Today knishes have an amazing variety of fillings, such as broccoli, spinach, and cheese. 2 Information about the founding of the business and the family's continued role in it come from a letter from the artist to the curator, Museum Archives, and from a telephone conversation in December 1994 with Mrs. Lillian Berger (now retired), Yonah's granddaughter and the third generation of the family to run the business.