Savage Feast audiobook

Savage Feast is a deeply personal memoir and what makes it even more special? It’s filled with recipes! Savage Feast is a story of family, of one immigrant’s experience, a story of love, and it’s all centered around the love of food. Boris Fishman is born in Soviet Belarus. Fishman conveys that good food was such a hot commodity in Belarus it was even more valuable than money. When he immigrates to the United States, food is more abundant, and he continues to equate it with love. Savage Feast is a beautifully-written tribute to food, family, and much more. It was original and an exceptional reading experience. I’m keeping this review on the shorter side because this is a book to experience and savor. I received a complimentary copy. All opinions are my own. My reviews can also be found on my blog: www.jennifertarheelreader.com

Reading this feels deeply intimate without feeling voyeuristic. The author consistently manages to "find the right distance" between himself and the reader, inviting us into his life and family with a frankness that might be awkward if rendered with less skill.We get to see not only his ownkno struggle with identity and assimilation, but that of his family and the communities they navigate and inhabit in their adoptive country. It is hard to fathom how deeply complicated the questions raised by such a life must be. Not only is there the personal experience of coming from a people set apart and of coming from a country that no longer exists, there is the inherited history of persecution that encompasses not only violence against those that were but against those that were never to be. (As the Mishnah says, to kill a man is to kill an entire world).While this story is largely foreign to the particulars of my own biography, the parallels to other experiences I have read and had related to me are unmistakable. My oldest and dearest friend took a similar journey thirty years ago, so certain parallels resonated with me particularly well. (Though as I noted in another review, one of the more important things I've come to understand is that each person's experience is unique and as much is to be gained by contemplating the differences as the parallels.)

My favorite kind of family memoir is one that is as much about food as it is about the people and their experiences. Years ago, I read and loved Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen. I’ve been hunting around for something similar since. When I read an excerpt from Savage Feast, in which Boris Fishman discusses the mix of smugness and shame he feels when he is the person on a plane with dozens of tinfoil bundles of profoundly garlicky food, I knew I needed to read the rest of the memoir. Like von Bremzen, Fishman offers recipes and memories from Russian history. He adds his own journey through cultural schizophrenia, heartbreak, and depression to acceptance and love along with the memories and recipes. Like all good food-based memoirs, this one made me hungry; I flagged a few of the recipes to try out in my kitchen...Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

I loved the story, intertwined with so many unique recipes!!!

I stumbled upon Boris Fishman's Savage Feast: A Memoir with Recipes on a recent trip to the public library. I found the cover, depicting a crowded table with the remains of a colorful and somewhat elaborate (in its complexity not fanciness) meal, immediately enticing given that we were in the lead-u

This utterly vivid memoir begins with Fishman's protestations of hunger, and it carries his reader through portraits of his larger-than-life family: his grandfather Arkady, a charming man used to hustling to survive; the Ukrainian woman Okshana who comes to care and cook for him; Fishman's cautious parents and their sometimes strangling love; Fishman's own alternation between passionate attachment and recoil. Fishman describes the difficulty of coming into adulthood, not only as a Russian immigrant who feels caught between the Soviet past and the American present, but as an only child who loves his parents dearly and yet feels the pressure and pull of their tremendous cautious, their desire to protect him and keep him close. There's a sequence where he brings them all to Miami, longing for a sunny vacation where everyone could feel joyful and free, and then once he gets there, he feels perpetually irritated, both with the hospitality that doesn't satisfy them and also with them for their constant penny-pinching and fault-finding. He also describes his love life, his obsession with impossible women and their distance from his family life, which is also all-consuming. After sinking into depression, Fishman finds recovery in food: farm work and kitchen work in a Russian restaurant, of course. Fishman's sense of humor and his psychological subtlety, his clear-sightedness (without prescriptivism) about himself and his family, make this memoir gripping to read, while his love and his aspiration to create a family himself in the model of his parents' love for one another is very moving. The book is unpredictable, wherein lies its power, and the recipes laced throughout bring an immediacy and a flavor to its contents that this reader found intoxicating.

Boris Fishman loves to eat. He wants us to enjoy his dishes, so he provides recipes that he learned from his grandfather's Ukranian home aide when depression claimed him. He knew he loved to eat and finally realized that immersing himself in the art of his old world style of Jewish cooking (including pork) would be a road out. It's complicated. So is his family's immigrant journey from Belarus to NYC. He was nine years old in 1988 when they changed homelands, but he brought along the past, including all of the anxiety and fear his parents and grandparents had instilled in him. He navigated this new world more easily and learned the language more completely (he became a writer!), but he couldn't ever leave home. The recipes are complex. In spite of the encouragement of my daughter-in-law, also a youthful Jewish immigrant from Russia who loves to concoct such multi-step dishes and attended college with the author, I doubt I'll ever prepare one of her friend's recipes. I'm content to eat them at my son and daughter-in-law's home, or her parents', and at the restaurants they select for all of us to visit. I miss my daughter-in-law's grandmother, who passed last year. That soup, which simmered all day, was worth the wait. But, like Boris Fishman's recipes, I'm never going to make it myself.

This is an enjoyable food memoir that tells the story of a family who immigrates to New York from Belarus.The majority of the book tells the story of different generations of this family, how they relate to their homeland, to their new home in America, and to each other, often through food. The very end of the book delves into the author's own depression, struggle with relationships, and therapy, which is administered conventionally as well as through cooking and working on a farm. He says "Cooking is making something where there was nothing. That something happens to keep you alive...It is the literal opposite of the emptying out of depression. Only something so elemental could do it -- because your emptying is elemental."I found myself wishing that the last part of the book were longer. Or perhaps developed more in another book. Fishman is foremost a writer, and I look forward to reading more of his work to see if he develops these themes more fully.

A Boris Fishman book is comfort food. His forte is the family dynamics of Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. I appreciate the memoir's descriptions of individual sensitivities rooted in war, generations deep, delicate and raw, the ways they flavor and feed relationships, and group cooking and eating as cure or sublimation. I sympathized when reading about his inventive strategies (working with soil, cows, cooks, food) to struggle through the slough of despond to a series of awakenings. And when he finds the right woman (all wrong), restraint is thrown to the wind. Lovely honesty and just the right balance of irony.

Immigrant stories are often uplifting, heartbreaking, laugh-out-loud funny and thought-provoking because they remind us of our own family histories or because they simply remind us of what it is to be part of the human experience. Savage Feast touched all of my emotions. It made me nostalgic for those of the author's grandfather's generation and sad for future generations who will know such brave and complicated survivors only through literature and family recollection.

I absolutely love this book. The author's writing is so beautiful as well as thought-provoking that I want to finish it all at once but also want to keep reading it. As an immigrant myself, I feel connected in a lot of parts that mentioned by the author. For his family, food brings all of them together. The lady who took care of his grandfather is the key of the family, I feel. The chapter that the author and the lady went back to hometown is the most impressive. Great read!

I enjoyed this book, I don't really know that much about Belarus or its people and I felt like I was able to experience some of the food through Fishman's family and the recipes he shared. He was very honest about his relationship with his family and later about his struggles with depression. I don't know if I've ever wanted to try Russian/ Soviet food but some actually piqued my interest, and his humorous interjections helped as well.

I must admit to sliding through some parts of the memoir---Boris' love life for example. But, even though his family story has absolutely nothing in common with mine, this was a really interesting read about life under Soviets and immigration ("fitting in"). And the recipes!!! Well worth reading. The description of the trip for everyone he arranges for 3 days in Miami is worth the entire price of the book.

Boris Fishman loves and hates in equal measure. Except food. He definitely loves food. His memoir of emigrating from Russia at the age of 9 and the tidal pulls between his family, writing and search for a great love are funny, wry, gut-wrenching and wonderful. I have a feeling it's got some similarities to Gary Shteyngart's "Little Failure" which I'd also like to read.

At first, the way it is written was a little confusing, but still good. It continued to get better and more poetic by the end of it. It is a really good read! I have never read anything, fiction or nonfiction, about people from the USSR. Although I will probably never make any of the recipes, it gave me a new insight into immigrants from that part of the world.