SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Bonny Reichert, the writer and chef, was 5 years old, sitting on her father's lap at the dinner table in Edmonton, Canada, and savoring the last bits of a salad - the cucumbers, tomatoes and fresh dill - when she noticed something colorful on her father's arm.
BONNY REICHERT: I saw some numbers. They were bluish-greenish. I remember the moment perfectly. Daddy, what's this? And he said, oh, some bad men put that on me. And I scrubbed him with the napkin. I said, take this off. And he said, those numbers don't come off. And I said, where are the bad men now? And he said, don't worry, the bad man ran away.
SIMON: Bonny Reichert's father, Solomon - Saul - is a survivor of the Holocaust, and in her new memoir, she comes to terms with the ways in which food has been mileposts in her family's life. Her memoir - "How To Share An Egg." And Bonny Reichert joins us from the studios of the CBC in Toronto. Thanks so much for being with us.
B REICHERT: Thank you. What a pleasure to be here.
SIMON: You grew up in a food family, family in the food business in Edmonton, didn't you?
B REICHERT: Yes, I did. We had restaurants. My grandmother also was a tremendous cook and also worked with my dad - her son-in-law - in our restaurants. So if we weren't going to have dinner with my dad, we were going to pick up my Baba, or sometimes I even got to help her in the restaurant in the kitchen.
SIMON: I want to bring in the voice of your father.
B REICHERT: This is Saul Reichert recording for NPR on December 29, 2024.
SIMON: Saul just turned 94, and he had this memory of his first hours of freedom after Auschwitz.
B REICHERT: Go ahead.
SAUL REICHERT: We were hiding in a barn under a pile of straw. And then, finally, we left the barn, and we went down to find out that the Americans already arrived. We were free. Oh, my God. I went down, I said, oh, my God, I'm free. I'm going to live. So we were out in the street, and we had no food. So we started looking for food. So we knocked on the barn, would you give us some food? They said, we can only give you one egg. One egg for two people. I said, how do we share that?
SIMON: Of course, the story of that egg becomes the title of your book. And what role did food begin to play in your life as you look back on it now?
B REICHERT: Food was everything in my family. So my father had almost starved in especially the large ghetto. And I depict that in the book, you know, that people are sitting on a bench, and he thinks that they're skeletons, and then one of them moves. He said the shock of that famine never left him. So I was raised by this person who had to survive on potato peels and coffee grounds, and he was very - you hear it in that clip, very grateful for what he had and brought a real sense of wonder and joy.
SIMON: I want to get you to talk about a couple of specific foods. I mean, the borscht of your life in Warsaw. That's not an easy story.
B REICHERT: The borscht was such a uncanny moment because we were in Warsaw. I was with my father, my mother and my sister. I had been brought up to say, I'm not going to Poland. I'm not going to look at the camps. My dad would say, I suffered enough. You don't have to suffer. We're not going to go. And then, all of a sudden, he changed his mind because a relative told him that there was a tomb in the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, which is an incredible, incredible place. There was a tomb that was a family tomb.
And the tomb ended up being his grandfather's tomb. And I said to myself, great, we're done. That's wonderful. We did what we came to do. I had a headache. It was raining. I wasn't enjoying being in Warsaw. It was like, fantastic - we're going to go home now. And we stopped at a restaurant. Everything was closed. It was the middle of the afternoon. And our guide said, here, here's something open. And it was the most dubious-looking restaurant. It was empty. It was full of cigarette smoke.
And I'm expecting, you know, some greasy, old food, you know, something or hot dogs. I didn't know what to expect. And out of the kitchen comes this beautiful, beautiful borscht. It's beet red, crisp and clear. And then these beautiful fresh garnishes - chopped cucumber, sour cream, fresh dill. And this bowl of borscht spoke to me and reminded me that my roots are in Poland. So it was - I mean, I - the hairs on the back of my neck or standing up just talking about it.
SIMON: What do stews mean to you? Cholent.
B REICHERT: Stew was such a funny thing in our house because stew was my mother's most hated dish.
SIMON: (Laughter).
B REICHERT: My mother grew up poor in Canada and felt that stew was poor people food and didn't want to have anything to do with it. On the other hand, stew was my father's beloved dish because when he was a child, he ate a stew called, as you said, cholent. And this was a special stew that his mother made for the Sabbath. So she would make it on Friday afternoons.
And then, because you couldn't turn your oven off or on in the old country, in the little village that my father grew up in, all of the women would take their cholents and walk them to the community oven to the bakery. They would slide their prepared cholents into the community oven and leave it there overnight, and then pick them up on Saturday afternoon.
And my father used to talk about cholent all the time when I was a child - my mother's cholent was the best. Everybody in the building knew that we had the most delicious cholent. Everyone could smell it. And yet, nobody made it. And while I was writing the book, I came to feel that this dish was so mythical and carried so much significance that nobody wanted to touch it. But I, foolish girl, I touched it. I decided to make it.
SIMON: What's in a cholent?
B REICHERT: It's beans and barley and a little bit of meat, depending on how much meat they had in the olden days, how much money there was for them to get meat. And it all goes into a pot with a lot of water. And in my first attempt, I did not put enough water. My father warned me to put - because it cooks for a very, very long time. And when you open it the next day, the meat should be very tender and the water absorbed and all of the beans and barley nicely plump and ready to be eaten.
SIMON: You know, we call your father a survivor, and he is. But it certainly occurred to me on the last page his life has been a good deal richer than just surviving.
B REICHERT: Yes, he will mention in passing what happened to him during the war. But it's not something that he goes back to over and over again. He's not stuck. You know, I write about his sense of wonder, and I felt so happy that I could figure out how to describe that because he is an amazingly optimistic person. He's a person that loves joy and fun and pleasure. He, at 94, still says to me, what are we doing for fun? Where are we going? Let's go out for dinner. And so he has lived a beautiful life despite what happened, or maybe he figured out how to make something beautiful after what happened.
SIMON: Bonny Reichert's new memoir, "How To Share An Egg." And thank you so much for sharing this story with us.
B REICHERT: Thank you. I loved it.
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