last word
Philip Korshak
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
O n the one morning each week
when Philip Korshak was not
running his bar on the East
Side of New York, and his wife had a
day away from her CNN editing bay,
they spent their mornings the same
way: Korshak would stop at Bergen
Bagels in Flatbush and pick up two
bagel sandwiches, a coffee and a copy
of the Sunday paper.

When job burnout prompted a move
to Austin, Texas — a bagel desert —
Korshak needed to find a way to revive
his and his wife’s tradition.

“I’m a romantic human, and I was
unwilling to give up the thing that was
important to us,” Korshak said. “And
so I looked at her and I said, “OK, so,
I’ll learn how to make bagels.”
A long stint as a pizzaiolo at a New
York-style pizza place in Austin gave
Korshak his baking chops, and a new
home in South Philadelphia three years
ago gave him a clean slate and bedrock
for Korshak Bagels, where he could
purvey bagels to far more folks than
just his wife. The shop celebrated its
first birthday earlier this month.

Through his bagel shop, Korshak’s goal
is to “manifest joy” through a fresh take
on a humble Eastern European bread,
using sourdough starter “Helen Mirren”
and locally sourced ingredients.

Though born to a Jewish father
(and parents married by a rabbi), the
49-year-old does not consider himself
religious. Yet he abides by a dogma that
can’t be considered anything less than
spiritual: “Every bagel is a love story.”
Korshak’s temple is the shop at
10th and Morris streets in South
Philadelphia, where he slings tried-
and-true schmear-and-lox bagel sand-
wiches and reinvents the wheel with
cheesy Cooper Sharp long hot bagels
and homemade jams, including a
clementine jam made with dates and
Sichuan peppercorns.

A self-proclaimed “recovering aca-
demic,” Korshak posts poems for his
32 MAY 26, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Philip Korshak opened his eponymous bagel shop in South Philly in May 2021.

Korshak bagels features traditional bagels, but also eccentric alternatives, such
as blue cheese and French toast bagels.

customers, who loyally wait in a blocks-
long queue outside the shop, to see. He
scrawls verses about the summer heat
and city sounds on bakery paper with
a Sharpie.

Korshak’s mother taught her son at
an early age the importance of poetry.

Long before Korshak was pursuing
a master’s in poetry at Wake Forest
University in North Carolina, he
learned the power of poetry to express
universal truths in a neatly wrapped
package, where the negative spaces in
the prose have just as much meaning as
the words around it.

After years of crafting a similar phys-
ical product — a ring of substance
with a signature hole in the center
— Korshak came to view poetry and
bagels as similar.

“With poetry, what you’re trying to
do is express something that is very,
very large in an incredibly limited
way,” he said. “That the amount of
control that you have has to be given up
almost completely, in the idea of how
it’s going to affect the human being
who’s reading it.”
Those familiar with working with
yeast, particularly the wild yeast found
in sourdough starters, understand the
importance of relinquishing control
over their product. Even if a baker mea-
sures each ingredient to a gram and
follows their own recipe, the yeast may
respond differently to different weather
or bacteria in the air.

“The nice thing about dough — and,
more importantly, wild yeast — is that
it doesn’t move on the same time frame
as us,” Korshak said. “It moves on its
own, and therefore, when you start
putting your feelings around what an
hour is, or what a day is, or what three
days are, or what a beginning is, or
what an end is — that’s all very fine and
great, but it really has no resonance.”
Korshak’s experience in embracing
change and unpredictability extends
beyond his product. Last summer, the
shop’s 14 workers unionized, a decision
Korshak supported.

“I hired 14 people a little over a year
ago. They were all strangers and, within
the space of three months, because they
wanted to see a world that was different
... organized themselves to become a
union, and that’s beautiful,” he said.

The baker’s romantic sensibilities con-
nect his support of his workers to his core
belief that every bagel is a love letter.

Korshak believes that one day, the next
generation of workers, in and out of his
bagel shop, will work to make the world
a better place, but he is at peace knowing
he won’t be alive to see that day.

After he finishes a bagel — taking it
out of the oven, slicing it open and fill-
ing it with schmear and jam or sizzling
egg and cheese — Korshak comes to
the same conclusion: When he hands
over the bagel to the customer, he’ll
never know the bagel’s true impact on
the customer.

“The best thing about a love letter
is ... you’re putting that on paper, and
you’re putting it out there, and you will
never, ever be there when the person
reads it,” Korshak said. “And you will
never ever really know what happens
with it. In fact, you’ll only ever know
that your intention of love was pure.

That’s the point.” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Philip Korshak
SERVES UP BAGELS, POETRY IN SOUTH PHILADELPHIA SHOP



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