When I heard the words “culinary memoir” coupled with “Holocaust” there were certain expectations I had before I ever even opened the cover of Bonny Reichert’s debut book How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty. Expectation one: there would be conversations surrounding food. Lots of them. Expectation two: there would be the story of the author’s personal connection to the Holocaust. Expectation three: Somehow, even though food and Holocaust seem like oxymorons of each other, there would be a narrative that brought the two together.
Yet, for the first 213 pages (of a 278-page book), something felt off. There were lots of mentions of food. From Coconut Cream Pie to Vichyssoise to Stew, the full range of foods are mentioned, if not fully detailed. The titles of each chapter, named after different foods, took well care of that. But we barely heard the story of Reichert’s father, who we very early on learned was a Holocaust survivor. This book is largely about Bonny.
If you expect a traditional Holocaust memoir, this isn’t it. This is the story of a second-generation Holocaust survivor who struggles to deal with her father’s past, to commit to an identity, to understand who she is and who she wants to be. Sometimes the tie back to the Holocaust is clear. Sometimes it isn’t. And while the summary on the back cover of the book seems slightly misleading, allowing readers to think that Reichert would be writing about her father, the reality is a memoir is about one’s own self. I allowed myself to stray from the definition of a memoir because Holocaust stories have become some sort of genre themselves.
A lot of How to Share an Egg is difficult to read. It is stories of Reichert’s everyday life at every stage of life. It is moody like a teenager. It is depressing. It is like waking up sweaty from a midnight nightmare. But ultimately, I grew to realize that is the beauty of this book. Reichert hides nothing from us but instead allows us to grapple along with her. Divided into parts, based on location, the book grounds us in a time and place through where Reichert lives at various moments. It isn’t always chronological, but it is very clear where we are. We move with Bonny. We travel with Bonny. We experience Poland with Bonny. Unfortunately, the only thing we don’t get to do is taste the food Bonny prepares.
And when you get to page 213, the wait for understanding is so worth it. A familiar Eastern-European Jewish food, cholent, becomes the food that draws everything together. It is warm and toasty and filled with nostalgia. It is Reichert’s way of bringing a positive aspect of her father’s difficult past to the present, a coping mechanism combining her need to live through her dad’s story and her extraordinary talent in the kitchen. As her dad starts to unravel memory after memory suddenly the book comes to life in an unexpected way. We meet shtetl inhabitants and see firsthand what cooking for Shabbos was like.
This is a book that requires patience. But it took Reichert many attempts at baking putterkuchen, her father’s dream childhood cake, before she got it right. The best things happen with patience.
