Slices of My Life

Last week the pizza king Dom DeMarco of Di Fara Pizza died at the age of 85. Maybe you never heard of him, but here in NYC he was a legend, his Brooklyn pizzeria consistently ranked among the best, if not the best in the New York City area. I knew Dom. His was the first pizza I ate after I moved to New York thirty-plus years ago. His pizzeria on Avenue J was around the corner from where I lived at the time. It was 1983. I’d just moved to New York. I was poor and couldn’t afford Manhattan rents, so I’d rented a place deep in the heart of Brooklyn, in the then primarily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Midwood. Mine was the second-floor apartment in a two-family house owned by a rabbi and his wife, Ralph and Faigie.

Faigie went on to become one of my closest friends. Me, a Catholic girl from California who’d had little experience with other cultures before I came to the Melting Pot that is NYC. After I got to know her, Faigie confided that none of her friends understood why she’d rented to a “goy.” I’m not sure she understood, either. We couldn’t have been more different. Faigie’s parents were Holocaust survivors. I grew up in a world far removed from such horrors. Yet we hit it off. Turned out we had more in common than not. Faigie was quick to smile and slow to frown, accepting of others and not one to judge. Faigie’s children were the same ages as my children and they used to play together. We became the family’s Shabbos goys, meaning we were on hand to turn off any light fixtures that had been accidentally left on in their apartment on the Sabbath, which is a day of rest for Orthodox Jews in the strictest sense. Faigie watched my children whenever I had to leave them to go into the city for work, an hour’s subway trip. (I was involved in the launching of the Sweet Valley High series then.)

Later I immortalized that experience in my novel Such Devoted Sisters. Faigie was the inspiration for my character Rivka. She loved the book. Her one complaint was “Did you have to give me nine kids?”

Before I’d moved into my new place, I had spent the day cleaning in readiness. I hadn’t eaten all day by the time I finished scrubbing the last baseboard and mopping the floor. I was starving. I went out to get something to eat and there it was, Di Fara Pizza, the lone outpost in a sea of kosher eateries in the neighborhood. I went inside. Behind the counter was this unassuming middle-aged Italian man rolling out pizza dough, his arms dusted in flour to his elbows, the enticing smile of pizza baking wafting from his gas oven. On the windowsill behind his work station grew herbs in pots. He greeted me pleasantly and I placed my order. I’d long heard tell of New York’s famous pizzas. After I took one bite of my slice, I got what all the hype was about. It was delicious, one of the single best bites of food I’d ever eaten in my life. Partly because I was so hungry and partly because Di Fara’s really was one of the best slices in New York, though I hadn’t known it then—I naively thought all New York pizzerias were more or less created equal.

I became a regular customer before I moved to Manhattan a year later, and made frequent pilgrimages to Di Fara Pizza in subsequent years. I never found another pizzeria like it anywhere else.

Faigie passed away some years ago from breast cancer. I lost a dear friend in her.

Mr. DeMarco wasn’t what I would call a friend, but I remember him fondly all the same.

They both represent slices of my life.