Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (a Memoir with Recipes) - Hardcover

The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told memoir. A story of family, immigration, and love—and an epic meal—Savage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle.

Beginning with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often valued more than money, Savage Feast, a revealing family memoir, told through meals and recipes, describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of hunger during the Holocaust left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician, while Boris’s grandfather was the master black marketeer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad along the way. These spoils kept Boris’s family—Jews living under the threat of discrimination and violence—always provided for and protected.

Although food was in abundance, it became even more important once Boris’s family reached America, after emigrating through Vienna and Rome—a journey filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, the Ukrainian home aide for Boris’s grandfather, shows him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold all at once, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soul mate.

Savage Feast is Boris’s tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Travel + Leisure, the London Review of Books, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, among other publications. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, which was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and lives in New York City.