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A review by life_full_ofbooks
How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty by Bonny Reichert
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
2.0
I was so excited to read this book but my hopes were dashed when I realized this is the author’s memoir, not a story based on her father’s fascinating life.
Bonny Reichert is a magazine journalist, a chef, a wife, a mother, the youngest sister, and the dad of a Holocaust survivor. It’s the last descriptor that has defined her for all of her life. Because of her father’s experiences living in the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz during the later years of the war, he had a different outlook on life and food than most people and it showed in how he raised his children.
Ms. Reichert’s memoir takes us through her life through different foods and meals she’s eaten and cooked. In that sense, it reminded me very much of Stanley Tucci’s memoirs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as Mr. Tucci’s.
This would have been much better had Ms. Reichert taken her father’s story and written that, especially because that’s what her original intention had been. I honestly couldn’t care less about the meals she cooked, the years she was in school, or the cookbooks she collected. While I greatly appreciated the parts that talked about her deep fear, her attempting to see what life in the ghetto was like for her father, and her very strong writer’s block I was here for Saul Reichert’s story and I got just a small snippet of it (and that small snippet was far more interesting than everything else I read before and after).
Bonny Reichert is a magazine journalist, a chef, a wife, a mother, the youngest sister, and the dad of a Holocaust survivor. It’s the last descriptor that has defined her for all of her life. Because of her father’s experiences living in the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz during the later years of the war, he had a different outlook on life and food than most people and it showed in how he raised his children.
Ms. Reichert’s memoir takes us through her life through different foods and meals she’s eaten and cooked. In that sense, it reminded me very much of Stanley Tucci’s memoirs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as Mr. Tucci’s.
This would have been much better had Ms. Reichert taken her father’s story and written that, especially because that’s what her original intention had been. I honestly couldn’t care less about the meals she cooked, the years she was in school, or the cookbooks she collected. While I greatly appreciated the parts that talked about her deep fear, her attempting to see what life in the ghetto was like for her father, and her very strong writer’s block I was here for Saul Reichert’s story and I got just a small snippet of it (and that small snippet was far more interesting than everything else I read before and after).