On Holocaust Cookbooks: Fourth Generation Jews and the Re-creation of Jewish Food Culture

Abstract

Food is essential: to memory, to culture, and to identity. In the introduction to In Memory’s Kitchen, Cara De Silva (1996) argues, “Our personal gastronomic traditions – what we eat, the foods and foodways we associate with the rituals of childhood, marriage, and parenthood, moments around the table, celebrations – are critical components of our identities” (p. xxiv). Food, as it is often associated with specific periods of time, events, and feelings, is undoubtedly intertwined with memory. This is especially true for Jews. In Judaism, not only is nearly every holiday associated in some way with special foods (such as the Passover Seder or eating fried potato latkes on Hanukkah), but the Jewish deli also played, at times, a more important role in American Jewish social life than the synagogue. Despite this rich tradition of associating food with remembrance and everyday life, food talk is often missing from discussions of the Holocaust. And yet, it was food talk that gave many in the labor, concentration, and death camps the will to survive and hope that they would one-day return to the life they had lived before the camps. Three extant, published cookbooks describe the way food was used for survival during (In Memory’s Kitchen, written in a concentration camp) and after (Recipes Remembered and the Holocaust Survivors Cookbook, two collections of recipes from survivors) the Holocaust. This thesis will explore just that, as I examine the relationship between food or “food talk” and memory. This is not just an important question for Holocaust memory, but also for public memory scholars and rhetoricians writ large. Rhetoricians have recently begun to take an interest in understanding food from a variety of perspectives. However, the relationship between food, collective memory, and identity has been left under-theorized. In this thesis, I bridge that gap, arguing that these cookbooks can make the past present and thus help to reestablish a lost Jewish identity for fourth generation Jews.