Bonny Reichert’s groundbreaking memoir presents two lives in food
Holocaust memoirs and food memoirs abound, but they almost never accommodate each other gracefully. Either the trauma takes over and casts a pall over the food, no matter how significant, or the inclusion of recipes, no matter how well meant, ends up trivializing the experience of those who suffered.
Bonny Reichert’s new memoir, How to Share an Egg, is one of the rare exceptional memoirs that combines the two in a way that somehow enhances both and becomes more meaningful and enlightening rather than less. Her story has garnered international acclaim since January, when it was first published, and the Jewish Book Festival is delighted to welcome her as our featured author at our annual brunch event this November.
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Reichert is an award-winning food writer, a trained chef, and the former editor of Chatelaine, one of Canada’s leading food magazines. Now nearly 60, she grew up as the youngest daughter in a restaurant-owning family, one where food was the most important thing in the world.
She is also the youngest daughter of a man who survived a childhood of starvation and enslavement in the Lodz Ghetto and multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Birkenau. Her father’s boundless zest for life and his gentle explanations of his childhood sustained her but could not shield her as completely as he wished from the undercurrents in his story, the family tensions, or her own reactions.
Reichert says that growing up, even though she valued her father’s enthusiastic approach to life, she had trouble following it, not least her father’s constant desire that she “just be happy.” So “How to Share an Egg” is not the food memoir she always wanted to write, following in the footsteps of the popular food writers she admires most, nor is it the Holocaust memoir her father asked her to write with him when she began to show talent as a journalist, and which she dreaded and avoided for decades.
Instead, it is a dual memoir, her father’s story braided with her own, as she balances the details of her father’s childhood and the way he lives with them against her own; her lifelong crushing fear of learning more about the Holocaust or visiting the camps in Poland and his rejection of the label “trauma”. His irrepressible appetite for celebration and plenty plays into her love of cooking, fostered early by her grandmother and her own childhood experiments. That love of cooking leads her to adult choices he always hoped she’d avoid but also gives her the tools to recreate some of his favorite childhood dishes from before the war. Always, the food has its own role to play, both in memory and in their current lives.
What unites this memoir and keeps the food from trivializing either Reichert’s or her father’s experience is the constant tension between her parents’ expectations, their understanding of happiness, and her struggles to find her own. Reichert’s thoughtful, clear-eyed storytelling breathes life and nuance into complicated relationships many of us will recognize.
Her childhood memories of making blueberry varenikas and kneading bread with her grandmother, or of helping out at her father’s restaurants, vie with nightmares she can’t explain to her bewildered parents, who have provided only the best for her. She endures school confrontations with antisemitic classmates that she can’t voice to her parents without devastating them and can’t get through to the Jewish youth leaders at her synagogue why she doesn’t want to see films about the Holocaust. It takes her decades to recognize just how much she shares with other children of survivors.
How Reichert finds her voice and her vocation in and out of the professional food world, and how she gradually develops the courage to research her father’s story in Poland, are just as fascinating and integral to the book. They, as much as her father’s story, have everything to do with love, memory and food.
Please join us on November 5 at 11:00 a.m. for a fascinating and inspiring conversation with Bonny Reichert at a privately hosted Jewish Book Festival brunch and book signing. Tickets for this special event are $36 per person and require pre-registration by October 24. Location details will be sent after registration. For more information and to register, please see the Jewish Book Festival brochure, visit the festival website at http://jewishsgpv.org/jbf, or call the Jewish Federation office at 626-445-0810.
Deborah Noble is a member of the Jewish Book Festival committee and a contributing writer to JLifeSGPV.
