ThoughtGallery.org > Boris Fishman: Savage Feast with Téa Obreht

Boris Fishman: Savage Feast with Téa Obreht

A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected.

Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Boris’s grandfather’s Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate.

Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at the age of nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Book Review, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Travel & Leisure, and New York Magazine. His first novel, A Replacement Life, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2014), winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal; a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick; and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His second novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2016), and received rave reviews. Boris teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program, and lives in New York City.

Téa Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was an international bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, she now lives in New York with her husband and teaches at Hunter College. Her second novel,Inland, is forthcoming from Random House on August 13th 2019.

This event is free! Let us know you’re coming on Facebook.











When: Mon., Mar. 11, 2019 at 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Where: Books Are Magic
225 Smith St.
718-246-2665
Price: Free
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A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected.

Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Boris’s grandfather’s Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate.

Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at the age of nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Book Review, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Travel & Leisure, and New York Magazine. His first novel, A Replacement Life, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2014), winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal; a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick; and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His second novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2016), and received rave reviews. Boris teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program, and lives in New York City.

Téa Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was an international bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, she now lives in New York with her husband and teaches at Hunter College. Her second novel,Inland, is forthcoming from Random House on August 13th 2019.

This event is free! Let us know you’re coming on Facebook.

Buy tickets/get more info now