Book Review: How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty

by Bonnie Reichert

Reviewed by Maxine Fischbein

(AJNews) – Toronto-based writer, chef and food stylist Bonny Reichert — who was born and raised in Edmonton —has written a memoir that will surely bring back fond memories for the many Jewish Edmontonians that know the Reichert family and, in particular, Bonny’s father: Holocaust survivor and beloved former Edmonton restauranteur Saul Reichert.

In How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty (Ballantine Books, 2025) Saul Reichert’s story is the jumping-off point for his daughter’s exploration of intergenerational trauma and its effects on her own life.

The unifying feature of the journey is food. Lack of it was one of the privations endured by Saul Reichert when his childhood was destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators in his native Poland. Yet food was also the key to the new life he built for, and with, his family.

Bonny Reichert’s obsession with food has other underpinnings, given her mother Toby’s efforts at maintaining a trim physique in contrast to the girth of her mother — Bonny’s Baba Sarah — a woman who was, both literally and figuratively, larger than life.

Branded by her mother as the “sensitive one,” Bonny Reichert’s trauma begins in earnest when, as a young child, she asks her father about the number tattooed on his arm.

While making every effort to answer her questions with age-appropriate stories about the number and the “bad men” who put it there, her father’s explanations become the stuff of nightmares, a situation that worsens when the family gathers around the TV to watch Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss, a TV series that brought the Shoah to public consciousness when it aired in 1978.

So great is her trauma, that Bonny Reichert spends much of her life avoiding the topic of the Holocaust and declining opportunities to travel to Poland and the death camps. When her father — who hails from a long line of Gerer Chasidim — finds out that a family grave remains in Poland, he insists that the family travel there.

On that trip, a meal in a seemingly unremarkable restaurant — certainly not the kind her discerning family would seek out — Reichert experiences a bowl of borscht that she knows instinctively just how to eat. The meal takes Reichert’s culinary journey to old-new places in her efforts to replicate the cholent once made by Reichert’s paternal grandmother Udel. The rich stew — a Sabbath classic — looms large in Saul Reichert’s early and happy memories from his pre-war childhood in Poland, before the slaughter of his family, his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, forced labour, a death march and, through it all, abject hunger.

Despite this — and, perhaps also because of this, Saul Reichert built a new life, warmly welcoming and feeding others, most notably at the family’s iconic Jasper Avenue eateries Teddy’s and The Carousel.  (Edmontonians of a certain age have vivid memories of Saul Reichert’s warmth as they entered his eateries. You were welcomed as if you were the most important person to walk through the door.)

We get some evocative glimpses of the restaurants through Bonny Reichert’s eyes as a child and teenager.

Also remarkable are the glimpses of Reichert’s maternal grandmother, Sarah Taradash, whose recipes and personal presence brought tam to countless diners. She is a source of comfort to her granddaughter through unconditional love, not to mention a steady stream of Jewish soul food that helped to fuel her Bondles’ seemingly inevitable entrée into the world of cuisine.

Seismic shifts keep happening as Reichert struggles with two wishes expressed by her aging father:  That she should “be happy” — a state that is elusive given the burden she carries — and that she write a book about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor, an assignment she avoids for years but fulfills, in part, in the latter pages of her memoir.

Appetite describes Bonny Reichert’s book thus:

“Sharing the moments that are 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?”

The answer to that question depends, of course, on each reader.

For this one, Reichert’s sour and bitter moments — a number of which are laid at the feet of her mother and authority figures on the professional side of her life — seem to take up a disproportionate amount of real estate in How to Share an Egg.

By contrast, there are more than a few close family members whose sole purposes seem to be to advance Reichert’s self-exploration, as when she fictionalizes her sisters’ names and reduces them to one composite figure.

Those readers who pick up the book anticipating a deep dive into Saul Reichert’s experiences will probably leave the table hungry. Some may not easily digest the poetic license Bonny Reichert utilizes in the telling of her father’s story.

Individuals who crave tales of self-exploration may find the memoir infinitely more satisfying, and foodies will, no doubt, be captivated by Bonny Reichert’s superpower: turning words about food into mouth-watering sensory experiences.

Reichert took a brave step in writing this memoir and she is a writer to watch. Her writing is most exquisite when she gets out of her own head and reveals herself in a living and breathing relationship with those she loves most.

Maxine Fischbein is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter.