Showing results by author "Boris Fishman" in All Categories

A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way.

Maya Shulman and Alex Rubin met in 1992, when she was a Ukrainian exchange student with "a devil in [her] head" about becoming a chef instead of a medical worker, and he was the coddled son of Russian immigrants wanting to toe the water of a less predictable life. Twenty years later Maya Rubin is a medical worker in suburban New Jersey, and Alex his father's second in the family business.

Susanna, George, and their eight-year-old daughter, Dina, have been lucky, so far, in these four years since war broke out in their country. Even as their fellow "minority-sect" neighbors and classmates are murdered or imprisoned, George’s loyal work teaching "dominant-sect" literature has kept them fed and protected. But then the day comes: the university fires George—despite his years of collaboration, he is no longer safe. Left without money or allies, it is time for the family to run.