Whose Delicatessen?

On Manhattan's clangorous Sixth Avenue, a block away from verdant Central Park, stands the garlic-scented Chambers Restaurant and Delicatessen. On one side of the establishment is a bar, on the other a counter piled high with salami, liverwurst and jars of borsch. There, greying

Sam Schulman, a friendly fellow who is never stingy with a pickle, each day serves up sandwiches to hundreds of satisfied customers, gauges their opinions on what passes in the great world by the chance-remarks they make between bites. Sam has no doubt where most of them stand. "Everybody here," he says firmly, "believes in the Atlantic pact."

Sam Schulman's considered opinion last week became the basis of a heated debate in U.N.'s high councils. Among the fanciers of Sam's sandwiches is Hector McNeil, British delegate to the U.N. General Assembly. Last week McNeil rose in the Assembly. "I am informed," he said, "that Mr. Gromyko and his colleagues live in a luxurious well-walled dwelling on Long Island ... I plead with Mr. Gromyko ... to escape from these . . . luxurious fastnesses, to go to a delicatessen, to a drugstore on a bus or a subway, where the normal hard-working . . . man and woman meet ... [He will find] that the credit built up so rapidly by the valor of the Red Army has been dissipated . . ."

Poland's Juliusz Katz-Suchy quickly jumped to Gromyko's defense. McNeil, he said, must have been visiting "the delicatessen of the Waldorf-Astoria. People in my delicatessen talk differently." When a newsman later asked where his pro-Russian delicatessen was located, Katz-Suchy impatiently brushed him off. "I often eat in delicatessens," he said evasively, "all along Sixth Avenue."

Up before the Assembly was a resolution submitted by the U.S., Britain, France and China, asking that the Big Five voluntarily curb their veto power in the Security Council. To the little nations, who had spent a year drafting the resolution, it was the most important business on the agenda. New Zealand's Sir Carl Berendsen cried: "I would give my right hand for the success of this organization."

Russia's Andrei Gromyko lumped the veto question with the North Atlantic pact. The pact, he cried, was a direct. threat to Russia; moreover it was in violation of the U.N. charter. It took McNeil no time at all to demolish Gromyko's argument. "No one fears, or need fear the Atlantic pact, if their intentions are pacific . . ." he said. "Those to whom the thought and methods of war are utterly repugnant . . . will welcome the Atlantic pact . . ."

The Russians stood by icily as the Assembly voted 43 to 6 to pass the veto resolution. At his post in the Chambers delicatessen, Sam Schulman was well pleased with Mr. McNeil's work. As for Russia, Sam expressed a harsh and highly undiplomatic opinion. "Russia is no good," he said sadly. "Absolutely no good."

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