“We are starving.” It’s a striking turn of phrase to begin a memoir about food and family and survival from Nazi death camps for what is a simple lament about a late lunch during a tour of Warsaw. Journalist and chef Bonny Reichert explains that in this circumstance, “[i]t was a happy kind of hunger, built on gratitude and pleasure and a true appreciation for what was delicious.”
In her memoir, Reichert proceeds to document the food she shared with her father, a survivor of the Holocaust, alongside his recollections of near-starvation, the cruel and slow deprivation of the concentration camps, and his escape from near-death. She records with an urgency borne of knowing that her father’s testimony to the atrocities of war could easily be lost to time.
There is an underlying sadness and grief to these memories of people, place, and emotion: the spectre of the Holocaust is ever-present. Yet the author and her family find joy in sharing food and feeding one another.
Reichert confronts the trauma of her father’s hunger and her own generational trauma at Auschwitz-Birkenau; her limbs are like lead and she feels the grit of ashes everywhere after viewing Birkenau’s crematorium. She writes, “I’ve tried to figure this out my whole life—how the memory of finding those blue-green numbers from Birkenau stirs in me not just fear and grief but also amazement and even a sense of wonder.” It is a difficult reconciliation.
Reichert observes, “What strikes me most—the thing that tells me, even today, that my father is not quite a regular human, bound by the ordinary limits of heart and mind, is that despite the horrors he’d seen and felt, violence and cruelty and unfathomable suffering, some of those feelings were very beautiful.”
The author travels across Europe to discover her lineage and honour those lost, and to understand that food is “connected to the meaning of life itself … woven into our very being.” She visits Warsaw, Paris, and Berlin, tasting “black bread, thickly cut … lavishly buttered and glittering with salt flakes,” “a gooey wedge of cheese,” and “salamis studded with fat and peppercorns.”
Reichert deftly evokes the sights, sounds, and aromas of the many foods tied to her memories of childhood, her career, motherhood, and relationships. Her writing is delicious and generous – from descriptions of the seasoned and fragrant browning butter in which an egg is scrambled, “a dark glug of molasses,” and the deep ruby hue of earthy borscht, to the magic conjured by a few simple ingredients (beans, potatoes, meat, and barley) to make her Baba’s cholent. She writes with equal clarity about the place where her father, and so many others, experienced unimaginable horrors, and of the ghosts that remain.
Writing with honesty and courage, Reichert admits that a “chunk of my soul broke free” when an article she wrote about her father’s experience of food deprivation won critical recognition, and ended the paralysis she had always felt at any mention of the Holocaust or something vaguely anti-Semitic. This is a deeply beautiful and personal work – a record of not only a family and its culinary traditions, but the impact of a dark chapter in recent history, and the story of a woman liberated from her own family trauma and finding joy.