Customer Reviews

In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin

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This book is a testimony to the towering reaches of the human spirit. In the midst of the horrors of Terezin, surrounded by suffering, deprivation, and death, hungry women recorded recipes of warmth, comfort, and abundance. They remembered cooking delicious meals, serving delicacies and caviar, making aspic, cooking many varieties of dumplings. The hand-written cookbook they put together demonstrates that although the Nazis held their bodies captive, their spirits remained free, drawing strength and nourishment from their memories of happy days and fully-laden tables. Despite the wretched conditions of the camp, these women dared to hope for a time when they could return to their kitchens and once again rejoice in feeding their families.

This haunting book will bless your life.

To the reviewer who thinks this book is worthless as a historical document and a lousy cookbook: you're missing the point completely. This book moved me to tears-- in my family recipes passed down from mother to daughter are our memory and our inheritance. The women who dictated these recipes probably didn't get that chance, and that this book survived is amazing.

This deeply moving book doesn't pretend to be either a history, or a cookbook. A previously unknown kind of Holocaust literature, it presents itself, as its title implies, as a form of memoir, with all the flaws (inaccuracy being chief among them) and virtues (a vivid evocation of states of mind) of the genre. And there isn't a more telling example of the ravages of the Nazi death camps than the fact that these hungry, terrorized women of Terezin could not remember accurately recipes they had prepared countless times in their lives. Nor is there a more poignant witness to the indomitability of the human spirit than the determination of these women, as they confronted annihilation, to preserve some part of their culture, their memories of the past, their dreams of the future, by writing these recipes down. What a testimony that was to the power of food to nourish the soul as well as the body, and to the force of hope, for defying logic and experience they believed this "cookbook" might survive. That it did is a gift to us all.

I first learned of this book when it was initially published and a small article about it was carried in The Parade Magazine appearing in The Boston Sunday Globe. What caught my eye was a recipe for roast goose (a weakness of mine) and then I read the accompanying piece -- I was moved to tears and tore out the recipe and placed it on my refridgerator under a magnet. A few months later, I was preparing New Year's Day dinner -- I got up at 5am to boil chestnuts for the stuffing ... and cursed my hangover as I was peeling the shells off and cutting up apples ... I followed the recipe and made the most delicious roast goose I have ever eaten ... and have cherished this recipe ever since. Then I had to search for the book -- and it is now one of my most favorite cookbooks.

I use the recipes often and each time I turn to the book, I think of the women who passed on these gems ... it gives me great pleasure to know that they live on and remembered every time I cook ... I think it would make them smile to know that their history continues and I am teaching my daughters about their history as I teach them to cook.

There is something wonderfully cyclical in that knowledge ... and it brings a smile to my lips as I watch my daughters stir and taste and know that they will teach their daughters in this same way.

I now keep Cara De Silva's In Memory's Kitchen on my cookbook shelf, not for the recipes, since most don't translate well to a modern day kitchen. No, I keep this book there to remind myself that even on my toughest day, when conflicting family schedules and obligations pull me in all directions and cooking is a chore, I have it so good! I am blessed beyond measure in comparison to the brave souls who lived their last days in a place of horror, yet kept alive their hopes and dreams of lovely times by recording their recipes. I wept at the descriptions of conditions in this place and marveled at the faith and ingenuity born of such times. This book uplifts and exalts the women ~~ and men ~~ who preserved with such dignity the reflection of their spirits, and in so doing uplifts the spirits of those who learn their stories.

This book is a unique combination of scholarship, history, and memory. Although it contains recipes, this is not in any traditional way a cookbook. In Memory's Kitchen is the moving story of how during World War II the women of the Terezin concentration camp spent evenings writing down recipes that reminded them of their previous 'real' lives: when they lived with and cooked for families and friends. They substituted memory for food and in doing so kept their humanity alive. The 'recipes' were smuggled out of the camp and years later found their way to the surviving daughter of one of the 'cooks.' Definitely worth reading.

A magnificent true story of the women of Terezin. Food was such a part of their soul that even though the torment they faced in Hitler's sadistic world they found comfort in the memories of their recipes. I feel blessed to have this connection to these women through their food.

The horrors of the camps in World War II are among the worst humanity has ever seen. It's hard to fathom just how little the people murdered by the Nazis seemed to matter -- visiting the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, with its towers of numbers etched in the glass and the creepy fog machines blowing over simulated cinders, proves that. But even then it's hard to focus on the humanity involved -- six million Jews alone, and millions more gays, Romani, "lesser races", "defectives", and dissenters murdered at the same time. This book is a tiny spot of humanity in the masses of the dead, a memory of a few dedicated cooks who struggled to keep some kind of creativity going in a city that became the last stop before Auschwitz. I had wanted a copy since I first heard of it over a decade ago, and I stumbled across it in a Massachusetts bookstore notorious as a money vacuum for cookbook collectors. I had to grab it.

Many of the recipes are in fragmented form; a cooking beginner would struggle with many of them, since they often assume intimate familiarity with a kitchen and style of cooking that most English-speaking readers have never seen. Many of the dishes (the original recipes written largely in broken, Czech-accented German, with a few in Czech) are what might be seen as party food, and more importantly a large number of them are desserts; Michael Berenbaum of the US Holocaust Museum, the writer of the foreword, points out that food was an obsession in the camps since the Nazis fed most of the inmates on starvation rations (if they bothered to feed them at all), and sweets are a human obsession even in the best of times. There's still a lot for modern cooks to learn, though; the creators of this book made frequent use of potatoes for example, and liked their dumplings a lot (one recipe I found resembled a Germanized version of the Italian passatelli (bread gnocchi)).

There is some poetry in the book as well, written by the book's original compiler Mina Pächter (who died in 1944), and a few art pieces done by other inmates at Terezin. Sadly, a few intriguing recipes are completely lost, having evidently been mangled or torn out in the original manuscript. Pächter's own story, as well as that of her daughter Anny Stern who worked to publish the book, is told in brief, including the peculiar odyssey that brought the book from the camps to 1970-ish New York. All in all, it's one of the most poignant cookbooks I've ever seen, rivaling Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food (one of my all-time favorite cookbooks) as a marker of history.

IT is heart wrenching and yet it shows how the spirit of the Jews cannot be broken and that they didn't lose their humanity even under most harrowing conditions.

I gave this book as a gift to friend and immediately asked to borrow it so I could read it. The strength and fortitude of the women of Terezin is nothing short of immutable and awe-inspiring. To find the strength to recount such memories of tradition, love and family in the face of incomprehensible and dire circumstances is a true testament to the human spirit. Of all of the stories to survive the Holocaust, this is certainly one of the most inspiring. That any of this survived is a miracle, and a sincere honor to the women who wrote these recipes, poems and stories. You may never cook a single recipe from this book, but you'll definitely hand it down with your other family recipes.