The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told recipe-filled memoir. A story of family, immigration, and loveāand an epic mealāSavage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle.
A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Borisās childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Borisā grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Borisā familyāJews who lived under threat of discrimination and violenceāprovided-for and protected.
Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Borisā family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to oneās roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Borisās grandfatherās Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksanaās kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with womenātroubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generationsāunfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate.
Savage Feast is Borisā tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.