Bonny Reichert on Food, Fear, and Finding Beauty

Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head-on.

Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish. Stepping into the kitchen to connect her past with her future, the author recounts the defining moments of her life in a poignant tale of scarcity and plenty.

How to Share an Egg is a journey of deep flavors and surprising contrasts. By turns 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? This moving exploration of heritage, inheritance, and self-discovery sets out to find the answer.

Bonny Reichert is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist. She has been an editor at Today’s Parent and Chatelaine, and a columnist and regular contributor to The Globe and Mail. When she turned forty, she had a now-or-never feeling in her bones and quit her job to enroll in culinary school. After that, she began to explore her relationship with food on the page, seeing her childhood in the restaurant business and her background as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor in a new light. Bonny was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and lives in Toronto with her husband and little dog, Bruno. Her three almost-adult children come and go. She holds a master of fine art in creative nonfiction and teaches writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. How to Share an Egg is her first book.

In our conversation, Bonny remembers how she protected her Holocaust survivor father from the antisemitism she experienced as a child. She shares how she found the strength to tell both her father’s story and her own, and on the foods that have meant the most to her. 

Bonny Reichert's Five Books:

1. Forever by Judy Blume
2. Portnoy’s Complaint by  Philip Roth
3. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
4. Still Life With Remorse by Maira Kalman 
5. How to Share an Egg by Bonny Reichert

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Artwork by Dena Friedman

Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.