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WORK TITLE: Treyf
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1963
WEBSITE: https://elissaaltman.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
au blog: http://www.poormansfeast.com/ * https://elissaaltman.com/about/ * http://www.wbur.org/artery/2016/09/20/treyf-elissa-altman-review * http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/09/23/treyf_by_elissa_altman_reviewed.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1963, in Forest Hills, NY; married.
EDUCATION:Boston University, B.A.; attended Gonville & Caius College—Cambridge University; attended Peter Kump’s Cooking School.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and acquisitions and development editor. TEDx 2016, speaker.
AWARDS:Resident fellow at Vermont Studio Center, 2016; included in Best Food Writing for five consecutive years.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Tin House, The New York Times, Washington Post, O: The Oprah Magazine to Tablet, Saveur, and Krista Tippett’s On Being.
SIDELIGHTS
Elissa Altman is a food writer known for her contributions to periodicals such as The New York Times, Saveur, and The Washington Post, for whom she maintained a year-long column, Feeding My Mother. Altman is also recognized for her food-centric memoirs, including Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw and Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking.
Altman grew up in the 60s and 70s in Forest Hills, Queens, under the care of her Jewish mother and father, with her grandparents nearby. Altman’s mother was a former model and actress and her father a former military man turned advertiser. Her upbringing as well as her observations of her parent’s relationship are common themes in her memoir writing. “She relays painful and life-affirming moments by artfully enfolding them in memories of toothsome meals,” notes Karen Iris Tucker in Slate in her review of Altman’s memoir, Treyf. Altman attended Boston University, where she received a degree in English. She also attended Gonville & Caius College/Cambridge University and studied cooking at Peter Kump’s Cooking School in New York. Altman lives in Newton, Connecticut with her wife.
Poor Man's Feast
Poor Man’s Feast interweaves narratives from Altman’s childhood in Queens with the love story that led to her marriage. Food is often the center of Altman’s stories while also functioning as a symbol of her growth and development. Her childhood memories are peppered with the thrill of secret lunch outings with her father, a rebellion against her constantly dieting mother and a fitting emblem of the dysfunction present in her parent’s marriage. In adulthood Altman finds success as a food editor. At the same time romantic love enters her life, giving food a new meaning. Finding her heart drawn to a tractor-driving gardener, Altman begins to appreciate the deeper aspects of food creation as she discovers a deep connection with her future wife.
Described by Dawn Drzalmay in The New York Times Book Review as a “smart yet tender tale of her gastronomical and spiritual evolution,” Poor Man’s Feast documents Altman’s maturation as she is both guided by and drawn to new relationships with food.
Treyf
In Altman’s 2016 memoir she addresses her upbringing in Queens by focusing on food and examining her family members’ and her own conflicting relationships with it. Her mother, a former television actress and commercial singer, models a restrictive relationship with food, treating it as fuel rather than a thing to be enjoyed. Her father, in contrast, finds escapism in food. While struggling with his identity as a Jewish man pulled both to tradition and modernism, he rebels against his Jewish roots and indulges in Gentile foods, such as shellfish and German sausages.
In the middle of these tumultuous inner struggles is young Altman, seeking out her own sense of identity and independence. “Food is Altman’s loyal friend as she navigates the more perilous aspects of her early life,” wrote Karen Iris Tucker in Slate. Altman rebels against her mother’s pressure to diet, rejects her father’s indulgent inclinations, but finds comfort in her Orthodox Jewish grandparent’s home, where food and treyf topics are openly discussed.
The theme of treyf, which denotes a thing that is prohibited and deemed unkosher, permeates the book in both literal and symbolic ways. In her father’s literal consumption of forbidden food as well as in her mother’s encouragement of shame around eating, there is an expression of the rejection of tradition as well as the secrecy of forbidden acts or feelings. Altman experiences her own struggle with a form of treyf as she hides her sexuality in her youth, ultimately falling in love in adulthood and marrying a Catholic woman. Described by Julie Wittes Schlack on ARTery Web site as “a family memoir that is pungent, raw, sometimes hilarious, but never delicate,” Treyf explores the meanings and expressions of treyf in herself, her family, and her culture.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist July 1, 2016, Ilene Cooper, review of Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw, p. 14.
Gourmet Retailer February, 2006, James Mellgren, review of Big Food: Amazing Ways to Cook, Store, Freeze, and Serve Everything You Buy in Bulk, p. 105.
Publishers Weekly July 25, 2016, review of Treyf, p. 62.
ONLINE
ARTery, http://www.wbur.org/ (September 20, 2016), review of Treyf.
Civil Eats, http://civileats.com (February 25, 2013), Kurt Michael Friese, review of Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking.
Jewish Book Council, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org (March 25, 2017), Elissa Altman, review of Treyf.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com (March 25, 2017), Margaret Placentra Johnston, review of Treyf.
New York Times Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com (May 29, 2013), Dawn Drzalmay, review of Poor Man’s Feast.
Slate, http://www.slate.com (September 23, 2016), Karen Iris Tucker, review of Treyf.
Tablet, http://www.tabletmag.com (September 19, 2016), Judy Bolton-Fasman, review of Treyf.
Food Writer Elissa Altman Dives Into New Territory With Family Memoir, 'Treyf'
September 20, 2016
By Julie Wittes Schlack
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“A person can eat treyf; a person can be treyf,” declares Elissa Altman’s kosher-keeping Jewish grandmother. And what is treyf?
“According to Leviticus, unkosher and prohibited, like lobster, shrimp, pork, fish without scales, the mixing of meat and dairy. But also, according to my grandmother, imperfect, intolerable, offensive, undesirable, unclean, improper, filthy, broken, forbidden, illicit, rule-breaking.”
These are harsh, visceral words, but appropriate in Altman's latest, "Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw."
The cover of "Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw." (Courtesy Penguin Publishing Group)
The cover of "Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw." (Courtesy Penguin Publishing Group)
Best known as a food writer, Altman has produced a family memoir that is pungent, raw, sometimes hilarious, but never delicate. It’s a story about the allure and limits of self-reinvention, a meditation on how tradition both soothes and imprisons. And because this is a memoir about family, it is also a memoir about food.
Growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s in The Marseilles, a new middle-class fortress in Forest Hills, Queens, Altman straddles at least two cultures. Her father, the son of an Orthodox immigrant cantor and his hausfrau wife, is “a Fifth Avenue mad man ad man of the teak credenza-Modern Jazz Quartet variety.” Her mother, born to a kosher-keeping, Bing Crosby-loving secret lesbian and a gentle but distant Brooklyn shop owner, is a former model and television singer, a glamorous woman who, when young, “gazed at the mirror and dreamt that she was Ava Gardner.”
Daughter of two parents who are estranged from each other and from their own middle-class lives, Elissa rebels against her mother’s attempts to feminize her with Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and strategically placed boxes of Ayds weight loss candies, smokes pot with the bell-bottomed daughter of an Orthodox Holocaust survivor next door, listens to rock 'n' roll and, at her beloved Jewish summer camp, prays and beseeches “How can we know God? Where can we find him?”
On Sundays, Elissa and her parents visit her paternal immigrant grandparents in Brooklyn. These afternoons are “…a car crash of old and new worlds, of schmaltz and Mitch Miller, of Santa Claus and the Cossacks.” While Elissa’s mother longs for return to her more cosmopolitan life, her father yearns for the attention of his father, who “lays the Torah on his shoulder so tenderly, like a baby, as he floats up and down the aisles of the airless synagogue, his eyes closed in a meditative trance … Tears cascade down his cheeks as he passes his son … He floats past my father like a ghost.”
As a younger man fleeing reverence and rage, her father enlists in the military. One night, after a particularly wrenching visit home, he dines in the officers’ club in Corpus Christi, gorging himself on prawns, pate, ribs and German sausages. “He eats all of it with a combination of rage and fervor; at first, it tastes bitter and alien, but then washes his father’s rejection clean and leaves in its place the sweet flavor of acceptance and belonging. He has broken the code and scoffed at the law; he is a Jewish boy dressed in an American Naval uniform, living and eating like the Gentile everyone on base will believe him to be.”
If you’re a Jew, it’s impossible to read this book and not burn from the repeated shocks of recognition. But it’s equally impossible if you’re a woman who was once a daughter, if you’re anyone who’s ever been an adolescent at almost any time in the past few centuries. The parental quarrels. The food — the endless plates of food, so much of it forbidden. The beige enema bag suspended upside down from the shower nozzle in her grandparents’ apartment, the box of passed down silver ornaments, “the smell of the past — a gamy, transportive scent of despair and schmaltz and Aqua Net,” — these are the details that make "Treyf" so extraordinarily resonant.
Author Elissa Altman. (Courtesy Susan Turner)
Author Elissa Altman. (Courtesy Susan Turner)
With skill, pathos and subversive wit, Altman depicts her parents’ and her own conflict between individuation and belonging, between being American and being imprinted with a tribal affiliation far less shiny and new. Just witness her father’s possessions: "Until he moved out, and for all the years of my childhood, my father kept his copy of 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' on the top shelf of the Danish Modern etagere in our living room in The Marseilles, sandwiched between 'Portnoy’s Complaint' and an ebony bust of the Buddha."
Altman depicts her mother and grandparents with clarity leavened by compassion. But it’s her ambivalent father, Cy, the Burberry-wearing, treyf-eating, secretly praying ad man who most comes alive on the page. And right from the beginning of the book, we know why. Like Cy, Elissa is an outsider simultaneously yearning to break in and to break free. The first Thanksgiving after she comes out as a lesbian, as she carries plates into the kitchen, her Aunt Sylvia whispers to her, “Who do you think you are, to cheat us out of joy, to break the chain?”
The author, her conflicted father, her glamorous, self-starving mother, her friends who chant from the Torah on their bat mitzvahs, then celebrate with shrimp-in-lobster sauce at their post-shul luncheons at the Tung Shing House — they are all modern Americans alternately fleeing and embracing identities rooted in the ancient. And as Elissa observes of her father and herself, “He gravitates to places where no one knows him, where he — where we both — can start fresh: new lives … we wait, anxiously, for the world to change around us, to accept us, to approve.”
Elissa Altman is the critically-acclaimed author of the upcoming memoir, Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw (NAL, September 2016), Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking (Berkley, 2015), and the James Beard Award-winning narrative blog of the same name. Upon its hardcover publication in 2013, The New York Times Book Review declared Poor Man’s Feast to be “one of the finest food memoirs of recent years.”
Altman’s work has appeared everywhere from Tin House and O: The Oprah Magazine to Tablet, The New York Times, Saveur, Krista Tippett’s On Being, and in the Washington Post, where her year-long column, Feeding My Mother launched a conversation about nurturing, sustenance, and the moral imperative to make senior citizens part of our national food dialogue. She spoke live at TEDx in 2016 on the concept of The Modern Tribal Fire. Her work has been selected for inclusion in Best Food Writing for five consecutive years and in 2016 her essay Thief of Beauty was a finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, awarded by The Southampton Review.
Elissa was born in Manhattan and raised in Forest Hills, Queens during the 1960s and 1970s, a place and time that significantly informs her work, both fiction and memoir. She graduated from Boston University where she received a degree in English, studied at Gonville & Caius College/Cambridge University, and in the late 1980s attended Peter Kump’s Cooking School in New York. She has been an avid guitarist since the age of four, studying for years with Ed Simon. She has been a longtime book doctor and acquisitions/development editor working across several genres, including fiction, memoir, and food. She lives in Newtown, Connecticut with her family.
One writer's battle to get her aging mother to eat
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"My mother taught me that food was fuel," says writer Elissa Altman. "That food was dangerous. That food was the enemy."
As Altman's mother grows older, Altman is finding it difficult to get her to eat. "The one thing my aging mother will devour: Simple roast chicken" is her latest piece in a monthly series for the Washington Post. She is the author of Poor Man's Feast.
Sally Swift: You are writing about how hard it can be to feed an aging parent. Tell us about your mom.
Elissa Altman
Elissa Altman (Photo: Susan Turner)
Elissa Altman: My mom is a former television singer. She's a former model; she was a model as recently as 10 years ago. She is just a beautiful lady, and always has been.
She has a funky relationship with food and always has had that. I used to say that my father divorced my mother because she was too religious -- every meal she made was a sacrifice or a burnt offering.
It took me a while to understand that there are certain people who are just not good cooks. They don't get it, and that's just the way it is. I wouldn't say that so much about her; she is fearful of food. It has taken me a long time to come to understand that, and that there's a difference.
In her life, food was the enemy. She refers to herself as a child as being very heavy. I've seen pictures of her when she was 4 -- I thought she was 9. I think that she's had a very cautious, difficult relationship with food. Especially because she knew early on that she wanted to be on television, she wanted to be a singer. That played itself out at the table.
SS: What did she teach you about food when you were growing up?
EA: My mother taught me that food was fuel. That food was dangerous. That food was the enemy. That it was certainly not something to be particularly proud of being emotionally involved with -- although she is involved with it in a different way. It's taken me a very long time to unravel those lessons that she taught me.
SS: It's just so poignant that's the path you went down for your writing. That's the font where your creativity comes from. It's wonderful, actually. You've carved yourself out another life.
EA: My dad used to say that I learned how to cook and I started to write about food and cooking out of self-preservation. I think that he was probably right.
SS: Are you surprised at this turn of events -- about you having this battle with her to eat?
EA: There are a lot of us where we're all sort of in the same age group, and we all sort of have aging and older parents. What I'm hearing from a lot of my friends and colleagues is the same kind of thing, similar problems. "Mom won't eat, so I'm giving her Ensure." "Mom was eating the wrong thing." "She's eating too much of the wrong thing."
With me, I'm able to go there -- she lives in Manhattan. I'm able to cook for her on a regular basis. I'm able to take her out, which she loves. But she just doesn't really particularly like to eat. She's very, very wary of her plate.
She's really a quintessential New Yorker. She adores to walk. She loves the city.
But of course at this point, when she walks into a doctor's office, one of the questions that invariably comes up is, "What do you eat?" If I'm not there, she'll tell them, "I'll have chicken, I'll have vegetables." She's not telling them that she is having a sliver of chicken and a Brussels sprout, period.
I've tried to explain to her that the better her diet, the longer she can walk across Manhattan and the longer she can be active. I think she understands that. But actually putting that to work doesn't really happen so well.
SS: Philosophically it's interesting because it is her life. She has lived this way all these many years. Suddenly you are thrust in this position where it's not a particularly comfortable one for you, I would think.
Grill-Roasted Chicken with Tarragon and Garlic
Altman's recipe: Grill-Roasted Chicken with Tarragon and Garlic
EA: No, it's difficult. When I wrote my first piece for the Washington Post about this, there were a lot of people who responded and said exactly what you just said: "It's her life. She has lived this way her whole life. Why do you think that she's going to change? Why do you think she should change?"
I want her to be as healthy for as long as she can possibly be healthy. But again, she has that image of herself lodged in her brain as a heavy child, as she put it. That's where the challenge is.
SS: It's interesting because I think that there was something about that generation of women. Women in general can have a very difficult relationship with food. But there's something about that age of woman. My mother used to brag that she never gained more than 10 pounds with any of her four daughters when she was pregnant.
EA: That sounds very familiar. I wrote a post called "Infrequent Potatoes" about the fact that my mother did not know she was pregnant for 6 months. It took one of her teenage nieces to say, "You know, maybe."
She was like, "I'm gaining weight, and I have no idea why." Finally, she went to the doctor when she couldn't get her rings off -- that's classic. I was born at 4 pounds, which is roughly, for context, the size of a supermarket chicken.
I'm not like that anymore. I favor my father's side of the family physically, which is the short and not statuesque live side. I think that's kind of hard for her too.
One writer's battle to get her aging mother to eat
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0:00 /
Download MP3
Share
?
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Thomas Northcut / iStock / Thinkstock
"My mother taught me that food was fuel," says writer Elissa Altman. "That food was dangerous. That food was the enemy."
As Altman's mother grows older, Altman is finding it difficult to get her to eat. "The one thing my aging mother will devour: Simple roast chicken" is her latest piece in a monthly series for the Washington Post. She is the author of Poor Man's Feast.
Sally Swift: You are writing about how hard it can be to feed an aging parent. Tell us about your mom.
Elissa Altman
Elissa Altman (Photo: Susan Turner)
Elissa Altman: My mom is a former television singer. She's a former model; she was a model as recently as 10 years ago. She is just a beautiful lady, and always has been.
She has a funky relationship with food and always has had that. I used to say that my father divorced my mother because she was too religious -- every meal she made was a sacrifice or a burnt offering.
It took me a while to understand that there are certain people who are just not good cooks. They don't get it, and that's just the way it is. I wouldn't say that so much about her; she is fearful of food. It has taken me a long time to come to understand that, and that there's a difference.
In her life, food was the enemy. She refers to herself as a child as being very heavy. I've seen pictures of her when she was 4 -- I thought she was 9. I think that she's had a very cautious, difficult relationship with food. Especially because she knew early on that she wanted to be on television, she wanted to be a singer. That played itself out at the table.
SS: What did she teach you about food when you were growing up?
EA: My mother taught me that food was fuel. That food was dangerous. That food was the enemy. That it was certainly not something to be particularly proud of being emotionally involved with -- although she is involved with it in a different way. It's taken me a very long time to unravel those lessons that she taught me.
SS: It's just so poignant that's the path you went down for your writing. That's the font where your creativity comes from. It's wonderful, actually. You've carved yourself out another life.
EA: My dad used to say that I learned how to cook and I started to write about food and cooking out of self-preservation. I think that he was probably right.
SS: Are you surprised at this turn of events -- about you having this battle with her to eat?
EA: There are a lot of us where we're all sort of in the same age group, and we all sort of have aging and older parents. What I'm hearing from a lot of my friends and colleagues is the same kind of thing, similar problems. "Mom won't eat, so I'm giving her Ensure." "Mom was eating the wrong thing." "She's eating too much of the wrong thing."
With me, I'm able to go there -- she lives in Manhattan. I'm able to cook for her on a regular basis. I'm able to take her out, which she loves. But she just doesn't really particularly like to eat. She's very, very wary of her plate.
She's really a quintessential New Yorker. She adores to walk. She loves the city.
But of course at this point, when she walks into a doctor's office, one of the questions that invariably comes up is, "What do you eat?" If I'm not there, she'll tell them, "I'll have chicken, I'll have vegetables." She's not telling them that she is having a sliver of chicken and a Brussels sprout, period.
I've tried to explain to her that the better her diet, the longer she can walk across Manhattan and the longer she can be active. I think she understands that. But actually putting that to work doesn't really happen so well.
SS: Philosophically it's interesting because it is her life. She has lived this way all these many years. Suddenly you are thrust in this position where it's not a particularly comfortable one for you, I would think.
Grill-Roasted Chicken with Tarragon and Garlic
Altman's recipe: Grill-Roasted Chicken with Tarragon and Garlic
EA: No, it's difficult. When I wrote my first piece for the Washington Post about this, there were a lot of people who responded and said exactly what you just said: "It's her life. She has lived this way her whole life. Why do you think that she's going to change? Why do you think she should change?"
I want her to be as healthy for as long as she can possibly be healthy. But again, she has that image of herself lodged in her brain as a heavy child, as she put it. That's where the challenge is.
SS: It's interesting because I think that there was something about that generation of women. Women in general can have a very difficult relationship with food. But there's something about that age of woman. My mother used to brag that she never gained more than 10 pounds with any of her four daughters when she was pregnant.
EA: That sounds very familiar. I wrote a post called "Infrequent Potatoes" about the fact that my mother did not know she was pregnant for 6 months. It took one of her teenage nieces to say, "You know, maybe."
She was like, "I'm gaining weight, and I have no idea why." Finally, she went to the doctor when she couldn't get her rings off -- that's classic. I was born at 4 pounds, which is roughly, for context, the size of a supermarket chicken.
I'm not like that anymore. I favor my father's side of the family physically, which is the short and not statuesque live side. I think that's kind of hard for her too.
From This Episode:
Teranga
Published:
August 28th, 2015
lissa Altman is the author of the critically-acclaimed memoir Poor Man’s Feast, and the James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name. She writes the Washington Post column, Feeding My Mother, and her work has appeared everywhere from O, The Oprah Magazine and Tin House to the New York Times, and has been anthologized for five consecutive years in Best Food Writing. She lives in Connecticut with her family.
“This earthy, gorgeously-written, sensual, powerful book is so compulsively-readable you’ll want to read it in one great gulp, but you’ll also want to slow down and savor every delicious morsel. Elissa Altman has written a brave and generous memoir, a lucid love letter to her history that—in its bracing clarity and large-heartedness—does the work of great memoir in piercing the reader’s separateness, and reminding us that we are not alone. I love this book.”
—Dani Shapiro, national bestselling author of Devotion
“Treyf is a memoir that reads like a novel, a spellbinding portrait of a very specific world that also serves as a universal primer on identity, on loneliness, on the nature of familial bonds, on the ways we make sense of the mess of our lives. Gorgeous, singular, heartbreaking, haunting.”
—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
“Treyf is a beautiful, brilliant memoir filled with striking images, unforgettable people, and vivid stories. Elissa Altman has given us the story of an era and a tribe, rooted in 1970s New York City, wrought with such visceral love that the pages shimmer.”
—Kate Christensen, bestselling author of Blue Plate Special
"With TREYF, Elissa Altman has outdone herself. Intricately structured, exquisitely wrought, TREYF exposes the love and longing at the core of transgression. It is a tour de force – nimble, cinematic, restrained. The sacred and the profane are no binary in Altman’s world; they are two chambers of a single, beating heart."
—Jessica Fechtor, author of Stir
“Savvy, warm hearted, and profoundly illuminating...The meaning of the forbidden—in a family, in a self—and the human needs we all struggle with are gloriously explored. This is a transforming book, one of the most satisfying memoirs I’ve ever read.”
—Bonnie Friedman, author of Surrendering Oz: A Life in Essays
Elissa Altman is the critically-acclaimed, award-winning author of Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, the James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name, the Washington Post column Feeding My Mother, and a finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. She is a contributor to publications ranging from Tin House and Dame Magazine to O: The Oprah Magazine, Saveur, and the New York Times and has spoken live at TEDx on the moral imperative to care for senior citizens.
A 2016 resident fellow at Vermont Studio Center, Altman writes full time from her home in Newtown, Connecticut where she lives with her spouse of sixteen years, book designer Susan Turner.
A Tribe Looking for Home: An Interview with Elissa Altman
By Michelle Wildgen | September 20th, 2016 – 08:00 am
interview banner
Elissa Altman can write you an appetizing culinary scene, but she’d really rather not. While it’s true she wrote about the glories of home cooking in her James Beard Award-winning blog and first book, Poor Man’s Feast, her new memoir finds her more interested in the sensation of wrongness: the clothes that aren’t you, the culture that doesn’t welcome you, the country that pushed you out or the one that only reluctantly lets you in, and—the most visceral of all these examples—the food you shouldn’t have eaten. Altman covers all this ground with humor, verve, and compassion, but it would be a mistake to think Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw is a story about refusal and regret. It is not. Treyf is about the seeking that never really abates.—Michelle Wildgen
Tiny-House
Michelle Wildgen: One of my favorite recurring descriptions in here is of your fashion choices, or maybe I should say, the fashion choices made for you. Can you talk a bit about this, and the role clothes play in telling this story?
Elissa Altman: Fashion was a tool in Treyf. My parents had a natural affinity for fashion and polar opposite senses of style. To my father the conservative traditions of Brooks Brothers and J Press represented Cheever-esque safety, formality, and an American, WASPY tradition that he was not born to but grasped for. My mother, on the other hand, possessed — and still possesses; she’s almost 81 now and only stopped modeling twelve or so years ago — a rebellious, edgy fashion sensibility: she has always paired very high style together with low and pulled it off. Yet my father loved to dress her as the idyllic, cool Katherine Hepburn he was desperate for her to be. Ultimately, it didn’t stick: for her, fashion is all about attention and sex, not Harris tweed.
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When their marriage started to fail, my parents wielded clothes against each other via me: deposited in my father’s care on Saturdays in the 1970s while my mother worked as a model, I was hauled around to places like the original Abercrombie & Fitch, the boy’s department at Brooks’ Brothers, and Kaufman’s riding shop. By the time we picked my mother up, I looked like I was going yachting or fox hunting. My father almost always preferred dressing me in boys’ clothes — he said they were better made — which, of course, infuriated my hyper-heterosexual mother, who responded by putting me in elastic tube tops and see-through voile blouses just as I was beginning to go through a particularly sulky, spotty, busty puberty. I felt like I was in drag, although I had no words for it. To this day, my mother is sure that I am a lesbian because my father made me wear boy’s clothes; I always have to remind her that at eight, I was in love with Susan Dey, and not David Cassidy. It had nothing to do with Brooks’ Brothers. Although I do like a good suit and wingtips.
MW: There is also a lot of, shall we say, physical discomfort in here—people eating things and regretting it. Was it ever hard to write about food in such an uncomfortable way, that maybe rebels against expectations for a completely delicious culinary memoir rather than something more complex?
EA: Writing about food is not that different than writing about any other sense experience, like sex, and always depicting it as yummy sanitizes, homogenizes, and de-humanizes it. I’m interested in the things that leave a strange taste, that make me squirm, that force me to think about what sustenance really is.
Everyone knows what good food and good food experience looks like; I want to talk about the mistakes, the faux pas, the cultural and practical blunders. I distinctly remember my maternal grandmother cutting herself when she sliced potatoes into the Hungarian goulash she knew I loved; her soul, and her blood, were in what she cooked for me. I thought about taking that section out of the story, but it would have been a mistake: it was representative of the sheer ferocity with which she nurtured me, queasy-making or not.
Treyf is the story of a tribe yearning for home; it’s about three generations on the outside looking in. There’s a certain bitterness that comes along with that sense of constant displacement, and in my life, it was expressed at the table. When I was eleven my paternal grandmother tried to feed me a boiled calf’s brain — plain, on a plate, like we were in a laboratory — the day after I saw Young Frankenstein. Borscht tastes to me like mud, like death, like the sorrow that enveloped us at my grandparents’ apartment when everyone switched languages so I couldn’t understand them, but I knew they were talking about the family who stayed behind and were murdered in the Holocaust. To this day, I can’t be in the same room with it; it’s the food of doom.
MW: Your first memoir, Poor Man’s Feast, deals with (among other things) love and food. This one seems to delve into tougher territory— familial stresses, belonging or the lack thereof, in particular. Can you talk about moving from one subject or tone to the other? How did the processes compare for you as a writer, as a person delving into your past?
EA: In Poor Man’s Feast, food and love were catalysts; one transformed the other, and that was the primary thread running through what was essentially a very linear story. But Treyf is more cyclical; it’s about appearances, the tug of the past on the present, about religion and sex and violation, and the human compulsion to find sustenance and acceptance in a world to which one has only been tentatively invited.
The narrative in Poor Man’s Feast was generated by food — the actual cooking of it as opposed to the eating of it. There was a very clear beginning, middle, and end from the outset, and I always had a strong sense of how it was going to unfold on the page. At the time I wrote it, my wife and I had been together for twelve years, my mother-in-law was still alive, my father, who figures heavily in that book as a food mentor, had passed ten years earlier; I was still very connected to his family.
Between the time I was starting Treyf, my extended family structure was in utter chaos; my connection to the people who had been my anchors had vaporized. I dealt with the grief the only way I knew how — by writing my way through it. Where there is sorrow and loss there is a natural hunger for nurturing and safety. And that is what the book is about at its core.
The lightness that pervaded Poor Man’s Feast was no longer there, and it wouldn’t have been appropriate or authentic. Which is not to say that there aren’t moments of humor in it, but Treyf is a much more complicated story, written from a very different place and at a time when I was feeling like I’d just stepped off a ship — wobbly, a little nauseous. It was only when I finished the first draft that I realized that I, like every person in the book, was searching for my place in the world, and for a tribe that I had lost.
MW: What has been surprising or unexpected about writing this book?
EA: The most surprising thing about writing Treyf was the realization that my memory is largely synesthetic. I’ve always assumed that everyone has crystalline memories of seeing colors and shapes and patterns when they hear certain music, or smell certain smells, or have a particular flavor flood their mouths when they see a certain image, but this is apparently not the case. The clarity of my memory is something that I’ve had to learn to live with over time; it’s not always easy. Some of my shrink friends call it a kind of PTSD: this is how my brain has synthesized extraordinarily intense, and regular, experiences.
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Very early on, I assumed that I would be writing the story of an assimilated American Jewish family who liked to break the rules; I also assumed that there might be recipes in it —- publishers love to include recipes in this genre they call “food memoir.” But I realized that it’s not necessarily a Jewish book at all; the assimilation experience is one that is universal — just ask any Muslim, Italian, Polish, or Irish American. We’re all searching for a toehold, and we’re all forced to make decisions about where we are going, culturally, vis a vis where we have been. Nor is it really a food memoir.
When I finished writing Treyf, I was faced with a story that was very different from what I assumed I’d have going in. Which only means that books are organic. Often, writers have little control over them.
MW: What passage of culinary writing first stuck with you as a reader?
EA: I read Paula Wolfert’s Mediterranean Cooking like a novel before I ever cooked from it.
When I picked up a copy of Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and read her description of her husband’s beef stew as being “a kind of gray water—rather like the gray, green, greasy Limpopo River in ‘The Elephant’s Child’ by Rudyard Kipling” it changed everything for me: it showed me that it was fair game to be brutally honest about food, even if it was utterly revolting. That one sentence gave me permission to describe food in ways that were less than prim or delicious, like the boiled brain and the borscht.
I also adore Seamus Heaney, who understood that food is both mundane and throbbing with the sensual, like air and dirt. To elevate that in a world of test kitchens and foam — Our shells clacked on the plates. My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight — I mean, my God.
MW: How would you describe your approach to food as a subject? What interests you about it, what doesn’t? Has it changed over your writing life?
EA: It was born out of an innate compulsion to cook, to learn how to feed myself and the people I love because, I suppose, I grew up in a home where food was the source of enormous strife. My father was very connected to it (and was a great cook) and my mother was completely disconnected from it (and was/is a terrible cook). Food and cooking could be a source of great joy and pleasure, and, where my maternal grandmother was concerned, safety. Eventually, as I began to read more about food simply because the writing was so compelling, it became the foundation of life and history for me: we have no greater connection to each other and our collective past than when we’re at the table. But when I was writing Treyf, there were times when I couldn’t bear to pick up a cookbook, to read a food magazine, to boil an egg: I couldn’t even think about nurturing myself. I had to learn to sustain and nurture myself again both in real time, and as my character in the book. And I did that by returning to the works of Deborah Madison, Diana Henry, Jane Grigson, Paula Wolfert, and Judy Rodgers.
There is so much brilliant food writing out there right now that it’s head-spinning: Diana Henry, David Leite, Jeff Koehler, Francis Lam, Kenji Lopez-Alt are all just excellent writers and likely would be in any genre. There’s absolutely room for simple how-to cookbooks and should always be. But the narrative bar has been set very high, and the understanding that food is culture/history/love/war/life feels ubiquitous to me now in a way that it wasn’t even ten years ago. And I am deeply happy for it.
MW: Let’s talk craft! What do you feel you know as a writer now that you didn’t five or ten years ago? What do you next want to learn?
EA: I come from a family of musicians — jazz musicians, singers, classical pianists, violinists, I’m a longtime guitarist — and learning to literally stop and hear each other when we play together is like breathing. We listen for cadence, for pause, for musical structure, for tone change. And for a very long time, I wrote the same way: by listening, by reading my work aloud and paying close attention to voice and sound. When I workshopped with Charlie D’Ambrosio at Tin House, I decided not to abandon that way of working — I couldn’t; I think in musical form — but to use the workshop as a place to experiment with a narrative style that was more taut, and a pace that was slower. Doing this felt completely alien to me, but I learned the importance of nudging myself out of my comfort zone.
Much of what I write takes place in a past at which I was not present; I do this by wrapping the situation in the stories that I was fed like pabulum. When my grandfather goes to Floyd Bennett Airfield to pick up his son — my father — who is flying himself home from wartime service in the Navy, I know that he has cold knish crumbs in his coat pocket because he always did, because my father told me that in the car on their way home, the smell of potato came off my grandfather’s fingertips as he gripped the steering wheel. But this is also something I imagine, and I say so, because I wasn’t there. That, to me, is the greatest challenge of memoir, which is written to revisit what happened, to unravel it, to reveal it from another place.
MW: What question do you wish interviewers or readers would ask you?
EA: The one question that no one ever asks, oddly—it just never seems to come up: who is my greatest literary hero? (Wallace Stegner. Why? I think there is no greater a master of writing difficult characters with compassion.) Also: Do I consider myself a food writer or just a writer? (Just a writer, who spends a lot of time at the table.)
Tiny-House
Elissa Altman is the author of the new memoir, Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw, Poor Man’s Feast, and the James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name. ”
Michelle Wildgen is a writer, editor, and teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. In addition to being an executive editor at the literary journal Tin House, Michelle is the author of the novels Bread and Butter: A Novel, But Not For Long and You’re Not You, and the editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast.
Treyf: My Quest for Identity in a Forbidden World
263.30 (July 25, 2016): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Treyf: My Quest for Identity in a Forbidden World
Elissa Altman. NAL, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-0-425-27781-2
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. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Treyf: My Quest for Identity in a Forbidden World." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2016, p. 62+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285534&it=r&asid=023ff5c2a9b50c81500543fb437cfa47. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285534
Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw
Ilene Cooper
112.21 (July 1, 2016): p14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw. By Elissa Altman. Sept. 2016. 304p. NAL, $26 (97804252771812); e-book, $13.99 (9780698182127). 974.7.
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 Mans 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 Altmans past is such a Character. Still, Altmans conflicted feelings about her life, her parents, and, yes, food infuse this delicious memoir.--Ilene Cooper
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cooper, Ilene. "Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw." Booklist, 1 July 2016, p. 14. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459888888&it=r&asid=d43f3161adfd8fc22d281467108207c5. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459888888
Big Food
James Mellgren
27.2 (Feb. 2006): p105.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Stagnito Media
http://www.gourmetretailer.com
One of the most intriguing books to come out this season is Big Food: Amazing Ways to Cook, Store, Freeze, and Serve Everything You Buy in Bulk (Rodale) by Elissa Altman. She has taken the approach that buying foods in bulk is not a bad thing as long they don't end up in refrigerator purgatory or simply get thrown away because you didn't plan on how you were going to use them. A savings is only a savings if yon consume all the food in a reasonable amount of time. In culinary terms, it's also not really a savings if you and your family are forced to eat the same meal for a week because you have tons of leftovers (that may be okay for Thanksgiving weekend, but not as a way of life). The recipes (there are more than 100 of them) are labeled as primary (based on what is on hand), secondary (based on leftovers from another meal), or both, and come with a list of items that you may have on hand upon which the recipe is based. Each recipe has sidebar information for "what to do with it," "how long will it last," "additional serving recommendations," and in some cases, "secondary dishes." Additionally, Altman provides a Big Food Action Chart that allows one to quickly see what recipes are appropriate to the ingredient that may be overstocked in your cupboard, as well as a handy How Long Will it Last Chart that lists all of the recipes in the book. Altman also gives great advice on streamlining your pantry; refrigerator, and freezer, and buying in bulk wisely--which things are great to stock up on and which ones aren't. This is a singular book that should become a must-have manual for anyone who shops big and yet wants to adhere to the timeless adage "Waste not, want not."
Mellgren, James
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mellgren, James. "Big Food." Gourmet Retailer, Feb. 2006, p. 105+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA142298207&it=r&asid=dcbae27dbe9bf4532c3a511d4604a6c1. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A142298207
In Treyf, Food Writer Elissa Altman Describes Her First Sweet Taste of Rebellion
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By Karen Iris Tucker
treyf.
Photo illustration by Slate. Image by Amazon
When she was 3, Elissa Altman tasted the sweetness of rebellion, which she describes in her second and latest memoir, Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw. “Disgusted with being shoehorned into a pink leotard and ballet slippers—I wanted to be Ken, not Barbie,” Altman packs up her tutu and flees dance class. Once outside, she hands her mother her ballet tote and says, “I quit.”
An award-winning food writer who grew up in the ’70s in a Jewish enclave of Queens, New York, Altman entwines this renegade experience with a story about having lunch at a local delicatessen with her father. At the deli, which shared a wall with Altman’s former ballet school, they ate pastrami, its “dark red meat edged with ripples of lace-white fat.” So go some of Treyf’s highly satisfying passages, which follow Altman into adulthood as she relays painful and life-affirming moments by artfully enfolding them in memories of toothsome meals.
As Treyf reveals, food is Altman’s loyal friend as she navigates the more perilous aspects of her early life—her parent’s tumultuous marriage, the mercurial nature of her family’s Jewish identity, and discomfort with her own nascent lesbianism. Her home was filled with the tense despondency of lives unfulfilled. The author’s mother was a gorgeous TV songbird whose dreams of the stage were curtailed by mundane domesticity. Altman’s father, a former pilot, settled into an advertising job and endured his wife’s cold indifference.
Gaga, her maternal grandmother and a constant presence in their home, gave Altman the sense of normalcy and the steadiness she craved in her life. It is Gaga, with her ritualistic devotion to and adulation of preparing old-country food such as potato latkes and Hungarian goulash, who nourishes Altman physically and spiritually. As it turns out, Gaga was also a lesbian, and she kept it a secret her entire life. Altman, who instinctively knows they share this bond, feels even closer to her for it, while also learning the cost of an unfulfilled life.
“What shall I make for your return?” is Gaga’s constant refrain in letters to Altman when she is working at a hotel in the Catskills during the summer. It is there, at 16, that Altman experiences her first real crush on a girl, a fellow hotel employee named Emma. One morning, “She gives me an affectionate peck on the cheek and touches the small of my back, and my heart cracks open like an uncooked egg,” Altman recalls. When she arrives home, bereft, Gaga is there with Altman’s favorite dish. “Goulash—the food her Hungarian immigrant mother made her—ties us together, grandmother to granddaughter, outlier to outlier.”
Throughout the memoir, Jewish rituals and culture are alternately revered and reviled. Altman’s parents long to fully assimilate and pass as WASPs, yet they seem forever tethered to familial legacy—her father’s father was an Orthodox cantor. The memoir’s title, Treyf, which means unkosher or prohibited in Yiddish, is fitting in a number of ways. In particular, Altman and her father bond, if not always by love and understanding, then by a primal desire for pork and other unkosher foods—from the taste to the illicit thrill they feel in consuming it.
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Elissa Altman.
Susan Turner
Altman’s upbringing is rife with what some consider the contradictions inherent in being a culturally observant Jew who isn’t a practicing one. American Jews of a certain age, New Yorkers in particular, will certainly recognize, and understand, the act of attending a Sabbath service in synagogue and following that holy ritual with non-kosher Chinese food at a haunt filled to the brim with their Jewish neighbors, “Muskrat Love” playing gently in the background.
Even with that brazen indifference to eating according to Talmudic principles, both Altman and her father find comfort in uttering Kaddish in mourning, as well as Shema, a centerpiece of Jewish prayer. What Treyf isolates very well is that Altman’s self-actualization ultimately comes when she is able to reconcile all these disparate pieces of her heritage, keeping the ones that fit in her life and discarding the rest.
The first few pages of Treyf unfold with Altman attempting to hock the silver cutlery given to her family as a wedding gift. She describes its ornate design “as a pattern of repetition; a tether to the past.” Altman is mystified about what to say when the antique dealer, a Hasidic Jew, asks her whether it was used for meat or dairy meals, since the two are mutually exclusive in an Orthodox Jewish home. Thinking back to the many pork dumplings and shrimp cocktails the forks have plundered, she knows there is no correct answer to the question as it has been asked. The silver, from a traditional Jewish home, is completely treyf.
The issue is apparently settled when the dealer spies what he thinks is a dried speck of jam on one of the knives, though it is more likely a fleck of pork glaze. Since jam would ostensibly be served in a Jewish home with blintzes, which are dairy, he answers his own question. The deal is done, even though Altman’s father warned her when he first gave her the set, “Without it, you’ll never know who you are.”
But Altman, the outlaw, who now lives with her wife in Connecticut, has obviously broken the family pattern. Her life and dreams won’t be confined to the mahogany box that silver is kept in. In the act of discarding the heirloom silver, the memoir conveys the bravery and pain in admitting that some family mythologies and traditions aren’t worth preserving.
Food Chronicle
‘Poor Man’s Feast,’ by Elissa Altman, and More
By DAWN DRZALMAY 29, 2013
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POOR MAN’S FEAST
A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking
By Elissa Altman
Chronicle, $27.50.
Named after her James Beard Award-winning blog, “Poor Man’s Feast” is Altman’s smart yet tender tale of her gastronomical and spiritual evolution. When Altman was only 7, she and her father would drive from Queens to Manhattan for secret Saturday lunches at Lutèce or Le Périgord while her rail-thin, narcissistic mother was safely tucked away at the hairdresser. Three decades passed before Altman, by then a food and entertainment editor with a predilection for “very fancy, very tall food,” finally found her true love. Susan Turner, a book designer who read Larousse Gastronomique in bed and M. F. K. Fisher in the bathroom, was almost as passionate about cooking as Altman. Unfortunately, Turner lived three hours north of New York City in a town with one stoplight. But love is powerful enough to transform a city girl — whose “idea of foraging involves making it to the olive bar at Fairway on the Upper West Side without getting elbowed in the head” — into someone who composts (“taking dreck and turning it into more dreck”), grows vegetables she doesn’t even like to eat and rides a tractor. Altman gradually attains the peace that has eluded her as Turner imparts the gentle lesson that, most of the time, more is less. Sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious, this is one of the finest food memoirs of recent years.
The Last Word: Poor Man’s Feast by Elissa Altman
By Kurt Michael Friese | Local Eats
02.25.13
W.H. Auden once said of legendary food writer MFK Fisher “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”
This is how I feel about Elissa Altman.
I am far from the first to say so. Altman was once described as “The illegitimate love child of David Sedaris and MFK Fisher,” which is also quite fitting, since she approaches her craft the way she does her life, with humor and love, and not without some occasional sarcasm.
She wields a sharp wit and an even sharper eye for detail in her new memoir, Poor Man’s Feast – A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking (Chronicle, 2013). Based on her James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name, which by the way is a must read for anyone who is serious about food, the book takes us on a meandering journey through the last couple of decades of Altman’s food-obsessed life, centered on discovering love and rediscovering simplicity.
It’s not that the stories she relates are new or particularly revelatory. It’s in how she tells the tales – the instantly relatable language that draws a reader in and makes her your best friend. Altman’s prose transports you through time ands space and makes you immediately familiar with times and places and dishes you may never have seen.
The reader does not need to know firsthand the SoHo neighborhood of New York to be instantly transported there in the 1980s, “Each street decorated with art illegally painted on city property in the middle of the night, showcasing a frustrated, apoplectic Reagan under the words ‘Silence=Death.’” One needs never to have set foot in a Dean and DeLuca store to feel the vibe of Altman’s former place of employment, at once alive with a passion for great food and awash in the era’s yuppie snobbishness, and still blissfully unaware that within five years AIDS would take half their male employees.
Far more joyous though is the love story she intertwines with occasional recipes and reminiscences of their origins. We learn how she found the love of her life, Susan, on an internet dating site, and how one would take the train to visit the other every Sunday as their romance blossomed. They share a passion for good food, but Susan’s Spartan sensibilities would eventually tame Altman’s lust for flashy, complicated “tall food.”
What Altman knows, and too many food writers forget, is that life is not all soufflés and cinnamon, and too often John Lennon’s lesson that “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans” can be brought startlingly back to the forefront of conscience. When her war-hero father was broadsided by some uninsured teenagers one sunny afternoon, she remembered a trip with him through the terminal at Grand Central Station. Pointing at the ceiling, the former navy pilot showed his teenage daughter that the designers had messed up – they painted the constellations of the stars backwards.
“‘Does that mean the world is upside down?’ I asked.
“He looked at me hard and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Isn’t it?’”
As an aside, it’s bears noting that Altman lives in Newtown, CT, and she was terribly shaken, as were we all, by the tragedy there last winter. In her personal take on the aftermath, an essay she titled “Getting Back into the Kitchen,” she told of watching the customers come and go in her favorite butcher shop, Butcher’s Best, in downtown Newtown. Enthralled by the human capacity to carry on in the wake of unspeakable heartbreak, she watched as even the parents of victims would come to order their holiday roasts and would be given a comforting hand from the owner, Steve Ford. “I realized what I already knew:” writes Altman, “That feeding people through joy and withering sadness and celebration and despair is the business of life. It defines us. It’s the way we move forward, and the way we mark our days. It’s the way we nourish ourselves, and our hearts, and the hearts of those we love.”
Memories of a ‘Treyf’ Life
In her new memoir, Elissa Altman looks back on a lifetime of food, family, and the contradictions of life as an American Jew
By Judy Bolton-Fasman
Tablet
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Memories of a ‘Treyf’ Life
In her new memoir, Elissa Altman looks back on a lifetime of food, family, and the contradictions of life as an American Jew
By Judy Bolton-Fasman
September 19, 2016 • 12:00 AM
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Elissa Altman never fails to feels a frisson of recognition when Friday night approaches. That misty weekly stumbling into erev Shabbat opens and closes her extraordinary new memoir Treyf: My Life as an Orthodox Outlaw. In the first pages of the book, Altman is driving back from the Berkshires on a crisp fall Friday evening to the home she shares with her wife in Newtown, Connecticut. In her trunk, there is a freshly slaughtered pig—perhaps the first animal in the pecking order of foods forbidden to eat by Jewish law. But Altman’s memory of a very different kind of Friday night persists: “The sun begins to set slowly and I remember that it is Shabbos,” she writes, “and the prayer I spoke nearly every Friday night during my childhood summers echoes in my head—it’s been 40 years since I learned it—and I whisper it to myself: Thy Sabbath has come.”
Elissa Altman (Photo by Susan Turner)
Altman first claimed the Sabbath for herself during the childhood summers she spent in the Poconos at Camp Towanda. “I didn’t understand what Shabbat was,” Altman told me recently. “At sleepaway camp, everything came to a screeching halt on Friday nights. We dressed differently; we ate differently. We lit candles. Since then, Shabbat has so stayed with me that it has invaded my core muscles. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, on Friday nights I’ll see the sun going down and remember that it’s Shabbat.”
In person, Altman is warm and talkative, but it’s a loquaciousness occasionally tamped down by shyness: She generously shares her life story, and yet there is something guarded about her. That paradox adds an intriguing layer of complexity to a woman who has been described as “the love child of David Sedaris and MFK Fisher.”
Joanna Rakoff, author of her own acclaimed memoir, My Salinger Year, does not entirely see that comparison, but made her own: “Elissa has a novelist’s eye for character and story, which reminds me of Kate Christensen, as well as other food writers like Molly Wizenberg and Jessica Fechtor.” Writer and memoirist Dani Shapiro added: “There’s tremendous integrity and courage present in Elissa’s writing—nothing about her work ever feels sentimental or pushed too far.”
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Treyf is Altman’s second book-length memoir, and in it, she traces the Yiddish word for unkosher to the biblical book of Leviticus, which lists prohibited, or treyf, foods. On the face of it, so many of the foods that Altman and her family have loved to indulge in are, strictly speaking, treyf. In the book, Altman’s father, Cy, the son of a dour Orthodox cantor, gives in to his guilt-ridden affinity for treyf by frying up bacon and Spam. That kind of fare bonds Altman to her father, who also surreptitiously takes her to lunch in expensive Manhattan restaurants where she eats oysters and whole lobsters.
But on a deeper level, treyf is Altman’s self-described identity at the intersection of American and Jewish life.
Shapiro says this meditation on the forbidden has earned Altman a place in the American Jewish canon. “From the title (which I love so much!) to the stories expertly stitched together throughout,” Shapiro wrote in an email, “Treyf is a uniquely Jewish story of rebellion, assimilation, shame, loss, family betrayal, and ultimately, growing up.”
Altman’s first book, Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire and the Art of Simple Cooking, chronicled her early relationship with her now-wife. Altman met Susan Turner, a Catholic 10 years her senior, online in 2000. A lifelong New Yorker, Altman spent weekends visiting Turner’s house in northwestern Connecticut; these visits morphed into longer stays until the two women decided to make a life together. Altman’s story of their courtship is buoyed in Poor Man’s Feast with recipes she and Turner make, ranging from dishes as basic as salami and scrambled eggs to the more foodie-oriented braised lamb shanks in red wine.
Both Rakoff and Shapiro came to Altman’s work through her James Beard Award-winning blog, Poor Man’s Feast. On her blog, Altman describes the role of food in her memoirs as “the grounding wire and the anchor; it is the silent collaborator in the story, the one who watches the tribe increase and the decades unspool and the rules be broken, repeatedly; food lures and betrays, beckons and soothes, and connects the present to the past in an unending loop.”
When Altman launched the blog, she branded it with an image of a 17th-century butcher’s pig. “A lot of readers found it funny that I write about pork a lot,” Altman said, “because my writing covers so many Jewish themes. I started to realize, in telling stories about my family, that we have all been on the outside looking in. We were not only eating treyf, but we were all treyf, especially me as a lesbian married to a Catholic woman. That was actually the impetus behind the book’s title.”
Altman does not include written recipes in Treyf. It’s a book born of olfactory memory—a book that captures a unique Jewish epigenetics. “There were no recipes—nothing was written down by [my maternal grandmother] Gaga,” Altman said. “Purely by virtue of the fact that she was in my childhood home is why I learned to cook. I didn’t get it from my mother or my other grandmother.”
“Angry Breakfast Eggs,” a short essay that speaks volumes about the complicated relationship with Altman’s food-averse mother, Rita, was anthologized in Best American Food Writing of 2012. Rita, who starved herself to rail thinness, was a singer who appeared on television during the 1950s and later modeled fur coats in a New York City showroom. In addition to chronicling Rita’s fraught relationship to food in Treyf, last year Altman also embarked on writing a yearlong series of articles for the Washington Post aptly titled “Feeding My Mother.” In those monthly columns, Altman balanced the challenges of coming to terms with her difficult mother while properly nourishing her:
Ours has been a lifetime of contradiction, paradox, incongruity, and argument: My mother is the bright to my dark, the thin to my heft, the tall to my short, the food-fearful to my chronically famished. Together, we have spent our lives starving: She, for the wisp-like physique she was certain would propel her onto the performance stage and model’s runway, and which, for many years, did; and I, for the sustenance and nurturing that I find at the table, in the act of cooking for and feeding others and myself.
Altman’s paternal grandmother makes hazy appearances in Treyf. In a dark, somber apartment located in the shadow of Coney Island, a place Altman remembers as being lit by the faint glow of Sabbath candles, her grandmother serves her heavy Eastern European food. “My father’s mother was a good cook, but riddled with quirks. She never used onion. Try making Eastern European food without onion,” joked Altman. In a memorable scene, Altman recalls the unfortunate timing of her grandmother feeding her a “cold boiled brain on a plate the day after I saw the premiere of Young Frankenstein at the Ziegfield in 1974.”
Altman’s depiction of her beloved Gaga, and the food Gaga cooked, poignantly demonstrates how food is love for her. Although the concept is overly familiar, Altman performs a kind of literary CPR on the phrase. In her capable hands, food becomes refreshingly synonymous with love. And that love mingles with the sensuous details of food preparation. “Gaga,” said Altman, “was one of the most natural cooks I’ve ever known. Love was simply associated with the fact that she said, ‘What do you want me to cook for you?’ It was pure love and nurturing.”
Altman asserts that another theme driving many of her family stories—stories she said she has spent a lifetime contemplating and “ultimately unraveling”—has been her encounter with the Holocaust. “I lost a number of family members in the Shoah,” she told me. “People my paternal grandfather left behind when he ran away from home in Eastern Europe in 1905 and immigrated to the United States.”
For Rakoff, that history, in part, “makes [Treyf] a very dark book that examines the rage and frustration of her parents’ generation. These brilliant, complex people felt stymied, held back, by their own parents’ fear, superstition, and values, as well as the specter of the Holocaust, which Elissa gorgeously, hauntingly evokes.”
In an essay for the On Being blog, Altman conjures the inevitable feeling of shame paired with the process of remembering and then shaping her life story:
The hurdles can make you think you’re better-or-worse-than. They can shut you down, prop you up, alter your course, tack your sails. They can result in moments of bliss and terror, calm and panic, hubris and humility, pomposity, paranoia, and paralysis. Often within moments of each other.
These obstacles may hinder permission to write, but they don’t withhold permission to succeed at it. The rickety, splintering plank connecting the two, as quavery as a rope bridge over a gorge, is reserved strictly for shame.
Altman catalogs the various instances in Treyf in which shame rears its head. “It’s the shame of being a person raised in a devoutly Jewish home and making a break like my father, which caused him so much anguish,” she said. “It’s about my grandfather leaving his family and then losing them in the Shoah. For me, it was once the shame of being a lesbian—attracted to women as a teenager when everybody was dating boys. It was the shame of being a survivor of child sexual abuse. Writing helped me overcome that shame, and cooking allowed me to nurture myself as well as to be nurtured.”
Shame also comes into play in the way Treyf portrays her father as a modern-day converso. For example, for a year Altman’s father says the requisite Mourner’s Kaddish for his father in the musty basement of their apartment building. Only Altman knows that her father is still drawn “to the sanctity … that tortured him; … he choked on hot tears as he chanted like the dutiful son he was, ignoring the portion of the law that also commands that the Mourner’s Kaddish be said in a synagogue.” Years later, Altman would learn that her father also secretly prayed the daily morning service until the day he died.
At the end of Treyf, Altman slips into a synagogue in midtown Manhattan on erev Shabbat to say the kaddish. The amber-like scene ties together many of Treyf’s themes: The Moorish style architecture reminds Altman of the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion. There is the idea of praying surreptitiously. Judaism’s lachrymose history. And there is the ever-present hush of the Sabbath that continuously animates Altman’s Jewish soul.
***
Treyf
Elissa Altman
0
Berkley 2016
288 Pages $26.00
ISBN: 978-0425277812
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barnesandnoble
Review by Libi Adler
Elissa Altman has eaten a lot of treyf—and loved it. In fact, the first sentence of her book describes her purchase of a 200-pound half of a pig from a seller in Massachusetts, “a nod to food trend and excess more than to need; no couple actually needs half an adult pig.” Throughout the rest of the 304-page book, there is a mention of some kind of pork food product on every other page. It is as if Altman is trying to drive home the point that her childhood was, in fact, treyf.
Altman is a very visual, creative, imaginative soul. She remembers more details about the ‘70s that others might recount from the last week. Her descriptions and scene settings involve incredible amounts of detail—sometimes too much: the embellished recollections of dishes, and waiters’ outfits become distracting at times. Altman painstakingly specifies each meal and how it was cooked, emphasizing her deep connection to her grandmother Gaga’s cooking and how, despite it not being kosher, it connected her to a deep level of Judaism.
In the beginning of the memoir, Altman’s narrative alternates between her parents’ pasts and how they met to her neighborhood and its inhabitants. The Champs-Élysées Promenade and the Marseilles apartment building were clearly defining points in her childhood. It was here that her parents’ friendships, her grandmother’s cooking, and the various personalities to enter her youth molded her life.
Once the stage has been set, Altman gets to the crux of her memoir: her identity as a daughter of parents who shunned their Judaic pasts—possibly even her identity as the daughter of mismatched parents and the granddaughter of a generation of loveless marriages. As the years go by, Altman loses herself and her identity is a blur. She does not feel compelled to pick a career and she isn’t even sure about her own sexuality. Her father, once a temperamental man, becomes a source of support and comfort once he and her mom get divorced. Her grandmother’s cooking, especially her Hungarian goulash, inspires Altman do some of her own experimenting. Depressed, she obsesses over trying out new recipes and recreating the foods of her childhood to revive the feelings of comfort she got from eating with her Gaga.
Altman eventually finds her purpose and realizes she has to carve her own path. She marries her partner, Susan, and together they live a very different life in Connecticut, far from the one she knew in New York. Even so, Altman understands and expresses that her Jewish upbringing, while confusing and conflicting, will forever float through her body and soul.
Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw
Image of TREYF: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw
Author(s):
Elissa Altman
Release Date:
September 19, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
NAL
Pages:
304
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Margaret Placentra Johnston
For anyone not familiar with the term, this book’s title will make little sense until a definition of treyf has been supplied. Treyf is a word used in Judaism to refer to a food that is not kosher and therefore prohibited. But author Elissa Altman shares an alternate definition commonly used in her family: “imperfect, intolerable, offensive, undesirable, unclean, improper, filthy, broken, forbidden, illicit, rule breaking.” She notes: “A person can eat treyf; a person can be treyf.”
Treyf is the story of Altman’s quest for an authentic personal identity* amidst numerous conflicting familial expectations regarding food, religious observance, and even sexuality. Some in her family observe Jewish law more strictly than others. Some keep kosher, others don’t.
Altman’s rendition is most engaging as her openness and confidential tone quickly draw the reader into her world where her early family life is always bordering on the edge of treyf. The only criticism is that the reader may occasionally lose his grip because Altman’s accounts have a tendency to flit back and forth without warning from one time frame to another.
Altman’s is a stormy and perplexing world. Her father was brought up in a violent home. Her mother was a depressed and food-obsessed fur model who had gotten married mainly out of the need to get out of her parents’ house.
The lifestyle of Altman’s Jewish but mostly nonobservant parents conflicts with the traditions followed by the more observant extended family. But even within the extended family, various people choose which Jewish customs to follow and which to ignore. The rules tend to flex and flow with the situation. Some will eat this, but not that. Some will keep kosher in one place, but not in others, and the way each person interprets the rules seems to vary over time.
As an uncommonly perceptive and introspective child, the young Altman winds up in the middle of many of these conflicts, which haunt her and serve as the source of her identity confusion. Is she a Jewish girl or not? To what extent will she adopt the practices and food restrictions of her heritage? Always present is the fear of eating treyf, or of actually being treyf. Being thrown out of Hebrew school after just one day did not help her to know who she is.
Altman’s colorful and dearly beloved grandmother, Gaga, plays a significant role. Forced into marriage at age 34 by family expectations, Gaga reportedly had consented to a single act of sex on her wedding night, and that is how Altman’s mother came to be born. But eventually her spurned husband was relegated to the attentions of a Catholic nun—of all things—while Gaga covertly took on a long-term gay lover.
Altman’s story includes hints about her own sexuality from a very early age. Disgusted with her ballerina outfit at age three, she quips, “I wanted to be Ken, not Barbie.” In her first and only Hebrew school class, the teacher Miss Kranowitz “put her hand on my shoulder, [and] I thought I’d pass out.” As middle school friends are discussing early sexual forays, Altman shares her personal reaction: “I achingly lust after something I can’t name; I know, instinctively, that it needs to be hidden.”
The summer working at the Sugar Maples Hotel in the Catskills among gentiles is transformative. Eventually the various life factors that contribute to Altman’s individuation become clear. Included are Gaga’s passing, and Altman’s passionate foray into cooking, despite her mother’s and her Aunt Sylvia’s disdain for this task. “Cooking became my religion, the key to my sacred, the path to sanctity and peace.” Also involved is her realization that her connection to her family will end with her father’s passing.
Altman finally finds herself when she becomes brave enough to venture outside the safety of family and religious expectations. After a long struggle and in a different part of the country, she finds an authentic identity defiantly filled with trayf food and what her family would consider a trayf lifestyle to boot.
“I am the real modern American, the who transcended my family’s genetic code of violence and disappointment, who broke every Talmudic law presented to us as though it was our job. . . . Belonging everywhere, I now belong nowhere. . . . I am safe—finally safe—even as I yearn for . . . all who came before me.”
In addition to its obvious human-interest value, this story is even more useful as an example of one person’s struggle to mature as an individual. To become thoroughly adult, a person must first step outside of the religious beliefs, cultural mores, and lifestyle expectations—even food restrictions—her tribe would impose on her, and critically analyze them for validity in her own life. Only once she has figured out who she is as an individual can a person begin to assess how those cultural beliefs and expectations fit in. Only then can she responsibly choose which ones to adopt and which to reject.
Unfortunately much of our conventional culture tries to make things work the other way around—tries to force the individual into the mold of various familial, religious, and cultural expectations. Some people engage more actively than others in the process of maturing as an individual; some reach wholeness more fully than others. The work of assimilating findings from this journey into an integral whole may be the task of a lifetime.
Altman was hurled into this struggle very early in life; her journey was one filled with more roadblocks than most. But Treyf, one person’s articulation of the process, is a gift to any who may still have this necessary maturation task before them.
* Treyf’s original subtitle was My Quest for Identity in a Forbidden World.