The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World - Hardcover

Sheraton, Mimi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767905024 ISBN 13: 9780767905022

Publisher: Broadway, 2000

Synopsis

A famed food writer tells the poignant, personal story of her worldwide search for a Polish town's lost world and the daily bread that sustained it.

A passion for bialys, those chewy, crusty rolls with the toasted onion center, drew Mimi Sheraton to the Polish town of Bialystok to explore the history of this Jewish staple. Carefully wrapping, drying, and packing a dozen American bialys to ward off translation problems,
she set out from New York in search of the people who invented this marvelous bread. Instead, she found a place of utter desolation, where turn-of-the-century massacres, followed by the Holocaust, had reduced the number of Jewish residents from fifty thousand to five.

Sheraton became a woman with a mission, traveling to Israel, Paris, Austin, Chicago, Buenos Aires, and New York's Lower East Side to rescue the stories of the scattered Bialystokers. In a bittersweet mix of humor and pathos, she tells of their once-vibrant culture and iconic bread, reviving the exiled memories of those who escaped to the corners of the earth with only their recollections--and one very important recipe--to cherish.

Like Proust's madeleine-inspired reverie, The Bialy Eaters transports readers to a lost world through its bakers' most beloved, and humble, offering. A meaningful gift for any Jewish holiday, this tribute to the human spirit will also have as broad an appeal as the bialy itself, delighting everyone who celebrates the astonishing endurance of the simplest traditions.

"On a gray and rainy day in November 1992, I stood on Rynek Kosciuszko, the deserted town square of Bialystok, Poland, and was suddenly overcome by the same shadowy sense of loss that I had felt in the old Jewish quarters of Kazimierz in Cracow and Mikulov in Moravia. To anyone who knows their tragic history, these empty streets appear ominously haunting, especially in the somber twilight of a wet, gray afternoon. The damp air seems charged with echoes of silent voices and ghostly wings and the minor-key melodies of fiddlers on rooftops.

"As a slight chill went through me, I had vague intimations that I was at the beginning of an adventure. I could not guess, however, that what had started as a whimsical search would lead me along a more serious path that I was unable to forsake for seven years. Even now I am not sure my quest is over, nor that I want it to be.

"The story began with my passion for the squashy, crusty, onion-topped bread roll known as a bialy and eaten as an alternative to the bagel. Widely popular in New York City and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the

About this title

Review:

As many of us know, bialys are chewy, onion-topped rolls, delicious with a cream-cheese schmeer. They originated in Bialystok, Poland, from which they--and the Jews who made and cherished them--have all but disappeared. In The Bialy Eaters, food writer Mimi Sheraton traces the history of this traditional treat and recounts her pursuit of it from Manhattan's Lower East Side (now bialy central) to Bialystok and elsewhere. Her book is principally a tale of the men and women, many pogrom and Holocaust victims, who have lived to recall the once plentiful kuchen. If the story lacks the thrust and imaginative life another writer might have given it, it is still a compelling blend of culinary investigation and poignant cultural evocation.

After carefully drying and wrapping exemplary bialys from Kossar's bakery in Manhattan to take with her as memory jogs, Sheraton heads first to Poland. She encounters no true bialy in Bialystok (a hamburger-roll-like bun is proffered in its name), nor does she find one in Israel, Paris, or Argentina. Look-sees in Miami Beach, Florida; Chicago; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Beverly Hills, California, are more encouraging, but also reveal underbaked and undersalted versions made--horror of horrors--with cinnamon sugar, raisins, and blueberries. Her investigation achieves moving resolution, however, in the person of Pesach Szsemunz, an ex-Bialystoker and bialy baker who survived Auschwitz, Dachau, and "other concentration camps" and now lives in Australia. "In 1941," he writes Sheraton, "the Nazis came to us, and since then there are no more Bialystoker kuchen, no more kuchen bakeries, and no more Bialystok Jews. [No other] Bialystoker," he adds, "can tell you more." Yet, as Sheraton reveals in her touching book, bialys do live on, delighting those who eat them--a tribute to endurance itself and the power of everyday life. --Arthur Boehm

From the Back Cover:

United States, the small, round bialy is characterized by an indented center well that is ringed by a softer, higher rim, all generously flecked with toasted onions and, at its most authentic, with a showering of poppy seeds. I cannot remember when I first ate one of these fragrant rolls, but surely it was addiction at first bite . . ."
-- From The Bialy Eaters

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0767905024
• ISBN 13: 9780767905022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176