I admit that I was drawn to this book simply by its intriguing title. Bonny Reichert's memoir of life as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor was eye opening to say the least. Speaking for myself, I have always been interested in the stories of those who survived WWII as well as for those who did not, but I never really thought of what it would be like for the children of Holocaust survivors.

Reichert's story of guilt, anxiety, and depression form an interesting and fascinating backdrop of a woman who has lost relatives she never met and whose father wants more than anything to protect his family from the horrors he endured as a child.

This is a thoughtful and honest portrayal of a woman who eventually faces her own fears as she comes full circle in her life. An exquisite read.
Thank you to #NetGalley and #BallantineBooks for this eARC of #HowtoShareanEgg.

Food and family - that was honestly all I knew going into this book aside from the author and knowing it would be powerful. And it was. She had a beautiful way of intertwining food with the story of her dad who survived the Holocaust - and how food had a large impact in his life. Learning more about her dad and his history and connection with food allowed her to understand better the almost obsession (but not in a negative way) with food and serving others. Her writing made me tear up at time...but then other times, made me hungry!!? A truly special story. Thank you Netgalley and Random House for this ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

How to Share an Egg
Bonny Reichert

HOW TO SHARE AN EGG is a memoir that is a mix of a food biography and personal experiences. Bonny grew up in a loving home with food and fond family memories. Her father, a survivor of the holocaust who lives his life in response to his horrifying experiences and her mother who does the same but in different ways.

Food was always at the center of her familial experiences. Around the table is where some of her favorite parts of childhood happened. She learned very early that love meant food and food meant home.

Although she knew her parents always loved her she didn't always feel that they allowed her to live her own life. She was often plagued by inherited guilt. And oftentimes felt that she could not want more for her life as she was surviving which was more than her father could've expected.

It is a story of one life that I think a lot of us can find a home in. Sharing her perspective will help a lot of us own ours.

An important conversation had within the pages of HOW TO SHARE AN EGG is about trauma and the exchange that happens when our traumatic stories are shared. Learning there is a difference between what is secret and what is private. What is relieved when it is shared and what is transferred. In all cases light is cast into the darkness but oftentimes, someone is left in the shadows.

It's about love, family expectations about finding you own path. Growing up and growing into yourself.

I am thankful for the opportunity to read it and it opened my eyes to my own associations with food and survival. It helped me to understand and really contemplate what food means to me.

Thanks to Netgalley, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine | Ballantine Books for the advanced copy!

HOW TO SHARE AN EGG...⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A beautifully written memoir and testament to resilience. Reichert's father survived the Holocaust and moved to Canada where he owned restaurants but more importantly raised her to respect food. His stories, slowly spooled out, led her eventually to explore his past. They also led her to food, to culinary school, to making dishes for her father. It's a thoughtful and different look at generational trauma and healing. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A good read.

A well written book about both food and the Holocaust. I can't even imagine what it would be like to grow up with a father who had lived through the Holocaust, so I was interested to read this book. In the end, I wished it had been two different books because the juxtaposition just didn't work for me. But, that's just a personal choice.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It will be eye-opening for many readers.

Bonny Reichert grew up hearing her Holocaust survivor father telling her "Sweetheart, do you hear me? It's okay. It's over and we survived." But what Ms. Reichert comes to understand - through painful discussions with her father, travel back to Poland, and through the excavation of her own anxieties and fears, that physical survival does not necessarily equate with psychic survival. When a parent survives a horror, how much is transmitted on a deep emotional level to the children? Reichert explores this issue through childhood memories and her adult life, but this is not a book about - or solely about intergenerational trauma. This is also a memoir about the centrality of food in families, in Jewish life, in an immigrant's life. Reichert's lifelong fascination with the creation of food and its ability to nourish runs parallel with her reckoning of her father's life and survival. She learns "survival is not one thing - one piece of luck or smarts or intuition - but a million smalls ones. This choice not that one. This brave move, that good stranger. Careful here. Reckless there." Keeping with the food metaphor, I gobbled this memoir up in a day and highly recommend it. Thank you Ballantine Books and NetGalley for the DRC.

How To Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty is both a captivating food memoir and Bonny Reichert’s deeply personal reckoning with her father’s past as a Holocaust survivor. While her father longed for her to document his experiences for future generations, Bonny found herself paralyzed by the weight of this beautiful yet overwhelming responsibility.

As she pursued her dream of becoming a chef and visited the German sites tied to her generational trauma, Bonny discovered healing and empowerment. In the process, she embraced her role as a storyteller, weaving together food, memory, and history in this poignant and inspiring narrative.

READ THIS IF YOU:
-believe the table is the best place to be
-have ever rediscovered your joy through cooking
-know the past is never far

RATING: 4/5
PUB DATE: January 21, 2025

I really enjoyed this memoir. Reichert's father survived the holocaust and this is partly his story as well as hers. Food plays an important part and the relationship between father daughter influences the menus throughout. A bit uneven at the beginning but comes full circle as what it means to the author to be a child of a survivor of something so heinous. A courageous attempt at finding self awareness.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

My fear when I started this book very much mirrored Reichert's own. Not, to be clear, her fear of the darkness which lay in her father's past, but the fear that her own story would come off as solipsistic and pedestrian beside that of her father. Fortunately, I think Reichert did a great job tying the two together. The story of her childhood, after all, isn't just her own. It also belongs to her father, and that's a part of a survivor's tale we often don't hear about. What happens next? How do you live—truly <i>live</i>—with the horrors of your history?

In Szlama Rajchbart/Solomon Reichert's case, it meant looking to the present and future and doing everything he could to protect his daughter from sharing the pain he'd suffered. Through her portrayal of both her parents, Reichert gives an unusual and truly empathetic portrayal of toxic positivity. One deeply rooted in past trauma and refusal to relive it or pass it on. A worthy aspiration, but one which runs smack-dab into the wall of this book's other major theme: intergenerational trauma.

Now, I have some personal experience with this latter theme. While my family was quite poor for chunks of my childhood, I was never in danger of literally starving. My parents, who'd grown up perfectly house-and-food secure in the Soviet Union, had even less to worry about in that department. And yet, I have to fight myself whenever I enter a friend's home. Opening their fridge or pantry and looking inside is <i>absolutely</i> inappropriate. But just in case...

"Of course you do it," a similarly-inclined friend once told me, laughing. "You're Russian." (I'm Ukrainian, actually. But all of us Soviet/post-Soviet immigrant kids just said 'Russian' to be less confusing, until the war made that very charged.) "You've got to make sure there's enough stored up for the winter."

What this summation leaves out is that my grandparents and great-grandmother did live through the Holocaust and what they called the Great War of the Fatherland. Which ended basically yesterday, as far as my childhood understanding was concerned, even though I was born in the eighties. Starvation was in the bones of my family, just as it was in the bones of Reichert's. With that in mind, her tying together food and want and trauma felt very organic and believable to me.

Her writing of the ways she was and was not exposed to stories of WWII and the Holocaust inevitably made me think of my own contrasting experience. Back in Ukraine, the war was an indelible part of everything, Victory Day was the single most important holiday except maybe New Year's. And my parents never explicitly told me I was Jewish, even as my grandparents strung Yiddish into everyday conversation. It was indelible, and it was avoided, and when a (Christian) religion class was suddenly introduced at my school, after the Soviet Union fell, no one said boo. I listened to Jesus stories the same way I devoured Greek myths, invested but growing no more faithful.

Meanwhile, in the US, we had an entire unit on the Holocaust in eighth grade. We read The Diary of Anne Frank (the version abridged by her father, sadly,) and Elie's Wiesel's Night. On a tenth grade visit to Washington DC, we went to the Holocaust museum en masse. The horrors affected me but did not surprise me. I'd long osmosed that a) humans suck, and b) try not to contribute to the sucking, in that particular blend of prosocial cynicism endemic to many Soviet-born Jews. Mostly, what I took away at the time was 'yes, this is important, but can we please read something with Jews who aren't just sad victims, for the love of fuck?' (Yes, I loved One of a Kind Family.) That, I truly believe, may have been a generational difference.

With all those differences, Reichert's story still felt very genuine and affecting, to me. Her experience wasn't that of her father. Nor was it mine. But we read memoirs to enter someone else's world, not expecting our own. I empathized with her avoidant terror, and appreciated the way she pointed out how contingent on deep empathy that terror was. As a psych nerd, yeah, sometimes deep empathy—the ability to almost literally feel another's pain—is precisely what makes us disconnect, refusing to empathize in order to protect ourselves.

I leave Reichert's food writing for almost last, as it's the reason I picked up her book to begin with. And yeah, she knocked that out of the park. Her descriptions were mouthwatering as well as thematically integrated and cohesive. Recipes, please!

I do have to mention one schmutz in an otherwise great reading experience. Given the climate in which this book is being released, I really, really wish Reichert had at least briefly mentioned Palestine. A heartbreaking example of people who've been taught to Never Forget all their lives. Who are this very day managing to fucking forget. Given Reichert's honesty about how difficult traumatic and contentious topics are for her, I can understand how she got (or, more accurately, didn't get) there. It won't affect my star rating of the book, especially since reviews are about the book we read, not about the book we wish we read. But the absence is still a little jarring. (I also concede that a) this book may have been finished long before the war went from cold to hot, and b) the ARC currently lacks acknowledgements or a full author's note, so all of this could theoretically change.)

That out of the way, is How to Share an Egg worth reading? Absolutely! I think Reichert accomplishes everything she sets out to do, doing so with depth and smooth prose, and I would pick up more of her writing in a heartbeat.*

*Assuming the length of a heartbeat is somehow long enough to let me climb atop my Mt. Everest of a TBR.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House - Ballantine for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions within are my own.

I received a free digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I remember reading an article once about trauma, and how some forms of trauma - such as childhood hunger/malnourishment - can reverberate over several generations. I was fascinated, and Reichert's memoir is a testament to the impacts the Holocaust had on her life, despite being born to safety in Canada many years after the end of the war. As the product of a Holocaust survivor (her father) and a parent focused on being svelte and sophisticated (her mother), one might guess that she has a very disordered relationship with food. However, her father owned a handful of restaurants and was an extremely kind and loving man who never weaponized his experiences (of the "I nearly starved to death as a teenager" type). Still, Reichert early on became the "sensitive one" of her parents' four children, and had extremely visceral reactions to her father's stories and to Holocaust stories in general. Her relationship to this trauma was further complicated as her interest in writing and food grew, and her father saw an opportunity to write a book together. In the end, of course, she has written a book, albeit not the one her father probably envisioned.

While her father is at times the focus of the book, this memoir really focuses on her life and her father's role in it. It is a love story of a parent and child, and a testament to the ongoing effects of a war that ended decades ago. Reichert explores her evolving relationship to this trauma and with her father. While her relationship with him is vivid, I did wish to understand her relationship to her three older sisters more. Instead, her sisters are largely summed up as one composite character (though there are occasional individual references, they aren't flushed out as separate people with unique personalities). Overall, though, this is a stunning memoir.

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).

I absolutely adored this book. The writing was outstanding and the story was captivating. I have already shared my review on my Substack newsleter.

Wow. This book took me by surprise. I went into this non-fiction book completely blind. I knew it was going to be a powerful book after the first chapter made me cry. Bonny Reichert is a beautiful writer. Her prose was breathtaking, it warmed my heart and made me hungry! The way she talks about food was so fascinating. It made me want to be a chef. This book talks about her beloved dad who survived the Holocaust, and how much food impacted his life. Her dad only ate stale bread, coffee grounds, and potato peels during his horrific time in the concentration camps. Her dad survived with his older cousin Abe. His mother and sisters did not survive. After the war ended, he started a new life in Canada. He became a restaurant owner, got married, and had 4 daughters. When Bonny learned her father was a prisoner in Auschwitz, she understood why her dad was so preoccupied and grateful for food/nourishment later in life. This is a heartfelt and profound book about love and family, and how food connects us all to past memories. This book left a lasting impression on me. Family is the most important thing in the world. Absolutely stunning.

Thank you, Netgalley and Random House for the digital ARC.

another ARC courtesy of netgalley. this was a moving memoir about a woman navigating her intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust through her relationship with food. throughout the book, reichart explores themes of self-acceptance, self-discovery, and letting go of others’ expectations. recommend for anyone who loves to express emotions or connections through cooking or those connected to Jewish, Polish, and/or World War II culture.

This is a shared memoir between Bonny Reichert, a journalist and chef, and her father, an eternal optimist and Holocaust survivor. A quick and satisfying read.

I gobbled this book! Literally. I picked it up intending to just taste it but it was so easy to read and I bonded immediately with the little Bonny that I had to keep reading to see what happened. Finished in one day but remembered for much longer, this book will stay with me a while. The author’s relationship with her father is a very familiar one to me. She wants to please and protect him and his goal in life seems to be to make her life as easy as possible. My father had similar aspirations for me and, like Bonny, I know I disappointed him with many of my choices in life. I love the full circle of this plot. It is a memoir but there definitely is a story line that is quite engrossing. The history and cultural lessons along the way were wonderful too. The ending is satisfying and although I didn’t enjoy some of the repetition, this is a five star book for me.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the advance copy.

Bonny Reichert’s father, Solomon (né Szlama Rajchbart), survived the Holocaust before emigrating to Canada in the late 1940s. In How to Share an Egg, Reichert recounts her years-long struggle to understand his relentless desire for everyone to be happy no matter what else is going on—and the ways that his trauma has affected her own life.

Unlike many other survivors, Solomon often spoke about his experiences in Poland and Germany, surviving Nazis, hunger, disease, cold, and more. He didn’t share everything; many of his stories were framed as yet another example of how he triumphed over adversity. His audience, for the most part, was his youngest daughter Bonny, and although she was able to pick up the moral of these stories, she started to have terrifying nightmares about being chased by something monstrous. These nightmares followed her for years. The other thing that followed her for years was an emotional Gordian knot of guilt, depression, and shame that she couldn’t live up to her parents’ expectations of her as a good Jewish girl, wife, and mother. It takes Reichert a lot of determination (and a dash of therapy) to find her own happiness, outside of those impossible expectations.

What makes this memoir stand out from other writing from children of Holocaust survivors is the prominent role of food in both Reichert’s and her father’s lives. Because her parents were often busy when Reichert was a child, she spent a lot of time in her maternal grandmother’s company. Her grandmother—who fled Ukraine decades before World War II—showed her love by preparing dishes that warmed the body and the soul. (Reichert’s descriptions of these meals had my mouth watering more than once.) When she’s older, Reichert attempts to recreate dishes made by her paternal grandmother before the family was sent to the Łodz ghetto and, later, Auschwitz, where Solomon’s immediate family were murdered. The day that Reichert masters the Rajchbart family recipe for cholent is a magical one.

I would recommend this book to readers who are curious about the way that surviving (or not surviving) the Holocaust marks even the lives of those born to survivors and how food can be a powerful means of recovering memory and building a sense of home.

Outstanding and so beautiful. I'm a big fan of food memoirs but I couldn't really imagine what one crossed with a Holocaust history could look like. This is a lovely and life-affirming story and an incredible addition to both genres.

Reichert offers a beguiling memoir about food, family, love, and the impact of the Holocaust on the survivor generations. I was especially impressed that she didn't dwell on the psychological pain she suffered, but rather described it in a way that evokes the reader's empathy without becoming burdensome. Reichert has a way with words that readers will find compelling. Recommended.

Chef and journalist Bonny Reichert always wanted to write a book about how her father survived the Holocaust, but she never felt wholly capable. After a particularly transformative meal in Poland, Reichert finds the path to her father’s memoir, one that explores both her life and his. The book intertwines Reichert’s culinary career with her father’s intense desire for food — built during his time in Auschwitz — and the joy he expressed in sharing it with his family. Reichert nourishes herself and her readers with every bite of this book.