When your father survived Auschwitz on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a relationship with food that no cooking school can teach and no amount of abundance can fully resolve.
Bonny Reichert avoided the Holocaust for most of her life — not the knowledge of it but the direct confrontation with what it meant for her. Then a bowl of borscht in Warsaw undid her. How to Share an Egg traces the journey that followed: back through her culinary lineage, into chef training, through the crumbling of a marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, and finally to Poland.
What makes the book exceptional is the structural intelligence — each chapter is anchored to a dish (her grandmother’s potato knishes, the brown butter eggs her father still scrambles at ninety-three), and each dish carries more than it should be able to carry, which is the point.
Where Art Spiegelman’s Maus found a form for inherited trauma through comics, Reichert has found one through recipes. The flaky knish. The molasses porridge bread. The egg, shared, because sharing is how you prove there is enough.
