How to Share an Egg
All her life, Bonny Reichert’s the one who would one day write about his life. Reichert was a spirited and sensitive child, subtly aware of what she had been born into, though it often went unspoken. Her father shared stories of starvation in the Lodz ghetto as a young boy, forced labour during his teenage years in an Auschwitz subcamp, and being offered a single egg to share with his cousin at the end of the war.
“The title came to me when I was about 13 or 14 because of his story,” Reichert recounts. “I thought if I ever write a book about that, it’ll be called How to Share an Egg.” But she didn’t want to go there yet. Toronto-based Reichert indeed became a writer and storyteller, as predicted by her family. She wasn’t ready to write her father’s story for years, though. Instead, using her writing skills and her experience as a mother of two, she worked her way up at two of Canada’s top maga- zines, Today’s Parent and Chatelaine. At the age of 40—by this time with three kids—Reichert decided to go to chef school. She then combined her cooking knowledge and journalism experience, writing a chef column at The Globe and Mail. When her youngest was off to college and the pandemic was starting, Reichert stopped doing journalism, started teaching food writing at University of Toronto, and began an MFA in Creative Nonfiction.
By now in her early fifties, Reichert at last started writing How to Share an Egg. She’d been researching the story of her father, her family, and food, for decades, she says. She was ready.
Egg, as Reichert affectionately referred to the book in our interview, is subtitled A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty. Reichert’s own hunger for autonomy and agency led her to resist writing the book all those years, she says. Something always kept her from it: College, an early marriage, a baby, a divorce which drove a wedge between Reichert and her father, another marriage, two more kids, one career and then another. Only after two trips to Poland tracing her father’s roots and with her youngest off to college, she buckled down to do what she felt she needed to do, her way: write the book while her father was still alive.
Rather than starting off Egg with Holocaust quotes, Reichert summons Aldous Huxley’s Island in the epigraph, an invocation to “feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.” And while Saul’s story is the book’s through line, what emerges even more strongly in How to Share an Egg is Reichert’s own story of growth and self-discovery against the backdrop of her father’s life.
Saul always put a spin on the tales he told his daughter: his triumph in surviving, and the ‘bad men’ who tattooed blue numbers on his arm but could no longer hurt him.
Yet “the Holocaust is not the central journey, in my mind,” she confides. “The quote speaks to the process of find- ing myself through writing this book… loosen your grip, have a little trust and belief, and see what happens.”
During a family trip to Poland—the first of the two trips which Reichert participates in with great reticence—a bowl of glistening borscht in Warsaw releases her imagination and gets her writing. The promise of good food and nice hotels on that trip were a lure by her father. Reichert had never wanted to see her family’s European history up close. But Saul insisted she accompany him to see a newly discovered family grave, and she couldn’t refuse him.
Eating well on the trip wasn’t just for Reichert, though. It was just as much for her father, to this day a bon vivant. “Meals are important to him, food is important to him, and feeding others,” Reichert says. In the book, she describes her father’s hunger as “a happy kind of hunger, built on gratitude, pleasure, and the sense of what was delicious.”
“And then there’s the metaphorical hunger, a lust for life, a search for joy, a sense of occasion and celebration all the time, and a bit of insatiability,” Reichert adds. “At 94, he still asks me ‘What are we doing for fun? What should we eat?’”
The juxtaposition of their differing hungers is striking. Hers – to establish her own identity and purpose — drives the memoir. The food metaphor features strongly in the titles of the book’s short, readable chapters (Jujubes / Strawberry Butter/ Cholent), alternating occasionally with places (Paris/ Warsaw) and experiences (Fear / Writer’s Block). “That’s the hunger to be myself, to know myself, to find myself, to be seen as myself,” she says. “Like many Jewish girls,
I was very aware of the roles I had to fulfill…. To be a good daughter, a good sister,
a good wife and mother—and it’s a lot.
“The act of writing the book was the final step in liberating me from that agenda.”Egg reveals the different kinds of love that Reichert received: from her emotion- ally generous father, her loving second husband, and the unconditional affection of her mother’s mother Baba Sarah. “My dad gave me something I will never lose,” Reichert says. “He taught me how to love, and that the capacity to love is there in me,” though she admits “I didn’t always choose the right person.”
In the pages of Egg, Reichert reveals her yearnings carefully and with honesty, moving through a vividly remembered childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and marriage(s). Her recollections of life as a young girl are particularly evocative. We see her riding her bike in the local ravine as an unfettered nine-year-old in the daytime yet troubled by nightmares in the dark. She had no words for that kind of unspoken intergenerational trauma until reading the work of Esther Perel, another child of Holocaust survivors.
She realizes in her early 20s that her first marriage was never going to bring her the joy that she needed and deserved. And ultimately, she connects the dots, understanding that it wasn’t ambition that motivated her through two careers: it was a need to create, and to love herself. “I feel more in touch with my child- hood self than the frantic young mother self,” she says, “probably because of all the reflection that I did to write the book.”
Those investigations also led Reichert to both her grandmothers, the one she knew and adored, and the one she could only imagine. “I created the characters of my grandmothers—Baba Sarah and Udel, the grandmother I never knew—with a lot of intentionality. They were important forces for me as I was working on this project,” she says. “It’s funny, because I’m a grandmother and I always hesitate to say it because I’m a little young. This idea of powerful older women, these women that protected me and guided me—that’s a very dominant feminist image for me.”
It’s also an image conjuring plenty. The ample Baba Sarah, who dipped chocolates and fed and housed boarders to survive widowhood, taught Reichert first the joys of creating through food. “Baba Sarah was a wonderful force in our lives,” Reichert says. “I needed her because my mom was a little tough and unavailable, and I sometimes got lost in the shuffle.” Her observations of her grandmother kneading dough in the early morning for molasses bread or verenike served her well years later when the challenges of chef training required drawing on all of her emotional and physical power.
Udel, her paternal grandmother, was more elusive, the bowl of borscht in Warsaw unlocking an unexpected conjuring of her unknown ancestor. “Too soon, I was tipping my bowl to scoop out the last sweet-sour mouthfuls, wondering whether you could remember a place you’d never been, or know a person you’d never met,” Reichert writes. “My father’s mother, Udel, must have made borscht from beets like these. It must have tasted just like this.”
The connection with the unknown past that she hadn’t given herself permission to explore—along with giving herself the permission to not always be a good girl—strengthened Reichert. In the books pages, she also clearly knows she needs to resolve an unspoken source of disappointment with her beloved father: her decision to divorce as a very young woman. The two are communicating simply yet deeply—as they seem to have forever—in a way that not everyone is privileged enough to have experienced within their families.
As she gently approaches him about that fraught stage of her life, she embraces the complexities and contradictions of being both her father’s daughter and herself. No longer coloring her hair (like a good girl might), she stops to look at herself at the end of the book, summing up her journey. “At the mirror, my skin is wrinkled, but it fits better than ever before,” she writes.
—Ivy Lerner-Frank is a food, fiction, and creative nonfiction writer based in Montreal.
