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: #810813 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 370 pages

Amazon.com
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.

The New York Times Book Review, Peter Kaminsky
As in a Vermeer painting, Ehrlich's focus is, like her subject's, relentlessly on the quotidian.... Human truth is observed in a moment of revelatory tranquility.

Customer Reviews

Soulful a delight to read
I read this many years ago. I love the stories that the author tells about her life and her family as related to food and Jewish tradition. I could relate. The recipies provided in the book are delicious. I am keeping the book as a reference.

Food for the Spirit
Elizabeth Ehrlich is a Jewish American woman who rejected, for many years, her connection to the practices of her Jewish faith. It is only through her discovery of her mother-in-law Miriam's kitchen and the foods prepared there that she learns to value the traditions that shaped her own family, traditions brought from the Old World and translated into the New. Through entries in her journal, through letters, memories, stories, and above all, through Miriam's recipes, Ehrlich recreates for us the story of her spiritual awakening and her self-guided journey into the lives of her foremothers, who nourished their faith and kept it alive and growing in difficult times, difficult places, through pain, separation, and even despair.

This often funny, often heart-rending, always beautifully-evocative book is a powerful testimony to the importance of women's domestic contributions to the survival of their families, their communities, and their faith.

Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org

Thoughtful, interesting memoir
Miriam's kitchen is a thoughtful, interesting, warm and homey memoir. If you are interested in material culture -- particularly food -- of various groups, you'll find it interesting. It's also a story about balancing identities -- Jewish, American, feminist, traditionalist, etc.