Abstract
In my interdisciplinary analysis of foodways which combines Gender Studies with Holocaust Studies, I aim to demonstrate the cultural and gendered significance of the wartime sharing of recipes among starving women prisoners in concentration camps. This study will further discuss the continuing importance of food talk and food writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, with an emphasis on the memory work of Hungarian survivors and their descendants. Fantasy cooking and recipe creation, or “cooking with the mouth,” as it was called in many camps, was a way for many inmates to maintain their identities and connections to their ethnic and family history, a survival technique that may have influenced the depiction of food memories and their continuing role in the postwar memoir writing of survivor women. I will also examine the continued use of food talk as a genealogy of intergenerational remembrance and transmission in the post-memory writing of second-generation and even third-generation daughters and (very occasionally) sons of Hungarian origin. Studying multigenerational Holocaust alimentary writing has become particularly urgent today because we are approaching a biological and cultural caesura, at which juncture direct survivors will disappear and we will need new forms of transmission to reshape Holocaust memories for the future.
Highlights
In my interdisciplinary analysis of foodways which combines Gender Studies with Holocaust Studies, I aim to demonstrate the cultural and gendered significance of the wartime sharing of recipes among starving women prisoners in concentration camps
While most of these works can be more traditionally classified as diaries or memoirs, the term life writing can be taken far more broadly, as I have discussed elsewhere (Vasvári 2016). In their new, revised edition of their Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010: 148-150) include new subcategories of what they call new kinds of memoirs, some of which were formerly considered marginal. Among these new genres Smith and Watson include gastrography, or “personalized recipe books,” the term they use to designate any form of life writing in which the story of the self is closely linked to the production, preparation and/or consumption of food
While these subcategories are useful, a broader term is needed that can encompass all these varieties and extend to the type of traumatic war and postmemory life writing that entails recipes as I discuss in this article
Summary
In my interdisciplinary analysis of foodways which combines Gender Studies with Holocaust Studies, I aim to demonstrate the cultural and gendered significance of the wartime sharing of recipes among starving women prisoners in concentration camps. She recounts that the recipes discussed recalled the taste of Shabbat meals and followed the calendar of Jewish holidays: For Shavuot, for instance, there was a conversation about flaky Hungarian strudel [....] when our appetite for rich stuff slackened, we talked of the simple food; soups, meat, bread with butter, and the Hungarian yellow paprika mother used to prepare for our school lunches.
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