So, you take the F train to Second Avenue and walk east on Houston Street. Keep walking. In time, you will reach a narrow-ish Manhattan food shop that, if you’re not careful, could turn you into a wide-ish person. Above the door, RUSS & DAUGHTERS APPETIZERS glistens in ’50s neon, flanked quotation-mark-style by two fish, as if to say, “Walk no farther. This is the real deal.”
Enter, and behold: Herring of customer Oliver Sacks’s giddiest imaginings. Smoked salmon that has beckoned bellies from Zero Mostel to Meyer Lansky. Little mountains of dried Turkish figs so plump and moist, you would swear they were just plucked from a dried fig tree. And a daunting array of caviar that tastes “as if the sea has kissed your tongue.”
Comments
What is so important about this story that it warrants a review in a major newspaper? Guthrie was a strong supporter of Josef Stalin. You remember Old Country Joe? He's the one that mass murdered more people than Adolph Hitler! What a jolly good time living under Old Joe was! Just ask the Poles, the Ukrainians and many others that lived under his Socialist Utopia!
But we were safe in our beds 8000 miles away, so his reign looked great to many "useful idiots" - as Lenin called his supporters in the West - in the abstract.
Guthrie was a real tough guy too. He used to travel around this country freely - which one couldn't do if he was in Russia - and had a sticker on his guitar that said "this machine kills fascists!" Was he delusional or what? Oh, I forgot. His “heart was in the right place and he was concerned about his fellow man and he spoke truth to power”
I think this comment is in the wrong place.