[.ca] The Bialy Eaters (ISBN 0767910559)

From Amazon.com:
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. \oNo other\c 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

Not By Bialies Alone:
Mimi Sheraton's work about a special bread and the people who made it echoes her subject matter. The Bialy eaters is itself moist, crusty, sensual, and characterized by a depressed hole in its centers. The hole is not due to any shoddiness in Ms. Sheraton's craft; it is the loss of some 60,000 beautiful soles and their rich culture that is the underpainting of her fine portrait of a special bread. Her doomed but dogged pilgrimage back to Bialystok, the source of the Bialy, is commendable for its integrity. Reading true, it involves a tale sadly too familiar for many of her readers, myself included. But it was her descriptions of bialies and pletzels, which I remember from my childhood in Baltimore, still warm from the baker's oven, that were the source of my lost night's sleep. I salivated and ruminated over the tastes and smells of my past. Sheraton shows shows how food is more than calories and carbs and taste and smell; it is also culture and history, art and, at its very best, a poetic expression of love. I can't wait to try the recipe.

It's not about the roll:
Sheraton comes out with two statements that are on the surface contradictory: the best bialys (and the customs used to eat them) were from Bialystok, but the bialys she most enjoys are from the places she is most familiar (ie, Kossar's). For instance, even though every Bialystoker she encounters states that you absolutely do not split the roll open, she states that she still continues to do this because she finds it awkward not to. Fair enough. However, other variations of the bialy, such as the amount of onion used and the generosity of poppy seeds on top, she seems to feel are intolerable. And that's fine, too, because what she is really saying- and what just about everyone she interviews is saying- is that the bialy you love best is the bialy you grew up with. When all is said and done, it isn't about the specific recipe or food as much as it is about the past. The food you grew up with is one of the strongest links to your past. This is what Sheraton is really writing about; when the Bialystokers talk about how much they miss the bialy they grew up with and how inferior the modern versions are, what they are really mourning is the loss of the home they lived in. That the exact method of producing the bialy has been lost is just one more testament to the world that was destroyed in the Holocaust. My mother went to visit my sister in New York recently, and I asked her to bring back some bialys. Surely the bialys in New York would be better than the bialys I eat here in Boston. Not even close. My bialy has definite merits over its New York counterpart (abundant onions and poppyseeds, huge and fat, not flat), but it wasn't simply that. My bialys are the ones I've grown accustomed to eating and remind me of the neighborhood I buy them in and the people I eat them with. I cannot imagine losing all of that, and every passage of this book that spoke about those losses brought tears to my eyes. Read this book and fall in love with an old bread and a lost world.

Intermittantly interesting, but ill-digested:
This is an annoying book. The author is interested in her topic, but only up to a point. If she has a freebie trip somewhere, she'll check out the bialy picture there. But if nobody will pay her way (as in the case of Australia), she won't. Surprisingly she is not embarrassed to admit this openly. The research is by-the-numbers. She'll ask her standard questions and report the answers dutifully. ("I asked him, 'Did you eat halvah with your kuchen?' He said Yes.") This leads to a lot of repetition, as respondent after respondent says the same thing. There's not a lot of creative thought here to organize the material--except her own story of how she got a letter from somebody and checked it out, which is far less interesting than the real subject matter (Bialystokers and their foodways) could have been. A better book would have at least had a map of Bialystok with the bakeries and shops marked, so we could have a spatial context to put her random data into. Luckily her informants have some interesting stories to tell--sometimes in spite of her bialy questionnaire. ("I left home that day and never saw my family again." "Did they eat halvah with their kuchen?") If you don't expect insights, this is an o.k. short read. Like a long Sunday New York Times Magazine article.

Blends a culinary expose with a travel memoir:
Bialys are bread rolls with toasted onion centers: her passion for these rolls led the author to the Polish town of Bailystok, where she investigated the origins of the Jewish staple and those who invented it. Bialy Eaters blends a culinary expose with a travel memoir and will prove of particular interest to Jewish food fans.

A lovely and unusual work of nonfiction.:
I grew up on Grand Street near Kossar's bialy bakery, and Ms. Sheraton comes close to making me taste those delicious breads once again. Her language is descriptive about food in much the same way that a good novelist makes you see something common differently through deft imagery. Unless you are a major nitpicker, you'll enjoy this gentle, respectful, and fun book. And if you haven't tasted a genuine bialy, on your next trip to NYC please do take a sidetrip to Grand and Essex and pick up a bag--onion, not garlic, for reasons the author addresses--fresh and warm out of the oven. In a world of mass-produced blandness, I can see why Ms. Sheraton wrote this book, seeking the secret behind something unique.