TREYF

July 25, 2016
Washington Post columnist Altman (Poor Man’s Feast) writes about Jewish food and family in Queens, N.Y., and how the former, with its goulashes and kreplach, sustains and anchors her while the latter leaves her in a state of panic and bewilderment. Her decades-long struggle to regain the happiness and comfort she felt in her beloved maternal grandmother’s home is depicted lovingly, with many moments of heartbreak and disappointment but also joy and contentment. Her childhood and adolescence are rife with disapproval and contradictions, such as bacon breakfasts before Sunday visits to her Orthodox paternal grandparents. Her grandmother tries to feed her brains; her grandfather is a rage-filled cantor whose family perished in the Holocaust. There’s also tremendous conflict between Altman’s father, an adman who adores cooking and food, and her mother, an aspiring singer and actor who starves herself and is relegated to performing for neighbors. The preoccupation with treyf (something that’s prohibited and unkosher) is a constant, such as how her grandmother describes the women Altman’s father dated before marrying, and the Spam he cooks that her mother tosses, emphatically declaring, “We’re Jews.” Pork, shellfish, and everything forbidden are endlessly present in their conspicuous absence. There’s also unease for Altman as she keeps the secret that she’s attracted to women. When she’s in her 30s, she sheds an image that never belonged to her and marries a Catholic woman. Altman’s path to living authentically is hard won, but she demonstrates there’s reward to be found in the fight.

July 15, 2016
A James Beard Award-winning food blogger's account of growing up in a family with conflicting attitudes toward Judaism.Though Jewish by culture, Altman's (Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, 2013) parents never pushed her to explore the religion. Her stylish mother scoffed at Talmudic teachings she believed were "designed for people living five thousand years before Pucci and Ella Fitzgerald." But her advertising executive father, the son of an abusive "fire-and-brimstone Orthodox cantor," had a far more complex relationship to Judaism. Though apparently uninterested in the Jewish religion, he still emanated a "primal yearning for spiritual connection." Feeling left out of the rituals that marked the lives of her more devout friends, Altman decided that she wanted to attend Hebrew school, where she felt the first stirrings of lesbian desire for a beautiful teacher. Meanwhile, her parents' difficult marriage foundered and failed. Her father returned temporarily to his mother's apartment, the very place he had sought to escape as a young man. By contrast, the apartment became a haven for Altman, whose grandmother joyfully cooked meals for her there. Years later, when her own life fell apart, the author returned to her grandmother's home, which her father told her was the place she would "bring my husband and raise my children." While she cooked meals that healed her soul and brought her closer to her beloved grandmother, she finally learned to embrace her homosexuality. Eventually, she married a Catholic woman she loved with--to her surprise--her father's approval. Like him, she was treyf--imperfect and rule-breaking--and in that commonality, the two finally bonded. In this richly textured narrative, Altman not only reveals how she learned to interweave the contradictory threads of her life into a complex whole. She also gives eloquent voice to the universal human desire to belong. A poignant and life-affirming family memoir.

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Starred review from October 1, 2016

Altman (Poor Man's Feast) treats readers to her somewhat unconventional middle-class childhood in 1960s Queens, NY. This readable memoir of a Jewish youth filled with longing for home and family finds contradiction and dashed expectations, as most childhoods do, but is centered eventually without fanfare or angst in the medium of cooking. The treyf (ritually unclean) designation ultimately comes from the author's dawning realization of her homosexuality. Yet, the issues of family and belonging are psychologically threatened by her (seeming) nonnormative orientation. This personal journey is somewhat nostalgic but offered without self-pity or self-loathing, valuing birth families as well as formed ones, honoring the beliefs as well as the memories associated with each. She concludes, "Belonging everywhere, I now belong nowhere.... To know who I am; to remember where I came from." VERDICT Highly recommended for its telling of the complexities of family life and the warm portrayal of coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s.--SC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2016
The word treyf in Hebrew means unclean and prohibited. Altman, a noted food writer who felt much of her life was treyf, explores what it meant to grow up in a Jewish household where the unhappiness was served up as thick as the dusky borscht her grandmother insisted she eat. Her father, a foodie, was as enamored of pork as he was depressed by a stultifying family and an unhappy marriage. Her mother, a model, disdained her chubby daughter. In this companion to Poor Man's Feast (2013), which detailed how New Yorker Altman found love with a small-town Catholic woman, the author turns a literary microscope on her growing-up years and the people who influenced her for good and bad. Like eating popcorn (gourmet popcorn), this is hard to put down, even when readers might occasionally wonder how it is that everyone in Altman's past is such a Character. Still, Altman's conflicted feelings about her life, her parents, and, yes, food infuse this delicious memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)