When a parent survives a horror, how much is transmitted on a deep emotional level to the children? Reichart explores this issue through childhood memories and her adult life, but this is not a book about – or solely about intergenerational trauma. This is also a memoir about the centrality of food in families, in Jewish life, in an immigrant’s life. Reichart’s lifelong fascination with the creation of food and its ability to nourish runs parallel with her reckoning of her father’s life and survival.
She learns “survival is not one thing – one piece of luck or smarts or intuition – but a million smalls ones. This choice not that one. This brave move, that good stranger. Careful here. Reckless there.” Keeping with the food metaphor, I gobbled this memoir up in a day and highly recommend it.
