K-never fear, k-nishes here

Not that you would call him svelte. By any means. But I ask Mitch Lipkin, 60 now, hasn't he lost some weight? "I lose some. I find some," he shrugs.

He is leaning over the counter at Lipkin's Bakery (est. 1975, "before the Bicentennial"), at Castor and Rhawn, which is to say the deep Northeast, the streetscape tending to workaday two-story storefronts, or lower.

A Pizza Hut sign looms at the corner, hogging the view. Such as it is.

It has been 14 years now since I talked to him at any length. And he has those same gently weary eyes, that same last-of-the-Mohicans shtick, that same pride of baking for the regulars in the neighborhood: "We get people in here three times a week."

Behind him are racks of trays fresh from the back bake shop - Danish twists, still glossy from the oven, and butter cakes, still runny before they've set up, and formidable tea biscuits, and too-warm-to-slice-at-first Jewish rye.

But mostly - and this is what Lipkin's Bakery is known for - there are the knishes (yes, you pronounce the "k"), about 2,000 baked daily - full-size round ones, unlike the blockier fellas from New York, and the big-selling minis, the size of mildly flattened pool balls.

They are part dumpling, part turnover, the Yiddish-Eastern European equivalent of the Venezuelan empanada, the Indian samosa, the Italian calzone. And given their humble origins, it is no surprise that it is the potato with grated onion that remains the favored rendition. (Though a pizza variety has joined the best-sellers, along with a moist kasha one, a nice spinach one that's best eaten warm, a mock liver, a rice, a cheese, and in season, a pumpkin.)

This is one of the last - Lipkin suspects it is the last - of the knisheries in the city.

And it is for these staples of Jewish knoshery that they traipse in (not only from Rhawnhurst, but from Richboro, too, and Rittenhouse Square and Allentown, even) to Lipkin's, "Home of Mitch's Delicious Knishes." In the case of the older set, they may drop in daily. More weight-conscious, though no less culturally tethered, younger customers may show up weekly to stock after-services Sabbath trays or, on occasion, holiday platters.

So an air of crisis and anxiety swept through the community and beyond in April when - while Lipkin's was closed for Passover - a television monitor overheated, lit some decorations, and sent flames shooting into the ceiling, shutting the bakery down. It was a day, as Lipkin put it last week, "that will live infamy."

This infamy, who needed it? Regulars were reduced to doing things they are not proud of. At the counter, one turns away as she tells me that she asked her daughter to bring down knishes from New York. Delis offering knishes of uncertain parentage were patronized. Some were procured, and not with any sense of joy or expectation, from stock in supermarkets.

Suspense morphed into something approaching panic as this fall's High Holidays approached. Workmen were still working on the place. But shortly after Labor Day, the ovens were fired up again, the dough extruded from the knish-stuffing machine, and the holiday run of knishes was ramped up; some days 10,000 were coming off the conveyor line.

The retail space is filled with product now - knishes lined up like toy soldiers, ryes like heavy guns. But it needs a little warming up: Walls once as busy as a Dr. Bronner's label are now faced in sterile food-grade white board.

That faint whiff of smoke? Not to worry. It's Lipkin's cigar, smoldering on an ashtray ledge just beyond the back shop's silver swinging door.

8013 Castor Ave.

215-342-3005

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