Bagelising America: How a Polish Jewish Family Changed USA’s Breakfast Scene Forever

fresh-bagels-new-york-photo-melina-mara-washington-post-gettyimages-490603112.jpg, default, Fresh bagels and traditional store bags at Russ & Daughters store in lower Manhattan, New York, Friday, September 18, 2015, photo: Melina Mara / The W, Bagelising America: How a Polish Jewish Family Changed USA’s Breakfast Scene Forever

#polish cuisine

Bagels are so important to New York that mayoral and gubernatorial candidates are always asked about their bagel choice and often scrutinised for it*. They are so important that when a photo of bagels cut into slices instead of crosswise was published on Twitter, the Internet exploded with disgust. Yet possibly not as much as sometime later, when The New York Times stated that the best bagels can actually be found… in California.

*(Bill De Blasio who ordered extra cream cheese and Cynthia Nixon who put lox on a raisin bagel are among those most ridiculed for their orders in recent years).

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Bagel Vintage Neon Sign, photo: iStock / Getty Images

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I won’t go as far as to undermine the primacy of the East Coast when it comes to yeasted dough rings, yet I want to tell the story of how bagels became Bagels with a capital ‘B’; how they went from a local staple in the Lower East Side of New York City, to a must-have breakfast item across the United States (and the world!); how the bagel made its way from a small Central-European town across the pond to the New Country. In other words, of how – as one of the protagonists of this story Murray Lender put it – the ‘bagelisation’ of America occurred and what Poland had to do with it.

The long journey from Siedliszcze to New Haven

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Joyce and Murray Lender, photo: Carl Lender / flickr.com/photos/clender (CC BY 2.0)

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It all started with Hersz (later: Harry) Lender, who was born in Siedliszcze in the region of Lubelszczyzna in 1897, into a poor Jewish family, as one of the seven children of Chaim and Lea Lender. He left home early, soon after his father died, and went to the city of Lublin to start a new life. He ended up helping out in a bakery, and soon opened one of his own together with his new wife Ruchla (later: Rose). It’s impossible to know the exact spot where the bakery was located (Piotr Nazaruk from The Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre association led a little investigation as part of his comprehensive publication about the Lenders which was a major source for this article), but we know what kind of delicious ‘glutenous’ delights he made. According to his children, he made rye bread, bagels, onion and poppy seed buns, similar to bialys (and which are called cebularze in Poland today), and matzah – all of which Rose later sold at the market.

Lublin was a major Jewish cultural centre at the time, with Jewish schools, social institutions, a big public library, a newspaper and an amateur theatre. In the early 1920s, 40% of the city’s population was Jewish and nine different Jewish political parties were active in Lublin. The Lenders had a pretty good life there, and yet, Hersz Lender wanted more. And so, he decided to set out for America.

In 1927, he left his wife and three children behind and travelled to Passaic, New Jersey, where he worked in a bakery as a bagel-maker for a year. He understood you could actually make a buck just selling bagels. When he learned that some bakery owner from Connecticut wanted to sell his place, he bought it for a few hundred dollars and became the proud owner of the New York Bagel Bakery in New Haven – one of the first bakeries outside of New York City dedicated to bagels exclusively. It all went so well he could easily shower his family with dollars – as his son Hymie recalled many years later, they were so well-off at the time, they didn’t really want to leave Lublin, but finally, in 1929 the whole family joined Hersz in the US. Here, the Lenders had three more children – their sons Sam, Murray and Marvin would grow up to be the ones responsible for the family company’s great success.

A revolution which started with a freezer

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Marty Kern, photo: Carl Lender / flickr.com/photos/clender (CC BY 2.0)

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In the 1930s Harry Lender’s bakery earned hundreds of dollars a week; Marvin recalled that when he was a little boy, on Saturdays the whole family worked all night, so that handmade, crispy bagels could be hung on twines or put into baskets and sold in the shop on Sunday morning. Their dough’s consistency slightly changed in the fifties, when Lenders started packaging their bagels in plastic bags, so they could be sold in supermarkets, delivered to delicatessens and sandwich shops. This change did have its consequences when it came to the whole business model – and to be fair, probably to the quality of the bagels as well. Yet the biggest revolution began a bit later, thanks to a purchase made by Rose.

One day aunt Rose bough a two-door fridge with a freezer on top – recalls Esther Kreisman – and uncle Harry started thinking about how to use freezing. At the time, bagels were a typical Sunday treat, so most of the week they had nothing to do. Harry started experimenting. At first, he froze the dough, then raw bagels, finally he realized freezing already baked bagels gave the best results. But nobody was to know about it, since everyone wanted to eat fresh ones.

It was only after Harry’s death in 1960 that his sons Sam, Murray and Marvin, raised on American soil, and very well-versed in how the American market worked – turned a local family bakery into a gigantic, industrial bagel production company. They decided to invest in the mass-production of frozen bagels, therefore significantly expanding their bagel-dom. They got together with inventor Daniel Thompson, who patented the first bagel machine, which could produce four hundred bagels an hour. And, what’s equally as important, they understood the power of marketing.

‘Hello, bagel lovers!’

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Lender's Bagel Commercial 3

In their animated ads the Lender brothers were turned into cartoon characters who joked around and praised the quality of their family-produced bagels, now available in freezers all around America. In other advertisements, it was Murray Lender who became the ‘face’ of the operation.

Possibly the most difficult people to impress with frozen bagels in plastic bags were New Yorkers used to hot, fresh ones from their local Jewish delis, yet the Lender brothers didn’t give up on that market either. On the contrary, some of their early marketing campaigns were addressed specifically to the NYC public, such as this one, which jokingly referred to stereotypes about some of the city inhabitants, and was shown in the New York subway:

Lender’s bagels became quite a big a hit even there, because they were convenient and came at a perfect time, when the kitchens of American middle class were being transformed thanks to an increasing amount of modern equipment such as freezers, where bagels could be stored, and microwaves and toasters where they could be reheated. Even some picky Jewish mothers bought them to eat throughout during week or keep them just in case, while on Sundays they still went to their local bakeries to get fresh ones.

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Lender's Bagel & Philadelpha Brand

As with most family-owned brands surprised by their own success, Lender’s did not remain in the hands of Lender brothers, but it was sold to a bigger player: Kraft Foods. In 1984, when this took place, a new campaign was launched which showed the ‘marriage’ between bagels and another celebrated Kraft product – Philadelphia cream cheese. Since 2003 the Lenders’ Bagels brand has been a part of the portfolio of Pinnacle Foods.

The good, the bad & the raisin

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Lender Men Commercial Cells, photo: Carl Lender / flickr.com/photos/clender (CC BY 2.0)

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What the Lenders did was pretty amazing: they took a food item which – if known at all – was generally viewed as ‘ethnic’ at the time, which was baked in small batches, mostly in family-owned bakeries in just one part of America and, cleverly taking advantage of modern inventions, they turned it into a treat for the masses. And earned a fortune in the process.

Looking at it from a modern, big-city perspective, it is easy to see them as villains: frozen, mass-produced, plastic-wrapped can’t be good, right? And the quality must have suffered: in 1994 Eric Asimov wrote in The New York Times, that there is something he called a Lender’s Line: ‘an informal border between those who eat supermarket bagels and those who know better’. In his aforementioned article Piotr Nazaruk quotes his New York friends saying they would never ever eat frozen bagels, ‘clearly designed for goys’.

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Lender's Sales Award by Willy Evans, photo: Carl Lender / flickr.com/photos/clender (CC BY 2.0)

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Yet it’s hard not to see the Lenders’ genius: the idea of convincing the non-Jewish world that bagels were a good alternative to toast, English muffins or baguettes was a simple, yet daring one (or, as their friend and coworker Barry Ansel said in the Washington Post: it was ‘full of chutzpah’). Also, Lenders’ bagels were the only bagels many Americans had access to; in a country of ‘food deserts’ there is some snobbery in saying only fresh, artisanal breads are worth eating. And even if traditionalists still complain about their inventions such as the infamous raisin bagel (the one that caused so much trouble to Cynthia Nixon), there is something brilliant in taking cinnamon and raisins – ingredients used in German and Austrian breakfast breads – putting them in a bagel and convincing immigrants from those parts of Europe that from now on this should be their favourite breakfast treat.

It’s hard to imagine a better personification of the American dream or the ‘rags to riches’ myth than Hersz Lender, who from a poor little Polish village went on to grow a big business in the American ‘promised land’. Yet even though he was self-made, he wasn’t alone: he worshipped his wife, who not only gave him children, but with her ideas, her hard work and her freezer helped him evolve his company; and from the get-go he involved his children in the family business, which led Murray, Marvin and Sam to achieve their grand goal: they really ‘bagelised America’.

Written by Natalia Mętrak-Ruda, June 2021

Language English

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