Hungarian Cookbooks for Israeli Readers: A Comparative Literary-Cultural Analysis

Ilana Rosen

doi:10.5195/ahea.2020.392

Abstract

How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In the case of Israelis of Hungarian origin, these questions inevitably have to do with the history of Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth- and early-to-mid twentieth-century, with a focus placed more acutely upon World War II and the Holocaust. Written by a female Israeli researcher of folk and documentary culture who belongs to the second-generation of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, the present article strives to deal with the foregoing and other relevant questions through a comparative literary-cultural analysis of the only two presently existing Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbooks. These two cookbooks were published in Israel in 1987 and 2009, respectively, by two male cultural celebrities, the first by a Hungarian-born journalist, author and politician and the second by an Israeli-born gastronomer and grandson of Hungarian-Israelis.

Highlights

How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In the case of Israelis of Hungarian origin, these questions inevitably have to do with the history of Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenthand early-to-mid twentieth-century, with a focus placed more acutely upon World War II and the Holocaust
How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it, or should it, encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? Written by a female Israeli researcher of folk and documentary culture who belongs to the second-generation of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, this article attempts to examine these and other relevant questions through a comparative cultural analysis of the only two, extant Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbooks
In two recent articles I devoted to the prose works and poetry of the 1.5 generation and second-generation Israeli descendants of Holocaust survivors of Hungarian origin, I showed that these authors emphatically explore their Hungarian family-histories, the Holocaust and the destruction of their older generations in their works

Summary

Introduction

How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In the case of Israelis of Hungarian origin, these questions inevitably have to do with the history of Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenthand early-to-mid twentieth-century, with a focus placed more acutely upon World War II and the Holocaust. Written by a female Israeli researcher of folk and documentary culture who belongs to the second-generation of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, this article attempts to examine these and other relevant questions through a comparative cultural analysis of the only two, extant Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbooks.

Results

Conclusion