There are figures of historical significance, like her great grandfather, Sussman Volk, who brought pastrami to the New World, and went on to open New York's first deli. There is Great Uncle Albert, the first man to stir scallions into cream cheese. And her grandfather Jacob, known as "The Most Destructive Force on Wall Street" for his innovative "Upside Down" method of demolition, which cleared the way for the new buildings of Manhattan; E. B. White eulogized him in The New Yorker, noting: "Jake knew that everything that goes up comes down."

Here are affectionate yet clear-eyed accounts of beauties, gamblers, heroes, fatalists and rebels -- the whole smorgasbord of family. Volk's stories add up to a picture of how a family works, how it assimilates, but also how and why some people in families become outcasts. Her book is a quintessential American tale of a family managing to make their way in an alien land.

At its core is Morgen's, the fabulous restaurant the New York Times called "a social center of the garment district, " but which the family called only "the store." How did it start, and how did this immigrant "restaurant family" thrive? With icy nerve, luck, imagination, some "glatt superstition" -- and through the genius of her other grandfather, Herman Morgen, who at sixteen years of age became the first man to carve meat in a window. Over the years Herman would own fourteen "stores" in Manhattan, opening one for anyone in the family who needed a job -- a "restaurateur" before the word was even in parlance.

From skyscrapers todinner tables; from Eastern Europe and the lower Eastside to the Upper West Side and Boca Raton, this is a pungent slice of American history steeped in affection and tenderness -- an unforgettable literary feast.