December 22, 2014 — Anne Rothstein stared through the counter glass, transfixed, as the knife slid through the fleshy pink salmon.
“Amazing,” Rothstein said to herself. “You are amazing.”
The subject of Rothstein’s praise, Len Berk, kept his eyes on the knife as it slid through the fish.
Berk, 84, is the last Jewish fish slicer at Zabar’s, the iconic delicatessen on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Dressed in a white apron and a beige Zabar’s baseball cap, Berk sliced a broad strip off a side of Nova and cut it lengthwise into two translucent pieces. Then he lowered the glistening fish onto a piece of parchment.
“It was so thin, you could read through it,” Rothstein told the Forward.
Before Berk sliced salmon, he crunched numbers.
He was a chartered public accountant his whole working life. He only started working at Zabar’s when he was 65.
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