Bonny Reichert’s father, Solomon (né Szlama Rajchbart), survived the Holocaust before emigrating to Canada in the late 1940s. In How to Share an Egg, Reichert recounts her years-long struggle to understand his relentless desire for everyone to be happy no matter what else is going on—and the ways that his trauma has affected her own life.
Unlike many other survivors, Solomon often spoke about his experiences in Poland and Germany, surviving Nazis, hunger, disease, cold, and more. He didn’t share everything; many of his stories were framed as yet another example of how he triumphed over adversity. His audience, for the most part, was his youngest daughter Bonny, and although she was able to pick up the moral of these stories, she started to have terrifying nightmares about being chased by something monstrous. These nightmares followed her for years. The other thing that followed her for years was an emotional Gordian knot of guilt, depression, and shame that she couldn’t live up to her parents’ expectations of her as a good Jewish girl, wife, and mother. It takes Reichert a lot of determination (and a dash of therapy) to find her own happiness, outside of those impossible expectations.
What makes this memoir stand out from other writing from children of Holocaust survivors is the prominent role of food in both Reichert’s and her father’s lives. Because her parents were often busy when Reichert was a child, she spent a lot of time in her maternal grandmother’s company. Her grandmother—who fled Ukraine decades before World War II—showed her love by preparing dishes that warmed the body and the soul. (Reichert’s descriptions of these meals had my mouth watering more than once.) When she’s older, Reichert attempts to recreate dishes made by her paternal grandmother before the family was sent to the Łodz ghetto and, later, Auschwitz, where Solomon’s immediate family were murdered. The day that Reichert masters the Rajchbart family recipe for cholent is a magical one.
I would recommend this book to readers who are curious about the way that surviving (or not surviving) the Holocaust marks even the lives of those born to survivors and how food can be a powerful means of recovering memory and building a sense of home.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.