Product Description

Like many Jewish Americans, Elizabeth Ehrlich was ambivalent about her background. She identified with Jewish cultural attitudes, but not with the institutions; she had fond memories of her Jewish grandmothers, but she found their religious practices irrelevant to her life. It wasn't until she entered the kitchen--and world--of her mother-in-law, Miriam, a Holocaust survivor, that Ehrlich began to understand the importance of preserving the traditions of the past. As Ehrlich looks on, Miriam methodically and lovingly prepares countless kosher meals while relating the often painful stories of her life in Poland and her immigration to America. These stories trigger a kind of religious awakening in Ehrlich, who--as she moves tentatively toward reclaiming the heritage she rejected as a young woman--gains a new appreciation of life's possibilities, choices, and limitations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89307 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
Food memoirs often delve into the meaning of life. This hardly surprises--memories are as essential to daily life as the food that sustains us. Miriam's Kitchen blends recipes and food reminiscences with family narratives and observations about the author's personal evolution as a Jew. Ehrlich weaves the stories from four generations of family life, punctuated with powerful and often tragic memories. While her mother-in-law, Miriam, is teaching her to make chicken livers with noodles, Ehrlich unexpectedly learns how Miriam, her mother, and husband survived a Nazi labor camp in Poland during the Holocaust. Using vivid and bare yet discreet words, she graphically tells what they suffered and the nightmares that still haunt them.

Ehrlich's own story covers her transformation from a child whose family lit Sabbath candles but went boating on Yom Kippur, to an adult who chooses an Orthodox life marked by ambivalence about the rigors of being kosher and pride in what she is passing on to her children. Recipes for Honey Cake, Noodle Pudding, and many others are buried treasures hidden among Ehrlich's intense words. Sadly omitted is a recipe for potato kugel. Her grandmother uses this tempting pudding to good-naturedly test, taunt, and ultimately as the means for accepting her daughter Selina's non-Jewish fiancé into the family. Happily for us, 24 other tempting kosher recipes make up for this one missed dish. Miriam's Kitchen is a gripping and gratifying memoir of food, life, tragedy, and family survival. --Dana Jacobi

From Library Journal
Ehrlich, a former writer for BusinessWeek, writes with humor and passion about her journey from ambivalent Jew to a woman who observes tradition and teaches her children about their ethnic heritage. Her story begins when she meets Miriam, her future mother-in-law, a Polish Holocaust survivor who "guarded culinary specialties in her mind during years when possession and certainties were ripped from her hands." Through Miriam, Ehrlich awakens to dormant memories and traditions in her past and gradually decides that her own family life would have greater meaning if she made her kitchen kosher. The author opens a window on a culture and tradition that her readers may know nothing about, discussing religious and dietary laws and sharing over two dozen recipes for traditional foods. Orthodox readers will likely see themselves in descriptions of the humor and ambivalence involved in trying to incorporate the traditions in today's society. The writing is crisp and smooth. Recommended for public libraries.?Susan Dearstyne, Hudson Valley Community Coll., Troy, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
An appealing, sensitive account of an assimilated Jewish woman's efforts to embrace the religious traditions of her ancestors. Former Business Week reporter Ehrlich (Nellie Bly, 1989) recounts a childhood where Judaism was merely kosher-style. Like so many other immigrants and children of immigrants, Ehrlich's left-wing parents shunned many of their religion's constraints. While pork didn't make it to their kitchen, shrimp did. And eating corned beef on ``Jewish'' rye became their most Jewish experience, ``the taste without the blessing.'' After Ehrlich married, she hungered for something more, finding that cultural nourishment from her mother-in-law, Miriam, who as a teenager had been sent to a Nazi work camp, but survived the horror with her spiritual pantry intact. From this living link to her grandmothers and their traditions, the author was able to learn the recipes to more than a culinary Judaism. The dietary laws led to Sabbath observance, which enriched her family with 24 hours of ``contemplation, rest, and praise as a gift . . . that punctuates the temporal world.'' Ehrlich's journey is not without occasional lapses and misgivings. She worries about the parochialism of her children's Jewish day school and prefers to tell professional contacts that she's a vegetarian, so that her dietary restrictions don't ``drive in a wedge.'' Nor is she completely comfortable with the Orthodox exclusion of women from the traditional prayer quorum, or minyan. ``I hope that a minyan will gather when I die,'' she writes, ``and that it will have women in it.'' While Ehrlich is not all that sure whether prayer matters or God plays a personal role in our lives, she is certain that the religious traditions she has adopted have made her life far more meaningful. Replete with family narratives and over two dozen recipes, Miriam's Kitchen is much more than one woman's journey to spiritual fulfillment. It is a savory stew made from the social and cultural ingredients of American-Jewish life. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Like Listening to Your Bubbe's stories
I was touched by the special relationship that the author developed with her mother-in-law, Miriam. Through Miriam, we are all so fortunate to hear her life's story, and ultimately, many women's stories from the Old Country. While the author does skip around in thoughts, her essays touch on numerous New York style traditions. I enjoyed reading the index afterwards, and realizing how many different topics she had covered. My synagogue did a book review and it was very favorable. Just one warning: many of the recipes apparently are NOT coming out right! Be sure to read the hilarious disclaimer about the recipes in the front of the book. The recipe I tried (Choc. chip and pineapple cake with meringue) DID come out delicious and was very different! Also be aware that this really is not a cookbook,per se, so it should be read as a story. Some of the stories ARE holocaust-related and as such, contain sad episodes. This book mostly establishes a mother-in-law's successful attempt to bring Judaism back into the major portion of her daughter-in-law's life. Anyone who has decided to keep kosher after being married will laugh with sympathy at some early attempts to do things right!

Outstanding! Read this book! Deserves 10 stars...
If I could give this book a 10-star rating, I would. Elizabeth Ehrlich has written this memoir from her heart, and it shows. The memoir traces the deepening relationship between Ehrlich and her mother-in-law, Miriam, as well as Ehrlich's memories of her fiercely left-wing family in the inner city of Detroit. Both families celebrate their Judaism through food, drink, ritual, prayer and family ties. Ehrlich's views on Judaism shift as she travels the road to middle age, first as a young girl, then as a young adult, next as a new wife and, finally, as the mother of three young children. Along the way she explores such complexities as Miriam's memories of the Holocaust and her native Poland, the challenges of managing a kosher home, and the joys and regrets of interfaith unions.

Travel Ehrlich's road with her and you won't regret it-- her book is rich with memories and love. An added bonus: the reproduction of many of Miriam's mouthwatering recipes.

Living kosher and liking it....
This book is a lot of things. It's a cookbook (although I will take a previous reviewer's warning to heart and be careful about following the recipes); it's a reminiscence of sorts (the memories of Ehrlich's mother-in-law Miriam and others about European/American/immigrant Jewish life in the era of World War II); and finally, it's a book about a certain way of Jewish living. All three of these books are wonderful.

The chapters with recipes in them put me in mind of the movie "The Big Night" (that's the one where you saw all that marvelous food being prepared in Stanley Tucci's restaurant in preparation for Louis Prima's visit). These parts of the book are the print equivalent - my mouth watered just reading about the preparation of those dishes.

The other parts of the book describe a world that's fast becoming extinct. There is a new wave of religious fervor in Judaism, but it's just not the same as the religion my grandparents observed. That was a meeting of the Old World with the New, and I don't really think that will happen again.

I do hope that Ehrlich writes a sequel (or some columns for distribution in newspapers or magazines). I'd like to know how she and her family are continuing to reconcile their version of religion with secular America. I'm sure it will become harder once Miriam and Jacob, her in-laws, pass on. They have been her teachers and guides (Miriam more so than Jacob), and I would like to know if she's truly acquired their commitment as well as their recipes.