Customer Reviews

A Wandering Feast: A Journey Through the Jewish Culture of Eastern Europe (Arthur Kurzweil Books)

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This remarkable and moving book takes the reader through the heart of central Europe to places few tourists will ever visit. The author, Yale Strom, is seeking old Jewish music. He wants to find and record klezmer tunes and Chasidic Ngunnim. His quest takes him to tiny forgotten villages, ancient schuls, kosher kitchens and kehilum.

On his journey, he finds the buildings and streets that bear the imprint of old Jewish communities and he finds unfogettable people. They shelter him, feed him, show him the places that mark the Jewish past. They tell him their proud, heartbreaking stories, full of courage and tragedy and faithfully recorded by the author. Most of all, they play and sing the music he came to hear. He meets Rom people as well and notes with some surprise, the similarities between their music and Jewish music.

His gift to us, his readers, is that he brings it all back in this wonderful book. It includes the music itself, recipes for the food he ate, biographies and photographs of the people he met and accounts of his wonderful adventures among these fierce and loving people. There is even a Yiddish glossary and thumbnail histories of Jewish life in various places. The richness of even the remnant of Jewish culture will amaze you.

I hope that you will buy this book and share it with friends and family. It provides a glimpse of a wonderful world that is almost gone, but as the author demonstrates, not quite.

I loved reading the author's memoirs about his travels and his experiences and was not overwhelmed by the discussions about music. I knew nothing of Klezmer before I started reading, but that din't matter. I love cooking and so enjoyed being given recipes with their cultural heritage and history. That made cooking them all the more exciting and meaningful. Each recipe I have tried, I will cook again; some have become favorites already. They are very accessible recipes with easy to find ingredients. I am interested in anything related to the Holocaust and parts of the world affected by it but little know to the rest of the world. He gave such an endearing picture of life in these places, I will always rememeber the people and places he shared with me through this memoir.