SHOCKING STORIES FROM HISTORY IN BLACK AND WHITE … WITH RECIPES
By MARY ELLEN HIGGINS
Pocono Record
Feb 10 2010
PA
February 10, 2010 If the idea of reading history makes your eyes
glaze over, you can find a back-door route to historical knowledge
through the following recommended memoirs and cookbooks, all of which
are enlivened with historical details.
"The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: a Memoir
of Music, Love, and Survival" by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen (2002,
Warner) tells the story of 14-year-old Lisa Jura, who is musically
talented and aspires to be a great pianist. At her final piano lesson
in Vienna, her piano teacher sorrowfully tells her that under a new
ordinance, teaching Jewish children is a crime.
On her way home from that final lesson, Lisa notices that the Nazis
have replaced Jewish names on street signs with Aryan ones. Shortly
after returning home, she awakens with her family in the middle of
the night. Kristallnacht, the coordinated attack on Jewish people
and their property, is raging.
Soon after, Lisa’s parents get her a place aboard the Kindertransport,
a rescue mission that transferred 10,000 mostly Jewish children out
of Vienna to safety in Britain. At one of the stops, someone places
an unaccompanied baby aboard. The other children scramble to find
milk and juice to feed the baby. As they enter Holland, the train
erupts in cheers. Almost all of the children will survive the war,
but most of their parents will not.
"The Knock at the Door: a Journey Through the Darkness of the
Armenian Genocide" (Beaufort Books, 2007) by Margaret Ahnert, whose
daughter Lynn Price lives in Middle Smithfield Township, bears many
similarities to eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. It’s the story
of an individual caught up in a vortex of ethnic violence.
Ahnert provides an account of the ordeal of her mother, Ester Ajemian,
who was 15 years old in 1915 when the Turkish Army began systemically
killing Armenians in Turkey. The first-person narration makes these
events palpable, and Ester’s descriptions of events spare none of
the brutality of the soldiers or the gore that she witnessed.
In the early chapters of "The Knock at the Door," Ester tells of
her happy youth growing up in the town of Amasia in Turkey. But her
happiness ends soon after her older brother, a soldier in the Turkish
army, visits her family with news that Armenians are being targeted for
acts of violence, and warns that the family should get ready to flee.
Soon afterward, all able-bodied Armenian men are ordered to present
themselves. Fifteen-year-old Ester watches from a window in her house
as groups of men are forced to march away from the town. When the men
don’t return, she realizes they have been slaughtered. Her father is
jailed and she never sees him again.
The women, children and elderly of the town are forced to march
many miles to deportation camps, but most of them die of starvation
or typhus contracted along the way. Ester is eventually forced into
an abusive marriage, but she eventually escapes and makes her way to
America. "The Knock at the Door" records unspeakable acts of brutality;
it’s an important testimony of crimes that should not be forgotten.
In contrast to these weighty memoirs, Viviana Carballo’s memoir,
"Havana Salsa: Stories and Recipes" (2006, Simon & Schuster), is much
more light-hearted.
The memoir of pre-Castro Cuba provides a potent mixture of humor and
pathos, with Cuban recipes interspersed with the narrative.
Carballo portrays Havana of the 1940s and early 1950s as a non-stop
party city. It bursts with cafeterias, cafés, bakeries, peanut
vendors, orange sellers, ices and ostiones — a small kiosk on wheels
that sells ostiones (a type of mollusk that grows in mangroves and
tastes like oysters), which were kept fresh in narrow glasses embedded
in a block of ice.
Carballo’s eccentric family and their various servants and friends
also enliven the narrative. Her father, known as Dr. Carballo (though
he had no medical degree), sold his services as astrologer, healer,
psychic and medium to Havana’s wealthy. The family cook, Dulce, is
a believer in the SanterÃa religion who teaches the young Carballo
the food preferences of each of the deities. In her memoir, Carballo
reconstructs Dulce’s recipes for calabaza and malanga fritters.
When Castro takes control of Cuba, he quickly puts down the frivolity
and high living of the islanders. He also takes away civil liberties,
and reneges on his promise of free elections. Writing with wit and
humor, Carballo recreates a magical Havana, with beautiful women
dancing on catwalks high up in the trees at the restaurants. Now,
Cuban exiles can only remark on how much the island lifestyle has
declined under Castro’s regime.
History also figures in "Zarela’s Veracruz: Cooking and Culture
in Mexico’s Tropical Melting Pot" (2001, Houghton Mifflin) by the
television personality Zarela MartÃnez and Anne Mendelson.
It’s another unusual cookbook. In addition to explanations of the
Afro-Caribbean and West Indian influences in Veracruzan cuisine,
MartÃnez and Mendelson discuss the history, poetry and dance
traditions of the region.
Food and history are intertwined. The authors point out why
Afro-Caribbean dishes, such as mariquitas, can be found in Veracruz.
After the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519, Caribbean
slaves were brought to Veracruz to work in sugarcane plantations
that were developed by Spanish colonists. When the invading Spaniards
displaced many of the indigenous peoples living in Veracruz, the native
influences were lost, leaving Spanish and Afro-Caribbean elements to
take center stage.