Wrapped in a pita

Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times - Reem sells more than 5,000 sandwiches a day for about $1 apiece, drawing crowds from all social strata every day

Customers waited for a shawarma sandwich at the Reem shawarma stand in Amman, Jordan.

If you were to slow everything down, this is what you would see: scoop of sauce, pinch of onions, scoop of tomatoes, shovel in some meat, roll it all up in a pita.


But who has time to slow down? The crowds are always pressed up against the gate — in the searing heat of a Jordan summer day or the desert chill of a cold winter night — outside Reem, a hole-in-the wall takeout place with a reputation for the best beef and lamb shawarma sandwiches in the Middle East.


Shawarma is marinated meat grilled on an upright skewer, then shaved off in bits and rolled in a pita. It looks like a Greek gyro.


Behind the counter, Alaa Abdel Fattah flies through ingredients, rocking at the waist, with the focus and precision of an athlete. He assembles sandwiches in a blur. Four seconds each. “You get used to it,” he says, pausing for a moment to wipe sweat from his brow. And then back at it because the crowds never let up.

I like my gyro. The place in Hewlett makes a really good one, hearty, with an immense serving of lettuce, some clerey, a couple of slices of tomato and a few of red onion included. I get a side of yogurt on the side, and am good to go.

Jordanians acknowledge that shawarma was originally imported, probably from Turkey, maybe from Greece, but it has clearly become a local food, having been adapted to native tastes and customs.

Reem has buzz.

It was founded in 1976 by Ahmed Ali Bani Hammad, who had worked as a cook in Lebanon, which is known for the best, freshest cuisine in the region. He returned home and opened his own shop. It is narrow, just wide enough for a cashier, two upright gas ovens to cook the meat, and an assembly of eight young men who cook, cut and serve nonstop.


Little has changed since he opened the place, except that now his sons, Sammer and Khalid, run the business. They drive around the city in a Porsche Cayenne and dress in expensive leather jackets.


“You make good money with shawarma?”


“Yes we do,” said Sammer Bani Hammad, the eldest son, laughing. He inherited the most important family responsibility when his father died five years ago.

5,000 bucks a day is very good money, anywhere.

Reem goes through more than 1,000 pounds of meat a day.

Cleavage and Bulge

from today's NYT's Arts section; notice the bulge. Now, let me compare the bulge and the cleavage. [the Merkel picture has this caption in Der Spiegel: Merkel was joined by other persons of note including Norway's Crown Prince Haakon (right), his wife Mette-Marit (second from left) and Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria (left).]

Black and White: Obama in PA

This is a fascinating article. It's nicely written, and it makes some interesting points. Levittown, PA is near Trenton, NJ (9 miles), not many miles (23) northeast of Philly. Working class, thirty, forty years ago it had a plethora of industrial jobs: steel, 3M, Thiokol. Now there are less than 100 workers at the steel plant.

I was focused primarily on Levittown’s response to Obama. Here, after all, was a place that needed a big change, a new dream, which for many voters Obama — with his mixed race, international background, inspiring life story and his soaring rhetoric — represents.

The writer used to be a reporter in Philadelphia. He writes that this Levittown shared characteristics with the Levittown on Long Island.

"...on matters of race Levittown has a particularly shameful history. It was billed as “the most perfectly planned community in America,” and part of the plan was for it to be whites-only: 5,500 acres, stretching across three Pennsylvania townships and one borough, closed off to blacks."

So there is a lot of work to do in a community such as this one.
Meetings of Obama volunteers begin with what his professional field organizers call “relationship building.” Everyone talks about what brought them together and what they have in common, which, of course, is Obama.

The belief in Obama is fascinating: these people believe in Obama, and don't just support him. Of course, it is easy to understand the same is true for Hillary: some people believe in her.

Annunziata [a former politician who had once been council president in Bristol Township, one of Levittown’s four municipalities] had been a motel manager but is not currently working. He thought Obama needed to “touch people in the wallet” in Levittown, but he was not primarily attracted by detailed campaign proposals. At times, he sounded almost mesmerized. The very challenge that Obama faced in Levittown and similar places — winning the hearts and votes of people who may never have dreamed they would vote for a black man for president — is part of what entices Annunziata. “When he won Iowa, it touched my soul,” he said. “I was very emotional. I felt like we were moving toward what this country should be.”

The writer of the article, Michael Sokolove, writes: My parents moved to Levittown in 1955 from their one-bedroom Philadelphia apartment, even though my father’s first impression of the new suburb was distinctly negative. But Levittown was what my parents could afford.

He was born in 1956.

There were a few small black neighborhoods on the fringes of town, non-Levitt-built houses, and their children attended our schools, but not comfortably. Periodically, brawls broke out between white and black students, and I spent parts of my high-school years with police and police dogs stationed in our corridors to keep the races apart. The word “nigger” rolled off the tongues of many of my classmates, and sometimes I would object, which had no effect other than to give me an adolescent’s fleeting sense of superiority. I felt of Levittown — and apart from it. I was always among just a small handful of Jewish kids at my schools, and my father was the rare college-educated person on our side of town.

Here is a curious anecdote; I'm amazed by it. “I like him — how do you say his name?” Carol Bianchini, a home health aide, said. “I like how he presents himself. I don’t think he’s for the black community or the white community. I think he’s for everyone. And I don’t like Hillary. I don’t like the way she talks to him. He looks so sad when she does that. He’s my guy.”

That is such an integral part of my own feelings, but I never thought of it this way. Or this: Colin Radicke, who is 23 and works in the produce section at a supermarket, signed up to vote as a Democrat, telling one volunteer, “I want to get out of Iraq.” As for his candidate, he said, “I think I would go with Obama.”

His candidacy is resonating with many people, many for their own peculiar, particular reasons. That is why I found Juan Williams's op-ed piece in yesterday's WSJ so objectionable: he parsed the electorate in cliched ways.

Some folks are charged up: Michael Branigan came to the door with his young son, whom he is raising alone after the death of his wife. He seemed just about euphoric when told that he could change his registration right on the spot. he said, referring to a black man’s being a serious contender for the presidency. “It’s, like, futuristic. By the time this came, I thought I’d be flying around in a spaceship or driving in some kind of little Jetsons vehicle.”

Others are not ... yet: When the canvassers came to the door of Harry Berko, a union electrician and former employee at the steel mill, they got a more grounded response, although friendly enough. He said he was “doing good” and making a decent living, but he added: “We need change. We need to end the war. We need better jobs.” He was already a Democrat and did not reveal whom he favored. As they walked off, he called out to them, “Good luck to yas.”

The reality is stark, mundane, and challenging, in Pennsylvania, and across the land.

Levittown is whiter, older and less educated than the rest of the nation — and Pennsylvania is made up of many Levittowns. The Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, said in February that some in his state were “probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate,” a remark that many would accept as self-evident but that nonetheless earned him sharp criticism. Rendell and most of the state’s Democratic establishment support Clinton, although Senator Bob Casey, a socially conservative, anti-abortion Democrat, endorsed Obama late last month just as Obama began a six-day bus tour across the state.

Reagan democrats, they're called. Rendell said something not politically correct, but accurate. Yet Casey threw an unforeseen complication into what was long considered the inevitability of Clinton's win.

“Pennsylvania is like a home game for Hillary,” Oxman [a political consultant in Philadelphia and may know Pennsylvania better than any political professional] told me. “In places like Levittown, he was cutting into her demographic. The blue-collar males were available to him partly because they did not like her. But about four or five days before the Ohio and Texas primaries, she turned the election from a referendum on change to a referendum on experience, and he lost them.”

Oxman adds maybe two thirds of 200,000 newly registered voters are in the Obama camp, yet needs to change back the focus of the campaign from experience to change.

Obama’s most important ally in the Levittown area is the first-term congressman Patrick Murphy, the son of a Philadelphia cop, an Iraq war veteran and a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of self-identified Democratic moderates and conservatives. Murphy, who is 34, says he believes that Obama offers the best chance for quickly ending the American involvement in Iraq, which he fervently opposes. He told me, “Barack Obama is going to win Levittown.” I asked him if he really believed that. “Yes, I do,” he said. “He will win it.”

That would be a big victory. Sokolove ends his story on a personal note: I remember my hometown as a place that craved the familiar. The normal. Its racism was hard-edged and overt. Like everywhere in America, it is more tolerant than it once was, but still, Obama’s differences probably do not help him in Levittown. The question that remains is how much they hurt him.

Art of kiss-kiss

This should be a campaign poster.