Fred Plotkin

Authority on Italian food and opera

This is a cookbook like no other, one that people who only think of themselves as foodies fail to comprehend. It is a book about food as identity, about survival and about memory. Jewish women who were imprisoned at the Terezin concentration camp during the Second World War wrote on scraps of paper everything they knew about what they ate before that way of life was destroyed by Nazi Germany. They were determined to document what they knew was going to be destroyed. These fragments found their way out of the camp even though their authors did not. Miraculously, after decades, they came into the hands of a sagacious and sympathetic editor, Cara De Silva, who made it her mission to bring to life what would have otherwise vanished.