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Alan Kaufman has not met a vegetable he wouldn’t like to pickle. In his shop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, surrounded by dozens of barrels filled with everything from button mushrooms to pineapple, The larger-than-life owner of The Pickle Guys is trying to keep the ways of Old New York alive. His is the last kosher pickle store in an area that once had so many it was nicknamed the ‘pickle district.

’ His store is old school, he banters with customers who’ve been coming in for years, giving them tasters of his newer pickles before packing them the same thing they buy every time. The store is in an area that was once very Jewish. As new immigrants from Eastern Europe arrived on Ellis Island, they made their way up the island of Manhattan, finding an unloved spot where there were plenty of cheap apartments.



With them they brought little pieces of the Old Country, which for many, was pickles. It's a story that’s a foundational part of New York’s Jewish history, and which helped make pickles as essential a part of the Jewish diet as the pastrami (salt beef) sandwich or knish. Over the last 100 years, many of these Jews assimilated, married out and left the busy dirty streets of Lower Manhattan for the suburbs.

Now, like many of the old Jewish areas of New York, the Lower East Side has been gentrified beyond the point of parody, with $10 artisanal rice pudding and fancy trinket stores. But on the corner of Grand and Essex, just down the street from Katz’s deli, .

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