Description
Price: $30.00 - $16.80
(as of Jun 06, 2025 18:45:36 UTC – Details)
An “absolutely transformative” (People) culinary memoir about the relationship between food and family—sustenance and survival—from a chef, award-winning journalist, and daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
“Beautifully written, heartbreaking and hopeful.”—Ruth Reichl, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Novel
When you’re raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.
Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head-on.
Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish. Stepping into the kitchen to connect her past with her future, the author recounts the defining moments of her life in a poignant tale of scarcity and plenty: her colorful childhood in the restaurant business, the crumbling of her first marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, her decision to become a chef, and that life-altering visit to Poland. Whether it’s the flaky potato knishes and molasses porridge bread she learned to bake at her baba Sarah’s elbow, the creamy vichyssoise she taught herself to cook in her tiny student apartment, or the brown butter eggs her father, now 93, still scrambles for her whenever she needs comfort, cuisine is both an anchor and an identity; a source of joy and a signifier of survival.
How to Share an Egg is a journey of deep flavors and surprising contrasts. By turns sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, this is one woman’s search to find her voice as a writer, chef, mother, and daughter. Do the tiny dramas of her own life matter in comparison to everything her father has seen and done? This moving exploration of heritage, inheritance, and self-discovery sets out to find the answer.
From the Publisher
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Publication date : January 21, 2025
Language : English
Print length : 304 pages
ISBN-10 : 0593599160
ISBN-13 : 978-0593599167
Item Weight : 12.8 ounces
Dimensions : 5.78 x 1.06 x 8.62 inches
Customers say
Customers find this book beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking, describing it as a story of food. They appreciate its readability and consider it worth reading.
briann –
A Father/Daughter Memoir
A new memoir by Bonny Reichert , How to Share an Egg, tells the story of Bonny’s father intertwined with her own story. It is a story of food, family and survival. Her father was a young Holocaust survivor with amazing survival skills, strength, and resilience who built a new life and family in Edmonton, Canada after the war. Bonny relates how she discovered her father’s story and his urgency for her to chronicle the tale. We also see her struggles as a woman, daughter and professional writer and chef. I usually read a book but I listened to this one, and I think the experience was enhanced by the author’s narration. I loved it.
deedee phillips –
Beauty for Ashes
Thank you , Bonny, for being brave enough to share this remarkable story of your father’s survival in the midst of evil. And your courage to partake of it yourself. You are fortunate to have a dad who took heartache and turned it to something worthwhile. Who took the ashes of life and found some beauty hidden in it. Truly my heart has been enlarged reading your memoir – as yours was in writing it. Be blessed as you pursue your dreams, Deedee Phillips
under the radar books –
How to Share an Egg.
How to Share an EggBonny ReichertHOW 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…âï¸âï¸âï¸âï¸
Lori –
Great insight!
I loved how this book exposed not just the horrors of the Holocaust but also the generational impact and after effects. Also the author is very talented in word handling.
Kindle Customer –
Never Forget. Never.
Bonny writes from her heart, soul, strength and mind. Like the story of the Israelites in the Old Testament, food is the essential piece of their story. Their story is one of pain, sorrow, grief, and food. Food was the core of their survival.As it was with Bonnie and her father.Do not pass by this book.Life, death, pain, acknowledgment of fear. She ran until she faced her family’s history.Bonny shares a story of redemption of herself and her family with hudzpah, strength, determination, and great love.
Sally L. Jablonski –
A New look at a Familiar Story
Bonny weaves the story of her personal growth around and through her father’s Holocaust story, uniquely beautiful and horrible. An unforgettable read.
*TUDOR^QUEEN* –
Daughter writes of father’s Holocaust experiences and ethnic foods
This was a book about a woman who was very close to her father, a man who was a Holocaust survivor. He tried not to burden her too much with his Holocaust related stories while she was much younger, but as she grew into adulthood he gradually shared more as she hungered for this information. Ironically enough, it seemed like he was able to handle the horrors of his past much better having lived it, while his daughter was filled with much more anxiety the more information she pried from him.Her father was very passionate about the cultural foods he remembered eating from the loving hands of his own mother, and would often describe them to his daughter. In turn, she also developed a passion for these foods, learning how to cook them from both her father and maternal grandmother. She eventually parlayed this into attending chef school. Her father had owned and operated restaurants, but did not want this overwhelming work intensive future for his daughter. In the end, she organically mixed her gift for writing with her culinary obsession and wrapped it around her father’s story. I think this amalgam of ingredients she combined in this memoir made the process of telling his story much more palatable. I loved hearing about the foods she was making, even though for the most part I had never eaten any of them in my lifetime. She made it all sound so delicious!The father’s Holocaust experiences did not weigh down the book heavily- they were artfully interspersed throughout the book around the author’s own life story and all the culinary interludes- and I learned a lot about this horrific slice of history in such a personal way that I had never really experienced before. Well-done.Thank you to Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.
Mimi –
Beautiful story
A daughterâs perspective on the Holocaust survival of her father was touching and powerful. I read the book in a week. Although I am a Christian woman married to a Jewish man, the thought that his life would not exist if his family did not survive the Natzi invasion of Eastern Europe is devastating to me. This was a âmust readâ book.
Amazon Customer –
Great read. A daughter experiences the horrors her father went through during the ww 2.