Recipes for a New Beginning

Book excerpt: Recipes for a New Beginning. Transylvanian Jewish Stories of Life, Hunger, and Hope is a literary and scholarly work, a cookbook, a cultural dictionary, and a memorial album of Transylvanian Jews. It is a historical summary of the Transylvanian Jewish community's past 100 years based on 10 in-depth interviews. The author conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and joint cooking with Holocaust survivors. The stories of the interviewees are supported by substantial archival research. Survival and starting anew are in the focus of this readable and gap-filling illustrated book, which conjures up the memories of its contributors ingeniously. "How do the senses remember? What begins as a conversation about food, followed by cooking what is recalled, sometimes only vaguely, and then eating together, leads to the revelation of traumatic memories. Shining a light on ten elderly Holocaust survivors who were children or teenagers during the war and stayed in Transylvania after the war, this beautiful book brings together their stories, photographs, and food to reveal the power of the senses to bring forth an uneasy mix of culinary nostalgia and traumatic memory. The body is indeed an archive, and this book plumbs its depths in a deeply personal way." - Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews