This debut novel from food writer Leah Eskin of the Chicago Tribune combines the historical sweep and emotional power of The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer and the resonant use of food and recipes of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.
The story opens on the mountaintop town of Pitigliano, Italy, once called Little Jerusalem for its vibrant, centuries-old Jewish community. But the year is 1943. Mussolini has enacted anti-Jewish laws across Italy, and the family of Stella Fortuna struggles to maintain any sense of their former life. Then one night a neighbor comes to their door holding a ricotta pudding and tells them "You must leave now. You're in grave danger." The Nazis have arrived to help the Fascists of Italy enact their own Final Solution.
Grabbing what few things they can carry (and the pudding), Stella Fortuna escapes into the woods below Pitigliano with her two older brothers and younger sister, Marcella. What follows is a desperate months-long flight. Stella finds temporary and precarious shelter with sympathetic, but fearful families in the countryside, dodging the ever-closer Fascists in pursuit. Meanwhile, she dreams of romance, the comforts of home, and the food that was not just her mother's love, but the delicious expression of an entire culture in danger.
In a separate timeline, Edda Servi Machlin is a housewife in 1960s Westchester trying to make sense of a new culture, as well as the "spaghetti and meatballs" food that passes for Italian cuisine. With caustic wit, we see twentieth-century America through an immigrant's eyes, someone who can never return to her former home because it no longer exists. Someone who comes to understand that it might be up to her to preserve the indelible flavors of an Italian Jewish way of life that is in danger of extinction, as her family once was.
In between these two remarkable stories are more than forty recipes (updated for today's cooks), all inspired by the life and example of Edda Servi Machlin, author of The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews.
PRAISE
"My father, himself an Italian Jew, used Edda Servi Machlin's recipes as a bridge to his culinary and personal roots. Machlin's life inspired this beautiful novel by Leah Eskin: a survival story and a cultural archive. It honors a nearly vanished world through narrative and recipes, showing how memory, food, and storytelling can resist erasure."
--Yotam Ottolenghi, author of Jerusalem: A Cookbook and Ottolenghi Comfort
" "A tale of survival, faith, and family. Leah Eskin writes beautifully, powerfully, and with an exquisite tenderness."
--Achy Obejas, author of Days of Awe and The Tower of the Antilles
"Edda Servi Machline was an icon of Jewish food writing and almost mythical in stature. Eskin's novel illuminates the very human stories of love, longing, family, and food that made Servi Machlin so remarkable. It is a delicious delight to read."
--Leah Koenig, author of Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome's Jewish Kitchen
"Is it a disconnect to call a novel about an Italian Jewish girl and her family's surviving Mussolini's atrocities and the Holocaust 'charming'? Author Leah Eskin has portrayed Edda Servi Machlin's story with humor, elegance, delicious recipes, and always a deep humanity. I ate it up."
--Betsy Andrews, co-author of Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip
