Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (a Memoir with Recipes) - Hardcover

Fishman, Boris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006286789X ISBN 13: 9780062867896

Publisher: Harper, 2019

Synopsis

One of Booklist's Must Read Nonfiction picks of 2019

The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told, recipe-filled memoir. A family story, an immigrant story, a love story, and an epic meal, Savage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle.

A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected.

Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Boris’s grandfather’s Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate.

Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.

About this title

Review:

“A tightly written page-turner about the author’s childhood in Minsk, his extended family and their odyssey from Belarus to New York (via Vienna and Rome in the 1980s) as well as his efforts to conquer his own demons. While reading it, I was frequently tempted to head to the kitchen and fry some onions, the step that starts many of the Eastern European recipes in his book.” (Florence Fabricant, New York Times, “Front Burner”)

“...a work of reminiscence and celebration that should appeal to a wide range of readers. If you like books about affectionate, colorful families, imagine Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers mixed with Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey’s Cheaper by the Dozen.  If you’re a fan of food memoirs, you’ll want to shelve it near M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating and A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals ...The accounts of raucous, argument-filled holiday dinners are hilariously familiar... [A] smorgasbord of humor, pathos and emotional insight. I very much enjoyed Savage Feast, and so will you.” (Michael Dirda, Washington Post)

“As Fishman suggests with this profusion of stories, all feasts are savage, in the sense that cuisine, like culture, is ultimately wild, feral, untamed.” (Paste)

“Mapped in recipes, a savage landscape of Jewish hunger...Boris Fishman brings the fraught role of food in Jewish culture to evocative life in his new memoir...Suspended between his Soviet childhood — Fishman was nine when his family left Minsk — and an American life from which he feels fundamentally distant, the home Fishman eventually finds is in food...Really, what it comes down to, is a hunger for something like truth. A true identity. A true relationship. A true understanding of his family’s history, and the ways it must and must not form his life.” (The Forward)

“Fishman’s writing is brisk and vivid, and despite generations’ worth of trauma the family suffered, from pervasive anti-Semitism to the brutalities of World War II, his memoir is often funny... This book departs from other memoirs: Most chapters end with detailed recipes, adding a lovely, homey dimension.” (BookPage)

“This delightful, recipe-filled memoir from novelist Fishman follows his Jewish family—and their richly-described dinner tables—across three generations, from 1945 Belarus to 2017 Brooklyn...Fishman’s immigrant saga masterfully evokes a family that survives, united by food...There’s a large web of characters and anecdotes, but Fishman grounds the narrative with his witty prose and well-translated family recipes.” (Publishers Weekly)

“Central to Fishman’s insightful, absorbing memoir is hunger...The trauma of cultural loss, shared by many immigrants, was assuaged by his grandfather’s home health aide, whose recipes for potato latkes, stuffed cabbage, braised rabbit, liver pie, and scores more make the memoir a succulent treat... A graceful memoir recounting a family’s stories with candor and sensitivity.” (Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review)

“This beautifully written memoir is a wonderful story about family, love, and connecting with your roots.” (Library Journal)

“Vibrant...It’s easy to feel at home in Fishman’s writing; it’s warm, reflective and frequently funny...Even more than a story of hunger, this is a story of love. Love of family and companionship. Love of romance and lore. Love of garlic, fish and the feeling of finally learning to identify and satisfy the simple but crucial loves for which everyone hungers.” (Shelf Awareness)

“This rich, memorable exploration of immigrant identity, culture clash and Soviet cuisine will linger long after the book has been closed or the last of the dishes within have been served.” (Shelf Talker)

About the Author:

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at the age of nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His first novel, A Replacement Life won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, was one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books, and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. He lives in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 006286789X
• ISBN 13: 9780062867896
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368