HOW TO SHARE AN EGG
A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty
By: Bonny Reichert
Published: January 21, 2025
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Memoir
Bonny Reichert is an award-winning journalist, chef, and the child of a Holocaust survivor. In HOW TO SHARE AN EGG, Reichert chronicles her father’s childhood horrors, her own childhood internalizing that trauma, and her adulthood attempting to reconcile her father’s trauma with her own.
In flashbacks and through conversations with her father, Reichert shares the horrors of her father’s time in concentration camps as the only survivor in his family. She remembers the first time, as a young child, seeing the numbers tattooed on his arm and asking him what those were. The author internalized much of his pain and suffering as a child which exhibited in anxiety and panic attacks for her. Since she was a writer, her father asked and begged her to write his story, but she never felt she had the emotional capacity to do it.
“When you have a father with stories like these, and you happen to be a writer, you know what you’re supposed to do…It’s simply the story of a daughter trying to figure out who she is in the shadow of something bigger…It’s a mishmash of what happened to my dad and what’s happened to me; a portrait of a parent and a child, a father and a daughter.”
After waiting until nearly the last minute (her father is 94), canceling and then finally taking a Holocaust tour, she was able to sit down and have the hard conversations with her father, putting pen to paper. A pivotal moment for her was eating a bowl of borscht while in Warsaw. She described it as “sweet and sour and honest and alive.” That bowl of borscht changed everything.
Reichert writes of her Baba, her mom’s mom, who came every weekend and filled the kitchen with food. Baba wore a house dress and baked and cooked for hours straight. Her descriptions brought my own memories to mind of my Great Grandma Wilma. My memories of her are in a house dress with an apron and always, always in the kitchen. I recently perfected her oatmeal cookies and eating one brought me to tears, taking me back to over 45 years ago. Reichert was also the youngest and her experiences as the last child of much older siblings were familiar to me.
So much of this story is centered around food. From the times when her father ate potato peels and coffee grounds to stay alive to the time he was given an egg to share…which is where the title came from. She writes of delicious meals made by her father who owned restaurants and her Baba. She relates food and its connection to memories and stories and how nothing was wasted.
“We did not waste food. Ever.”
“Beautiful fruit was not something to take for granted.”
As Reichert wondered what her grandma Udel was like, I had similar thoughts to my own grandma, who died when my mom was 17. Reichert wanted to “conjure her, smell her, know how she moved, hear her voice.” But, it went farther. She wanted to understand her bravery. How did she cope with being separated from her children? Did she resist or enter the gas chambers bravely? Did she lie, bribe, or deceive to live one more day?
As someone who has read numerous stories (true and fictionalized) about the Holocaust, imagining the author’s father in the camps, hearing his story of survival (hiding in a hay loft), becoming a business owner, father, and grandfather, and living to see his 90s is nothing but inspirational. He wasn’t bitter or filled with hatred. He didn’t fill his life with sadness but looked for the joy in every day. He didn’t let his past consume him. Many of us can take this approach to our own lives.
“Survival is not one thing-one piece of luck or smarts or intuition-but a million small ones. This choice not that one. This brave move, that good stranger. Careful here. Reckless there. From my father, I’ve learned that survival is also a state of mind.”
This emotional and deeply personal memoir is very well-written. I could almost taste the food, imagine the places, and feel her father’s love in her words. I hope this experience of writing was healing for her and allows her to focus from here forward on the many wonderful memories shared with her parents and family.
Bonny Reichert is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist. She has been an editor at Today’s Parent and Chatelaine, and a columnist and regular contributor to The Globe and Mail. When she turned forty, she had a now-or-never feeling in her bones and quit her job to enroll in culinary school. After that, she began to explore her relationship with food on the page, seeing her childhood in the restaurant business and her background as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor in a new light. Bonny was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and lives in Toronto with her husband and little dog, Bruno. Her three almost-adult children come and go. She holds a master of fine art in creative nonfiction and teaches writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. How to Share an Egg is her first book.
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Posted Under Bonny Reichert, Book Review, Holocaust, memoir, WWII