For many people who are uprooted from their lives in their homeland, the foods of home are often the first things they want to share, and the last connection to home that they hang onto. That’s certainly true for Edmonton’s Reichert family. Saul Reichert was the sole surviving member of his immediate family when he arrived in Canada as a Jewish war orphan aboard the SS Sturgis in 1948. He was one of 1,123 orphans brought to Canada through the Jewish War Orphans Project, spearheaded by the Canadian Jewish Congress. Saul soon found work at a diner called Teddy’s Restaurant, and would go on to become owner of Teddy’s as well as many others over the years. In her upcoming book, How to Share An Egg, A True Story of Love, Hunger, and Plenty, Saul’s daughter Bonny explores what she considers the guiding principle of her life: that food equals life. Through family stories as well as her own experiences Bonny weaves her family's devastating losses in the Holocaust with her own coming of age story. “When I was a child, there was always the idea that I would write my dad's story, that I would write the story of his survival and the things that had happened to him. And I wanted to do it, but I couldn't do it. I didn't think I was worthy of it,” says Bonny. It wasn't until Bonny visited Poland where she saw the sights of the horrors her family experienced that she felt she could find a way into these stories. “And I started to see that maybe instead of writing my father's story, I could write my story of being my father's daughter. And a little later I started to realize that maybe I could tell that story through food, which was this theme that came up again and again and again throughout not just my life, but my father's life too.” In this episode we join Bonny as she prepares a dish Saul remembers his mother cooking for Shabbat, and hear Saul recount his harrowing story of surviving the Polish ghettos of Pabianice and Lodz that he and his beloved family were forced into in Poland, and his ultimate survival of Birkenau.
[00:00:03]Saul Reichert: Is it hot yet?
[00:00:06]Bonny Reichert: Underneath it's very hot.
[00:00:08]Tina Pittaway: This is Bonny Reichert and her dad, Saul.
[00:00:11]Saul Reichert: That cholent looks delicious. It looks like the old cholent.
[00:00:15]Bonny Reichert: Well, let's see.
[00:00:16]Tina Pittaway: Bonny's a chef and a journalist, and they're sharing a meal that Saul remembers from his childhood in Poland, something called cholent.
[00:00:25]Bonny Reichert: You're gonna want salt
[00:00:26]Tina Pittaway: Bonny is working towards perfecting her recipe for cholent. This is the third version she's made in the past few months.
[00:00:35]Bonny Reichert: It wouldn't be traditional, but I would add fresh herbs or maybe some lemon juice to make it a little more, a little brighter, juicier.
[00:00:46]Tina Pittaway: It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the Reicherts are obsessed with food.
[00:00:50]Bonny Reichert: Food was the center of all of our lives all the time. Everybody was a cook in my family. Everybody was in love with food.
[00:00:59]Tina Pittaway: And in her upcoming book, How to Share An Egg, A True Story of Love, Hunger, and Plenty, Bonny explores what she considers the guiding principle of her life: that food equals life.
[00:01:16] Through family stories, her own experiences and recipes that hold special meaning, Bonny weaves her family's devastating losses in the Holocaust with her own coming of age story.
[00:01:28]Bonny Reichert: When I was a child, there was always the the sort of the idea that I would write my dad's story, that I would write the story of his survival and the things that had happened to him. And I, I wanted to do it, but I couldn't do it. I didn't think I was worthy of it. I didn't know how to do it. I couldn't ask the questions I would've had to ask to be able to do it properly.
[00:01:56]Tina Pittaway: It wasn't until Bonny visited Poland where she saw the sights of the horrors her family experienced that she felt she could find a way into these stories.
[00:02:05]Bonny Reichert: And I started to see that maybe instead of writing my father's story, I could write my story of being my father's daughter. And a little later I started to realize that maybe I could tell that story through food, which was this theme that came up again and again and again throughout not just my life, but my father's life too.
[00:02:29] I'm Tina Pittway and more with Bonny and Saul Reichert next on Countless Journeys from the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.
[00:02:41] OPEN MONTAGE
[00:02:43] Countless Journeys. All of our chefs represent either our grandmothers or our mothers or our aunts or the land we come from, or the place we grew up in and we put ourselves on the plate.
[00:02:57] It was my home, it was everything. People came in and wanted to talk to me, and whenever they came in to buy a loaf of bread, they had to make sure that I knew that they bought a loaf of bread and sat down and wanted to talk to me.
[00:03:13] It was Portuguese women coming here to build a better life, but also to help build Canada.
[00:03:18] It, it's, it's scary to make that change. Our, our change was absolute. There was no going back, so it was a, a brave thing for my parents to do.
[00:03:28] Instead of feeling torn between my two realities, I decided to feel happy wherever I am.
[00:03:38] MUSIC FADES
[00:03:42]Tina Pittaway:Growing up in Edmonton in the 1970s, the kitchen was one of Bonny Reichert's favorite places to be.
[00:03:53]Bonny Reichert: I always loved to cook. I loved to be in the kitchen. I loved to have the kitchen to myself, which was hard to get in my house. I have three older sisters. All of them like to cook too. My grandmother, you know, it was a, a very popular room, but when I could be in the kitchen by myself, it was like a laboratory. I loved to play around in there and do things I knew I wasn't really supposed to do, like fry and chop and bake, and I was messing around in there whenever I could.
[00:04:25]Tina Pittaway: Her love of food came naturally enough. Her parents, Saul and Toby Reichert, owned several restaurants throughout the city, and her maternal grandmother was a source of steady inspiration as well.
[00:04:37]Bonny Reichert: Her name was Sarah Taradash. She was from a little town near Odessa in Ukraine. It was 1917 , the pogroms, and she was basically run out of her home as a teenager, and so that was an earlier wave of immigration in Edmonton.
[00:04:54]Tina Pittaway: Teddy's was the name of the first restaurant her parents owned.
[00:04:58]Saul Reichert: It was my whole life. People came in and wanted to talk to me, and whenever they came here to buy a loaf of bread, they had to make sure that I knew that they bought a loaf of bread and sat down and wanted to talk to me. So it was my social life. It was from 11 to 11 for many years, and I loved it. It was my home. It was everything.
[00:05:21]Bonny Reichert: One side had little booths along the wall. The booths had these mini juke boxes. You could put a coin in and choose your music, and then down the center was a counter and there was a soda fountain. And then the menu was, dad kept the menu at first that the place came with. So, It was Chili Con Carne and Hot Turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes, and like real comfort food.
[00:05:54]Saul Reichert: Toby's mother, she was a real great chef, Jewish chef, and when we opened a place called the Carousel, I engaged her to be the chef and she made the most wonderful food, blintzes, and she made the best corned beef, and to this day, we've made the same corned beef with her recipe.
[00:06:21]Bonny Reichert: And then he decided to renovate.
[00:06:25] When I was a young teenager, it was an emporium. It was two stories. When you came in the front, there was what we called the deli, and that had the corned beef that we were known for. And then on the other side of that wall was a lounge. And then upstairs was a dining room. And a dance floor. A dance floor with a disco ball.
[00:06:49] And lights in the floor, which when I was, when it opened, I was 13 years old, was about the most exciting thing you know, I could have imagined.
[00:06:59]Tina Pittaway: Teddy's was where Saul landed his first job when he arrived in Edmonton in 1948 before becoming its owner in the 1950s. Teddy's is also where he met Bonny's mother, Toby.
[00:07:11]Bonny Reichert: My mother came into Teddy's as a teenager, maybe she was in high school.
[00:07:16]Saul Reichert: I was at the cash register.
[00:07:19]Bonny Reichert: And she came to pay her bill and she had had a tomato juice and let's say the tomato juice was 5 cents, and my mother said to my father, who was working the cash register, how dare you charge 5 cents for a tomato juice? I could buy a whole can of tomato juice for 5 cents.
[00:07:39]Saul Reichert: I remember that conversation very vividly because it was very unusual.
[00:07:44]Bonny Reichert: So that was the kind of girl that my mother was very feisty.
[00:07:48]Tina Pittaway: Saul Reichert was an orphan when he arrived in Canada. The sole surviving member of his immediate family when he sailed to Canada.
[00:07:56]Bonny Reichert: He had $2 in his pocket and he did not know a soul.
[00:08:02]Tina Pittaway: Saul arrived at Pier 21 aboard the SS Sturgis.
[00:08:05]Saul Reichert: The Red Cross was there and they gave us milk and cookies and like a cake or something, and then we got on the train to go west.
[00:08:20]Bonny Reichert: Canadian Jewish Congress sponsored around 1100 people from from Europe, from the camps. He was part of a group of 1,123 war orphans that were allowed to come to Canada if they had a Jewish family sponsor them.
[00:08:40] It was a very special list and he got on that list and he lived when he came to Edmonton with this family, the Margolis family.
[00:08:50]Tina Pittaway: How to Share an Egg brings us deeply into Saul's experience in the Second World War. Saul was the beloved only boy in a family of girls headed by his widowed mother.
[00:09:02]Bonny Reichert: My dad was born in a little place called Pabianice, or Pabianice which is uh, a small town near Lodz in Poland. He came through the war with very little family. His mother and sisters died.
[00:09:20]Saul Reichert: September the first, 1939.
[00:09:27] I remember there were explosions all around us and people were running out of their homes into the street, and they were huddling against the buildings.
[00:09:41]Bonny Reichert: They were moved from their home in Pabianice, in their own town into the ghetto in Pabianice, so still in their own town, but they had to leave their home and go inside this ghetto.
[00:09:56]Saul Reichert:And we were in that ghetto till 1942 and in 1942 we were told get out of the home and take whatever we can. And that was a very, very traumatic night.
[00:10:12]Bonny Reichert: They were deported to Lodz.From Pabianice to Lodz.
[00:10:17]Saul Reichert:From Pabianice to Lodz.
Now, that was a real, real nightmare. Lodz is about 15 kilometers, and they had a street car to Lodz.
[00:10:29] And then they asked the old people to come forward. Most of the people that came forward, they just took it to a place and they took out the older people and shot them and killed them right away.
[00:10:44] And how my mother, her name was Udel Rahel, how she managed to get us onto the street car and from Pabianice to Lodz that we lived for another two and a half years is amazing thing that I can never figure out how she did it.
[00:11:07]Tina Pittaway: Having somehow survived being murdered along with most of the older residents of the Pabianice ghetto, Saul's mother faced another huge challenge upon entering the Lodz ghetto.
[00:11:19]Bonny Reichert: The Lodz ghetto was a starvation factory. There was not enough food. People were dying in the streets. It was a thoroughly miserable, life-threatening existence there.
[00:11:35]Saul Reichert: My mother got lucky, I don't know - lucky or smart. She got a job at a place where you handed out vegetables and my sister got a job where they handed out soup. Because when we went for for vegetables, she threw out an extra couple. She took a risk that would catch her, they would punish her, but she took that risk and my sister was in the kitchen.
[00:12:06] When you were in the kitchen, you got a ladle of soup and a ladle of soup consisted of soup and maybe one potato. And my sister, when we went to get the soup, we got a, a ladle full of potatoes, very little water. This is the kind of thing that saved our life in the ghetto because when I went to Birkenau and I was in front of Mengele and I saw one man goes this way and one man goes this way with a, with, he had a baton there and there was a couple soldiers with dogs standing there and with guns, and he was pointing with his baton this way or that way.
[00:12:56] And the way, if you looked like you're going to die because you had starved in the ghetto, they right away they put you to the crematorium, but if you looked healthy that they can get labor out of you, you put in the living side, and I was of the lucky ones that I was pointed to the living side because of my mother and my sister who were giving us extra food and extra, you know, extra vegetables and extra potatoes in the soup.
[00:13:32]Bonny Reichert: His mother was, was amazingly resourceful. She, you know, figured out how to save my father's life so that I can be here talking about this right now.
They stayed together there and um, were on one of the last transports from there to Auschwitz, Berkenau.
And when they got got off the train there, um, he was told to go one direction and his mother and sisters went the other direction.
Saul Reichert: All we can hear is dogs barking and Germans yelling, raus, raus. You know what that means? Get out. And immediately the men were put to one side and the women and children were put to the other side.
And I get out to one side and I could see my mother and sisters going the other side of one long line. It was hard to really see any, uh, faces, but they could you waved and say goodbye and, and, so that's the last time I saw any of them.
You can't imagine how, how frightening it was the dogs and the Germans with the guns and the and the, uh, screaming and hollering and shooting. Was just most terrible, terrible day that I remember.
[00:15:09] We went to work and we had terrible work. We were digging ditches, very, very deep ditches, but it was very, very deep. It was very, very hard work.
[00:15:26]Tina Pittaway: In the chaos of all of this, Saul is reunited with a cousin Abe.
[00:15:30]Saul Reichert: And we had to carry those railway ties to take it from one place to the other because had the railway ties with the railway wagons to take from one place to the other.
[00:15:45] I remember when I was liberated, I was liberated on May the eighth, 1945. I was with the hundred other guys who were marched by the SS and we were overnight at the barn to sleep because they, they, even the German soldiers needed sleep. And in the morning when they called us everybody to get up and come.
[00:16:17] And we heard the guns already. So we knew that the Americans are very close and they told us to get out and I decided not to get out to hide in on, on a haystack stack. And I heard him call, come down, come down, or else we find you we shoot you. I didn't go down. And after a little while, I dunno how long it was, I heard voices. They said, come on, come on. The Americans are here. The Americans are here.
[00:16:51] So I finally believed it. I came down and I was so excited of course, I - I'm going to live, I'm not going to die. The whole thing was always, You're going to die. You're going to die.And now you're going to live.
[00:17:09]Tina Pittaway: The title of Bonny's memoir is taken from an encounter that Saul and Abe had in those first few days of being liberated. Underfed for years, the starving man walked through the German countryside in search of something to eat.
[00:17:22]Saul Reichert: And we didn't know where to go, what to do. We were just left in the world all by ourselves.
[00:17:28] So of course, we started knocking at doors and would you give us any food? Well, They gave us an egg, one egg that's all they can spare. So I had my cousin and I said, well, we are two people. How are we going to share this egg?
[00:17:50]Tina Pittaway: Loss, trauma, sharing, hunger, hope. The themes that ran through Saul's experience found their ways into the stories he would tell when Bonny was growing up. And these are themes and stories that she explores in her memoir.
[00:18:06]Bonny Reichert: It came in dribs and drabs. He didn't sit me down and tell me the whole story, but he did tell stories and he, he had a way of telling the stories that made them not as scary as they really were. So he didn't lie. He didn't even really sugarcoat.
[00:18:34] It was more the tone. I don't know how a person could come with that kind of baggage and that kind of history and know intuitively how to share just the right amount. Not too much, but it wasn't a big secret, and raise a family with this trauma in the background without it becoming, um, you know, an overpoweringly dark force.
[00:19:04] So to unpack that, um, on a sort of day-to-day level, I think he, he gave the information that we needed when we needed it, but he didn't hide either. So he somehow found the balance. I don't know how he did it, honestly. I don't know how he knew.
[00:19:29] When I was a child There was always the, the sort of, the idea that I would write my dad's story, that I would write the story of his survival and the things that had happened to him. And I, I wanted to do it, but I couldn't do it. It it. I didn't think I was worthy of it. I didn't know how to do it. I couldn't ask the questions I would've had to ask to be able to do it properly.
[00:19:56]Tina Pittaway: But things changed for Bonny after she made not one, but two trips to Poland.
[00:20:02]Bonny Reichert: So I had grown up with the feeling that we did not need to go back to Poland. This was not something that was important. We knew what had happened. We, um, you know, my dad had had enough experience for all of us and there was no need to go back. He did not really want us to go back. He didn't wanna go back.
[00:20:25]Tina Pittaway: But in 2015, Saul heard from an extended family member that they had learned of a grave site in Warsaw.
[00:20:31]Bonny Reichert: He got a call that there was a tomb. Of an ancestor. His ancestor in Warsaw. Warsaw has a, a massive Jewish cemetery still, and relatives had discovered this tomb in Warsaw.
[00:20:50]Saul Reichert: My grandfather, who was in Warsaw, his name was Shlomo Rothblat, they called him Shlomo Chusid. I am named after him.
[00:21:02]Bonny Reichert: The tomb of his maternal grandfather was there, and all of a sudden he turns on a dime and he says, I wanna go. I wanna go see this tomb in Warsaw. He didn't wanna do anything else. He didn't wanna go back to the camps. He didn't wanna go to Pabianice where he was from. He just wanted to see the tomb and come home. And I was faced with a choice. I did not wanna go. I was quite afraid to go. I had always felt quite afraid of going to Poland. But I could either, he was going anyway. I could be part of it or not be part of it.
[00:21:40] So we went and my dad was satisfied. We saw the tomb. It was, you know, quite a happy occasion. We, we came home, we were there and back in five days and he was done, but I was not done. That happened to be a beginning for me instead of an end.
I came home and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I couldn't stop thinking about just little things.
[00:22:07]One of them was the food and how familiar the food was. The way that the language started to come back to my dad over the five days that we were there, and I couldn't repress the feeling that I had unfinished business there. And what ended up happening is that a friend of mine was leading a trip a short time later back to Poland, and this was a, a full on Holocaust trip to all the towns - to Lodz where the Lodz ghetto had been ,to all of the concentration camps.
[00:22:44] And I just decided that I had to go back. So I did the trip and it was, it was very, very difficult. And it was, you know, there were some absolutely harrowing moments on that trip, but, after I came back, I, I felt for the first time, like I could kind of wrap my arms around all of it, and I started to see that maybe instead of writing my father's story, I could write my story of being my father's daughter.
[00:23:18] And a little later I started to realize that maybe I could tell that story through food, which was this theme that came up again and again and again throughout. Not just my life, but my father's life too.
[00:23:36] SFX COOKING
[00:23:40] It wouldn't be traditional, but I would add fresh herbs or maybe some lemon juice or something to make it a little more modern and to give it a little bit of a a little.
Saul Reichert: It would make it juicier.
Bonny Reichert: little brighter. Juicier. Some more water.
[00:24:04]Saul Reichert: More water.
[00:24:05]Bonny Reichert: Okay. I'm not done. I'm not done creating it. It's about the midway point. I'm about halfway. And obviously more salt.
[00:24:19] Recipe development is an iterative process- you make and you fix, and you make, and you fix, and you make, and you fix. So the first time I made it, it was almost a disaster. I didn't put enough water. It cooked overnight. The beans and the barley soaked up all the water.
[00:24:37] It was very dry. On top of that, my father had told me to use brisket because what does he remember? He was a little child, and in fact, brisket is also too dry a meat, and it works much better with short rib meat that has more fat. So the first time was not a good showing. The second time was much better.
[00:25:01] Um, and I'm still working on it and hoping to get it better, but I have to weigh the competing demands of making it just like he remembers and making it something that, that I think is delicious in the modern world and in, in my own cooking. So that's a little like, uh, A microcosm of the book. It's mine. It's his, it's both of ours. It's shared.
[00:25:28]Tina Pittaway: In her book, How to Share an Egg, Bonny’s both recreating traditions as well as honoring and preserving the memories her dad has of this very special dish.
[00:25:38]Bonny Reichert: So he would talk about cholent and how his mother would make this dish. The custom was each household would make their own cholent and then they would carry the pots to the village bakery. It's designed to cook Friday night and all day Saturday.
[00:26:06]Saul Reichert:And Friday before Shabbat many people were coming with their little pots, and their pots were sort of wrapped around with a towel and took it into the baker.
[00:26:18]Bonny Reichert: And slide them into the bread oven so that they would cook there at the bread oven overnight, and they would pick them up on Saturday after services. And you've got this hot stew that has been cooking all this time.
[00:26:34]Saul Reichert: There's two smells that I remember. One was Friday comingfrom school and the smell of Shabbat cooking, whatever mom was cooking for Shabbat, maybe fish and the roast beef or chicken. So there was a lovely smell. And another one was the cholent smell when they opened it up on Saturday for lunch when you opened up the cover the smell permeated the whole building.
[00:27:07] SFX COOKING
Saul Reichert:[00:27:10] Yeah, it's very good.
Bonny Reichert:
I didn't put garlic. Would you think your mother would've put garlic?
Saul Reichert:
Garlic? No.
Bonny Reichert:
But kishka?
Saul Reichert:
Yeah.
Bonny Reichert:
Kishka you have to go buy. So I didn't put that in, but I could do that next time.
[00:27:30]Saul Reichert: Okay.
Bonny Reichert: It’s pretty good.
Saul Reichert:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's very good.
[00:27:37]Bonny Reichert: When I was a child, he did talk about cholant. It, it's such a funny word, and I never heard anybody else say it. You know those, those words that you, your parents say, and sometimes you're not sure if they're even real words. So cholent was one of those words for me, and uh, I didn't even really know it existed in the outside world.
[00:28:02] Uh, the sort of, the penny dropped for me when I went to synagogue and after services, they served cholent and I thought, oh my gosh, like, this is a, this is a real thing. So it took me a little while to realize that we could make it, we could just make it, it, you know, you didn't have to go back um, in time and space to create it. And of course, I mean, my sisters and I, we are always aware of what our father went through so that we could be here. I, I think that we are always carrying that in our heads and our hearts. So what a simple, easy way to make him happy.
[00:28:48]Saul Reichert: I'm often asked, well, how come you can have such a healthy attitude? But I'm managing to put away my crying nights one side and my loving life. I love it. I survived that. I survived. How could I survive? What can I do? What should I do with the years that I've left? How come I am so lucky? What can I do to remember my family? How can I honor them. But the years go by, and I am, even today, I love to see my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, and they're so beautiful and they're so loving.
[00:29:34] But I see what happened and I see what's happening and what was, and what is ,it just beyond words. It just, uh, it overpowers me.
[00:29:50]Tina Pittaway: Bonny Reichert's memoir, How to Share An Egg, A True Story of Love, Hunger, and Plenty will be published in Canada in 2024 by Appetite by Random House andBallantine Books in the United States.
[00:30:09] If you'd like to hear more stories like this and help new listeners discover this podcast, make sure to rate countless journeys on your favorite podcast app, or leave us a review. Countless Journeys comes to you from the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, located at the Halifax Seaport. I'm Tina Pittaway.
Bye for now.