Recipes As Resistance

This post was originally published as “Yom Hashoah: Recovered Recipes From A Vanished World” on the Kosher.com blog on April 12, 2010.

For victims of the Holocaust, recipes, a treasured cultural inheritance normally passed from generation to generation, also became a vital source of resistance.

Love it or hate it, we all carry a culinary legacy. During the Holocaust, where food represented life and death, recipes represented a precious link to the culture that the Nazis and their allies tried to destroy.

As Holocaust educator, Myrna Goldberg notes, talking about food and exchanging recipes, even, or especially, in such terrible circumstances “… boosted women’s sense of community. As women recollected recipes, they taught one another the art of cooking and baking, and, in the process of teaching, they reclaimed their importance and dignity.” Teaching offered hope that there would be a next generation – hope for survival.

Better Days: Recipes as Spiritual Resistance

For most in the Shoah, recipes could only be recalled as a link to better times. In rare cases, though, Jewish women were able to record their own recipes, or collect and write down those of others imprisoned with them. One of the very few such recipe books to survive the Shoah belonged to Rebecca Teitelbaum, who, as a forced laborer in Ravensbruck, managed to steal paper, pencil, needle and thread to write and sew together a tiny, 110-page book of the recipes she recalled from home. The women around her found comfort in reading the recipes aloud to one another. Teitelbaum lost the book during her forced evacuation from the camp, but a stranger found it and succeeded in returning it to her in Belgium, where he located her two years later. The book is now housed in the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center.

In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From The Women of Terzin, published in 1996, is a similar handwritten cookbook that was put together by Mina Paechter and entrusted to a fellow inmate who survived. The manuscript, together with some letters, reached Paechter’s daughter in New York after a circuitous route and several decades. Joan Nathan, the eminent cookbook author and chronicler of American Jewish cuisine, notes in Jewish Cooking in America that Paechter’s collection included recipes that “evoked memories of better days – the Gesundheits kuchen, the good health cakes brought to the mothers of newborn babies, the Linzertortes from carefree days of tea parties, the typically Czech Jewish mazelokich, a layered matzah and fruit dessert for family-filled days of Passover.”

Lives Remembered: Recipes as Living History

In some families, food is the way in which survivors have been able to share their pasts with loved ones. Miriam’s Kitchen is Elizabeth Ehrlich’s memoir of her own Jewish journey, but she honors her Holocaust survivor mother-in-law in its title. It was while Miriam was teaching Elizabeth how to make chicken liver and noodles that she unexpectedly revealed how she, her mother and husband survived a Nazi labor camp in Poland.

With survivors aging and passing away, Jewish mother Joanne Caras felt an urgency to collect family recipes from them (or from their children in cases where the survivors themselves were no longer living).  A few years ago, she published The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook (“Recipes Your Family Will Enjoy, Stories They Will Never Forget”), containing “129 heartwarming stories of survival and 250 mouthwatering kosher recipes.” The book is packed with personal stories and vintage family photographs, making each recipe, its originator, and historical context come alive. Caras’ endeavor has been so successful that the sale of the book has raised half a million dollars so far for Jewish charities in Israel and America, work on a second volume is underway, and student groups (both Jewish and not) are incorporating the preparation of recipes from the book into Holocaust education classes and activities.

Projects like The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook and the recipes recovered from the Holocaust remind us that we need to commemorate not only those who died in the Shoah but the lives they lived and the vibrant cultures from which they came.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Tags: cookbooks, Elizabeth Ehrlich, Holocaust, Holocaust cookbooks, Holocaust recipes, In Memory's Kitchen, Jewish Cooking in America, Jewish food, Jewish recipes, Joan Nathan, Joanne Caras, Miriam's Kitchen, Myrna Goldberg, Nazi death camps, Nazi labor camps, Ravensbruck, Rebecca Teitelbaum, recipes, Shoah, Terezin, The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook, Yom Hashoah