2023-08-31 16:09:32
The author has frequented Ashkenazi cuisine since childhood. The days of celebration at his grandparents with a cheesecake, while crunching on pickles in front of an episode of Columbo with his father, watching his mother struggle to empty the entrails of a fish. Not everyone is lucky enough to like stuffed carp, the title of this first novel tells us. It would therefore be necessary to have bathed in Yiddish culture, chewed the shreds of its bygone worlds and cried on the tomb of the ancestors who knew how to hum its tunes to be moved by this “beigeasse” gastronomy.
A memorial fridge
But none of this is necessary to taste the story that these dishes inspire in Elise Goldberg, moved by “their rarity or the disappearance that awaits them”. To do an act of heritage and transmission, to talk about lives shattered by the Second World War, the Shoah and the Soviet Union, to reconstruct identities dismembered by exile and glottophagy, distorted surnames and missing photos, this Frenchwoman of Polish origin opens her fridge to us. She received it from her grandfather and it reeks of white cabbage, but their cohabitation has lasted twenty years: this transitional object keeps the family history fresh.
Talking about cooking is not insignificant when you come from a people who have experienced hunger and uprooting. It is even more subtle when this gastronomy is expressed in an almost annihilated language, which retains few written traces. Elise Goldberg graciously accommodates these constraints, transforming this sensitive story into an anti-food manual and a poetic guide to Yiddish conversation.
The bread of exile
On the same subject, we remember the Festin Sauvage, from Soviet Minsk to modern-day Brooklyn, the story and cooking recipes of an atheist Jewish family, by Boris Fishman (Ed. Noir sur Blanc, 2022) or films by documentary maker Anne Georget, Mina’s Recipes, Terezin 1944 Then Imaginary feasts, which retraced the history of deportees’ recipe notebooks: to fight against hunger is to fight against the end. If gastronomy is at the heart of much Jewish literature, it is also because the table is a gathering place – one where the absent are particularly noticeable.
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To plug these gaps, Elise Goldberg relies on humour, a Jewish panacea that adapts to all sauces and is eaten on unleavened bread, “those corrugated sheets that hit the gums, tasteless, not easy to spread (…) this flatbread of exile and exodus”. His grandparents did not leave Egypt, but Poland. This bread, as unsavory as it is, has retained its properties from Kyrgyzstan to Siberia, from the French internment camps of Vittel to Palestine and even to their Parisian apartments: a semblance of continuity, an ersatz identity. “Cooking is the most sedentary activity there is,” ironically declares the author, herself a travel phobic.
Novel. Elise Goldberg, “Not everyone is lucky enough to like stuffed carp”, Ed. Verdier, 152 pages.
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