Power Lunch With Deli Cartoonist Provides Some Tasty Conversation

You ask: Are there fringe benefits to your job?

I answer: Yes.

Take the other day.

I’m on company time, and I’m at D.Z. Akin’s Restaurant & Deli, just east of San Diego State.

I’m consuming a huge bratwurst swaddled in enough sauerkraut to stuff a mattress. I’m talking with Ivan Goldstein, whose cartoons adorn the walls of D.Z. Akin’s and the pages of the San Diego Jewish Times.

Goldstein, 67, was born and reared in Denver and ran a graphic design and printing business for 30 years. Inside, the soul of a cartoonist struggled to emerge.

Then he retired and moved to Israel in 1983. Suddenly he was doing a thrice-weekly strip called “Nate’s Deli” for the Jerusalem Post and several Jewish newspapers in the United States.

The cartoons caught the eye of Debi Akin, co-owner of D.Z. Akin’s: “I said to myself, ‘This is a man who understands the restaurant business.’ ”

Akin acquired some Goldstein originals, which are now framed and displayed like big-money Picassos.

The strip pokes at the stereotypical characters of the Jewish deli: the frustrated diners, the sarcastic waiters, Irving the philosopher, Feldman the businessman.

Diner: “What kind of roast chicken did you bring me? One leg is shorter than the other.”

Waiter: “Did you come here to eat the chicken or dance with it?”

Sometimes, though, the diner eats the upper hand.

Diner, waiting for his food: “What’s my offense?”

Waiter: “What do you mean?”

Diner: “You’ve had me on bread and water for the past 30 minutes.”

Other strips are reworked vaudeville gags.

Woman: “Whenever I’m down in the dumps, I get myself a new hat.”

Friend: “I was wondering where you got them.”

Goldstein lives six months in Jerusalem, six in Denver (there are grandchildren in each venue). In Israel, he plays golf at a course with Roman ruins in the rough.

He does his cartooning in bursts, sometimes eight or 10 strips at a stretch. He is a happy man.

I’d give you a bunch of quotes to back this up, but frankly I was too busy with the bratwurst to take notes.

Howard Jarvis Kin She Isn’t

Seeing is believing.

* The late tax-curmudgeon Howard Jarvis and Republican congressional hopeful Judy Jarvis are not related.

But that hasn’t stopped Judy from plastering a picture of old Howard on one of her campaign mailers in the 49th District under the headline: “Howard Jarvis and Judy Jarvis Fighting for California’s Taxpayers.

The mailer does not explain that they are not family.

“I didn’t make any claim (to kinship),” says Judy. “I quoted him. I wanted to use his paragraph because it reflects how I feel about the budget and mobilizing voters.”

* Alexander Frish, the onetime Moscow Circus clown and ringmaster who was a headliner at San Diego’s Soviet Arts Festival in 1989, has just been granted an immigrant visa by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, making him eligible for permanent residency.

Among those petitioning the INS on behalf of Frish was Mayor Maureen O’Connor.

Frish, 40, now living in New York, was approved for the much-sought-after immigrant visa under a new INS category for “extraordinary performers.” He hopes to join an American circus.

* The Rolling Stones film at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater has attracted an older and more affluent crowd than officials expected.

An extra security guard has had to be hired to keep prowlers away from all the BMWs and Jaguars.

Ferreting Out the Facts

* Your government at work.

The Assembly last week passed a bill introduced by Mike Gotch (D-San Diego) to ban evidence derived from live-animal experiments from being used in motor-vehicle liability suits.

The bill is aimed at General Motors, which has used dogs, pigs, and ferrets in crash tests.

The bill’s passage is politically propitious for Gotch: One of his election opponents, Libertarian Pat Wright, is running on a platform that Gotch is anti-ferret.

* Steve Barto swears he saw a man on Prospect Street in La Jolla pouring water from an Evian bottle into the radiator of a BMW. I want to believe him.