This week, Boris Fishman — the author of A Replacement Life, just released in paperback from HarperCollins—
blogs for The Postscript on one of his favorite paragraphs in his book and the importance of food.
blogs for The Postscript on one of his favorite paragraphs in his book and the importance of food.
The Postscript series is a special peek “behind the scenes” of a book. It’s a juicy little extra something to add to a book club’s discussion and a reader’s understanding of how the book came together.
To “host” Boris at your next book club meeting, request him through JBC Live Chat.
One of my favorite passages in my debut novel, A Replacement Life— the story of a failed young writer who starts forging Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn who have suffered, “but not in the exact way[they] need to have suffered in order to qualify” — appears on page 20 and has no verbs oradjectives; there isn’t even a complete sentence in it. It’s a list. I reproduce it here, along withthe preceding paragraph for context. The young writer’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, hasjust passed away, and he makes his first return to south Brooklyn, where so many Russian-Americans live, in over a year — he has been trying to force his past out of his life — for herfuneral and commemoration. (The first names in the first paragraph refer to the home aides thatlooked after his grandmother when she was ill.)
Because food is so important both to the novel and its author — so much so that, havingfinished my second novel, out from HarperCollins next year, I am contemplating a Ukrainiancookbook as my third project — I invite you to make it a part of your book club discussion of AReplacement Life. Cross-pollination is welcome: One club, in Knoxville, TN, fortified itsdiscussion with vodka and lox. If there’s a Russian grocery store nearby, raid the shelves. And ifyou’re willing to try your own hand at a staple of the Russian table, I include a recipe for borshchfrom the woman whose cooking I want to highlight in the Ukrainian cookbook. I went down tosouth Brooklyn, where she looks after my grandfather, just last night, and made it together withher. You won’t regret the (not very taxing) effort. And in case it’s your discussion that needsfortification, I am also including a handful of discussion questions. Finally, I am available through the JBC Live Chat program to callor Skype into your book club if that would be of interest; you can reach me atcontact@borisfishman.com.
Oksana’s Borshch
The night before, boil three medium-size beets (anywhere from forty minutes to an hour andchange depending on their size and age). Leave the skin on and refrigerate. This helps the beetkeep its color and not blanch when it’s cooking the next day.
To “host” Boris at your next book club meeting, request him through JBC Live Chat.
One of my favorite passages in my debut novel, A Replacement Life— the story of a failed young writer who starts forging Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn who have suffered, “but not in the exact way[they] need to have suffered in order to qualify” — appears on page 20 and has no verbs oradjectives; there isn’t even a complete sentence in it. It’s a list. I reproduce it here, along withthe preceding paragraph for context. The young writer’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, hasjust passed away, and he makes his first return to south Brooklyn, where so many Russian-Americans live, in over a year — he has been trying to force his past out of his life — for herfuneral and commemoration. (The first names in the first paragraph refer to the home aides thatlooked after his grandmother when she was ill.) I am often asked in what way I remain Russian more than a quarter of a century after myfamily left the Soviet Union, when I was nine. I feel no political kinship with the Soviet Union’sfallout republics (I was born in Belarus), and the one return visit I made, in 2000, excavatedpowerful sensory memories but left me with an equally powerful distaste for the lack of civility,paranoia, and xenophobia that continues to thrive there. So my answer tends to refer to theRussian literature that was my path back to my home culture after I’d spent a decade in Americatrying to forget it; the language, earthy and comic and supple and brusque; and the food. Is itbecause professional opportunity — not to mention other forms of personal expression, such asreligious identity — was so much more circumscribed in the Soviet Union that so much moreceremony and ritual significance was given to meals and community? All I can say is that to thisday, my family — its opportunities and self-expression circumscribed in America all the same,due to imperfect English, advanced age, and plain shyness — sits down to meals as to a greatrespite from the ordeals of the day. Great care is taken to prepare the meal, almost always athome, from scratch; it is pounced upon with an equally great hunger that sometimes feelsspiritual more than alimentary. The food is gone in a third of the time it took to prepare. It’s notthe French or Italian model.Slava used to sit at one of these tables once a week, the cooking by a Berta or a Marinaor a Tatiana, uniformly ambrosial, as if they all attended the same Soviet Culinary SchoolNo. 1. Stout women, preparing to grow outward even if they hadn’t reached thirty, intights decorated with polka dots or rainbow splotches, the breasts falling from their sailorshirts, their shirts studded with rhinestones, their shirts that said Gabbana & Dulce.
Stewed eggplant; chicken steaks in egg batter; marinated peppers with buckwheathoney; herring under potatoes, beets, carrots, and mayonnaise; bow-tie pasta withkasha, caramelized onions, and garlic; ponchiki with mixed-fruit preserves; pickledcabbage; pickled eggplant; meat in aspic; beet salad with garlic and mayonnaise; kidneybeans with walnuts; kharcho and solyanka; fried cauliflower; whitefish under stewedcarrots; salmon soup; kidney beans with the walnuts swapped out for caramelizedonions; sour cabbage with beef; pea soup with corn; vermicelli and fried onions.
There may be another reason. Looking from America, Russian food feels like a paradox.(I am calling it “Russian” only as an economical shorthand; there is as much French as CentralAsian influence in it, and Jewish, too, if buried — a Ukrainian Orthodox woman I know had beenmaking kasha varnishkes for decades before she realized its provenance.) Industrial agriculture,with its reliance on chemicals and preservatives, was never practiced in the Soviet Union to thedegree that it is in America; strawberries used to taste like strawberries there, and you couldcount on finding them for sale only in late summer. (Things have changed somewhat now, but intoday’s Ukraine, for instance, Belarussian food products sell at a premium because Belarusavoids GMOs; products advertise this prominently. Isn’t that something? The Soviets were localand organic — and progressive on GMO usage and labeling — long before all this caught on inAmerica.) But neither was health-consciousness a priority in the same way; when it wasn’tbutter in the pan, it was sunflower oil, and lots of it. So, well-raised products cooked in the goodstuff: Perhaps it’s no mystery why Russians love to eat.
Because food is so important both to the novel and its author — so much so that, havingfinished my second novel, out from HarperCollins next year, I am contemplating a Ukrainiancookbook as my third project — I invite you to make it a part of your book club discussion of AReplacement Life. Cross-pollination is welcome: One club, in Knoxville, TN, fortified itsdiscussion with vodka and lox. If there’s a Russian grocery store nearby, raid the shelves. And ifyou’re willing to try your own hand at a staple of the Russian table, I include a recipe for borshchfrom the woman whose cooking I want to highlight in the Ukrainian cookbook. I went down tosouth Brooklyn, where she looks after my grandfather, just last night, and made it together withher. You won’t regret the (not very taxing) effort. And in case it’s your discussion that needsfortification, I am also including a handful of discussion questions. Finally, I am available through the JBC Live Chat program to callor Skype into your book club if that would be of interest; you can reach me atcontact@borisfishman.com. Happy eating, reading, and talking: The Jewish national pastimes.
The night before, boil three medium-size beets (anywhere from forty minutes to an hour andchange depending on their size and age). Leave the skin on and refrigerate. This helps the beetkeep its color and not blanch when it’s cooking the next day. You can make the soup with plain water, or ready-made stock, but you can also make your own— with chicken bones, meat on, or pork bones, ditto, or beef bones. In a 3L pot, cover thebones with 2L of water and bring to a boil. Once the stock is boiling and the surface has coveredwith fat skimmings from the meat, remove the bones, empty the pot of the liquid, and wash it outget rid of the film on the sides. Refill with 2L of water and return to a boil. Once boiling, lower theheat and slide the lid slightly off to prevent it from boiling too hard.
Day of:
- Bring the stock to a boil, then lower to medium heat and slide the lid slightly off.
- Peel three medium-size potatoes, and cube.
- Peel one medium-size parsnip and dice into disks, halving the larger slices.
- Wash and de-seed one jalapeno, and dice into tiny pieces.
- Shred a quarter of a medium-size cabbage head.
- Add all of it — they require the same cooking time — into the boiling pot, along with one nearlyfull tablespoon of salt. The soup stays at medium heat, lid slightly off.
While vegetables are cooking (one hour):
- Peel and grate two big carrots.
- Peel and cube one medium-to-large onion.
- Cover the bottom of a saute pan generously with oil (Oksana uses corn oil)
- Add the onions and saute until they are golden-brown.
- Add carrots and keep sauteing until they are cooked all the way. If you throw in carrot sooner,it will give off a lot of juice and the mixture will braise rather than saute.
- Add a heaping tablespoon of tomato paste using a dry spoon. (Wet spoon will cause mold inthe paste. To preserve tomato paste after opening a can, cover with oil.)
- Press or grate two large garlic cloves into the soup
Separately:
- Skin the beets — if you run them under water, the skin should come off in your fingers.
- Dice into relatively small pieces
After the soup has been going for an hour:
- A dusting of coriander and curry into the soup (Spices get tossed in with about 20% cookingtime left. Otherwise, the flavor isn’t sharp.)- Slide the onion/carrot/tomato paste/garlic mixture into soup
- Deglaze pan with water and add to soup
- Add 1/2 tbsp. of Vegeta or salt to taste
- Add the beets and turn heat to low. Add salt to taste. Does it need acidity? Options: Lemon,vinegar, the brine of pickled cabbage. (Oksana added 2 tbsp 4% vinegar.)
- Add one teaspoon of white sugar.- Add a generous helping of dill. (Oksana’s was from the freezer.)
- Press or grate two large heads of garlic into the soup.
- Add a little bit more salt to taste — borshch always tastes like it needs salt the next day.
- Turn the heat to high; at the first signs of boiling, shut it off or the beets will start to lose color.(When reheating, reheat only serving portions — not the entire pot.)
Leave for the next day.
Boris Fishman was born in Belarus and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. Hiswork has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, TheWall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in New York.Just out in paperback, A Replacement Life is his first novel. It received a rave on the cover ofThe New York Times Book Review — “Is there room in American fiction for another brilliantyoung émigré writer? There had better be, because here he is. Boris Fishman’s first novel, ‘AReplacement Life,’ is bold, ambitious and wickedly smart… The only problem with this novel isthat its covers are too close together… Undoubtedly, comparisons will be made — to Bellow andthe Roths (Henry and Philip).” — and was selected by The New York Times as one of its 100Notable Books of 2014, by Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great New Writersprogram and as a finalist for Jewish Book Council’s Sami Rohr Prize.
Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo. Both were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes, will be out in paperback in early 2020. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives in New York and teaches creative writing at Princeton University.