THE BOOK OF LIFE - Across So Many Seas with Ruth Behar

9:47PM Apr 28, 2024

Speakers:

Heidi Rabinowitz

Sheryl Stahl

Heidi Rabinowitz

Ruth Behar

Leslea Newman

Keywords:

sephardic

story

jewish

cuba

song

write

spain

sephardic jews

spanish

books

working

book

expulsion

family

cuban

children

speaking

seas

grandparents

years

[COLD OPEN] They all left, like 90% of this Jewish community of about 50,000 people left in the '60s. That's when my family left. And yet they were so happy in Cuba that they thought it was going to be their promised land, their tropical promised land. And I always found that to be so poignant and so powerful. It feels right to me to tell those stories because there's so many stories I can still tell from a Jewish Cuban perspective.

This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Lucky Broken Girl, Letters from Cuba, Tia Fortuna's New Home, and now, Across So Many Seas. Award winning author Ruth Behar keeps finding new ways to share her Sephardic and Ashkenazi Cuban Jewish heritage with us, and it's fresh and fascinating every time. In her latest sweeping middle grade novel Across So Many Seas, she introduces us to four generations of a Sephardic family, from the Spanish Inquisition to modern times. Like the Ladino song woven into the story of each of the 12 year old protagonists, this book is a poignant and powerful ode to sorrow, and connection, and joy. Check out the show notes for more about Ruth, including a link to a blog interview we did in 2021 about Letters from Cuba at BookofLifePodcast.com.

Ruth Behar, welcome to The Book of Life.

Well, it's so nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

I read an interview that you did for the website Public Seminar, where you said that you became a children's author through serendipity. So can you explain that?

My family were Jewish Cubans or Jewbans as we're also called. We had arrived from Cuba and soon after we were in this terrible car accident. And I was in a body cast for close to a year. I had written about that experience before but looking at it as a woman looking back on her childhood. And then somebody said to me, well, why don't you write about this from the child's perspective? I had to recreate this 10 year old girl from a fictional perspective. And then when I finished, I said, this is really a book for kids. And I kind of jumped into that world. It wasn't anything I was ever planning to do. I thought I would always be writing nonfiction for adult readers, as I had done as an anthropologist, and then suddenly, I had jumped into this world of kidlit.

Well, the book that you were just describing, Lucky Broken Girl, really made a splash. And all of your children's books have been excellent. As I was saying, before we started recording, I've just been basically waiting for an opportunity to talk to you. And now you've written a book that I just simply could not ignore, Across So Many Seas. So tell us about this new book.

That's really an honor, I really appreciate it. Well, this new book is different from the other two middle grade novels I've written before: Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, from the point of view of one girl, and here I have four girls telling the story. We start in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, then we make a big leap, several hundred years into the future to Turkey in 1923, Cuba in 1961, and then Miami, the US in 2003. I wanted to write a Sephardic novel, I don't think we have a lot of Sephardic novels for kids or even for grownups, really. I'm Sephardic on my father's side of the family, I'm Ashkenazi on my mother's side. The Sephardic side was always the more mysterious side because I was much closer to my Ashkenazi side. Yet, the family would always say that I seemed more Sephardic, I looked more Sephardic, I had the temperament of a Sephardic person, a strong will, you know, they said, This is Sephardic. So I've been interested in Sephardic topics for a long time, I made a documentary film 20 years ago about the Sephardic Jews of Cuba, and I've written poems about my Sephardic identity. So it was there in my mind. And then one day, I just had this idea that I would write the story from four points of view, and that it would have to be about Jewish displacement and the Jewish search for home, but looked at from the point of view of girls, because we so rarely hear these stories told from the perspective of young girls.

You mentioned 1492, and I think people are familiar with that year, "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue," but talk about the significance of that year; what else happened in 1492?

We all know about the conquest of the Americas in 1492. But before that, the expulsion of the Jews was called for by the Spanish kings. And this happened actually, after they conquered Granada, the last stronghold to be held by Muslims in Spain. And then the next step at the end of March of 1492, was to call for the expulsion of the Jews. They had four months to gather their things and leave Spain, if they wanted to continue being Jewish. They did have the choice to convert. And in fact, I found this incredible chronicle by a priest of that era, who witnessed the expulsion and recalled how there were priests like on the path that the Jews were taking to leave Spain, there were preists saying "we will still convert you and you can stay," and those who left essentially became the Sephardic Jews. So before the Spanish Empire could essentially conquer what became known as the New World, they first had to expel those who were different, those who were not Catholic. And so that I think, is just such a pivotal thing and just says so much about the inability for people to coexist with different religions and different belief systems.

So, as you mentioned, you tell this story with four different generations, medieval Spain, and then the rest are many years later and much closer together: a grandmother, a mother and a granddaughter, with the last generation being in the present day. So why did you decide to organize it that way, rather than like dipping in and out of Jewish history all along the way?

I was thinking about how does the distant history affect us to this day? 1492, that's so long ago. So thought I'll start with 1492. And then just see what remnants of that history remain in three generations, grandmother, mother, and daughter. And so I very purposely wrote it that way. I did at one moment think, Well, I wonder if readers are going to be convinced by this? Maybe they'd want something in the 16th century, something in the 17th, 18th, and 19th. And then we finally come to the 20th and 21st centuries. But I thought what's so interesting about Sephardic Jews is that we all think of ourselves as people who descend from those who left Spain, from those who chose to leave. They could have stayed and would probably be Catholic today. And so many Spaniards are looking for their roots, actually, and wondering if they had Jewish ancestors. So I thought, there's so much pride among Sephardic Jews that, you know, we were the ones that left. Nevertheless, we continued speaking Spanish, even though they expelled us. So it just seemed that it made a kind of spiritual sense to me to write it that way, to connect to history from 500 years ago, with what's happening today so that when we get to the last protagonist, to Paloma, she can feel and see that link that she has all the way to the past.

As you bring the story full circle, at the end with the modern Sephardic family visiting their ancestral homeland in Spain, something occurred to me. With the current discussions going on about Israel being the original ancestral Jewish homeland, it would have been interesting to see an origin story that reaches back even further, because the family must have started in the land of Israel originally, before they even got to Spain. And I know that wasn't the story that you were setting out to tell. But was that something that you consider showing, like the full story of their diaspora?

I definitely thought of it. I guess I don't feel that I have maybe the expertise to tell that story as well as the Spanish story. Just because I've been doing research in Spain for 40 something years, I did my anthropology fieldwork in a small Spanish village. So I've had a connection to Spain for so long. And I've thought about Spanish Jews for so long that I felt that that story, you know, I could tell vividly, like, I feel that story. So yeah, so I didn't feel I had the expertise and the lived experience to tell that story with the same vividness that I could tell the story that I did tell.

So you have these four different settings of location and time period. So you must have done a lot of research to write this book.

I think I did!

Well, it sounds like you did a lot of the research before you came to write the book. Like this was just something that you were researching your whole life long. But was there anything in particular that you learned during the research specifically for this book that surprised you? Or that was just really interesting, but you had to leave it out? Because it just didn't fit into the book.

One thing that surprised me that is in the book, is that I met Spaniards that are really seeking this kind of historical reparation in a way, and they will light Shabbat candles and they will light Hanukkah candles. So they'll celebrate some of the main Jewish holidays. They're not Jewish themselves. They're not planning to convert, but they want to respect Jewishness in Spain, and remember that there were Jews living in Spain. I mean, There are now Jews living in Spain. But there were, of course, many more before the expulsion, I found that so interesting, I was not expecting to see that. And so some elements of that are included at the end of the book. It is a story that in many ways I have been living and thinking about for a very long time, the close connection to Spain, but also the close connection to Cuba, where I was born. Because I've gone to Cuba many times, I have even taken Jewish groups to Cuba, where I also did fieldwork. And where I actually wrote a book about the Jews of Cuba. So I feel very connected to Spanish speaking countries, I grew up speaking Spanish, it was the language of home when we left Cuba. All of my family, both the English speaking mother's side spoke Spanish and the Ladino speaking father's side spoke Cuban Spanish. So I was always immersed, it's a language that makes me very, very happy. And I was also able to visit Turkey, which is another location for the story. And that had a deep impact on me being able to see the house where my paternal grandmother lived, that was amazing. And then I've spent a lot of time in Miami, which is another location for the story. So part of the research, I think, was living in those places. As an anthropologist, you know, having spent time in these places and spent a lot of time among strangers, you know, in Spain, I lived in this little village where everyone was Catholic, and they took me in with so much love and affection and worried about me took care of me. And in Cuba, similarly, I made friends with people who were so kind so generous to me. So that was one way in which I did research.

So I think editors make a very big difference in the success of children's literature. So let's shout out your editor. Who was your editor?

So my editor is Nancy Paulsen. And she's amazing. She has her own imprint at Penguin Random House. I dreamed of working with her, I would look at her picture online, I would just like stare at her picture and go, I would so love to work with you. I don't think she knows that story. I would just look at her picture and go, Oh, she seems so nice. So the three books now, Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, and now Across So Many Seas have all been edited by her. And it's been amazing to work with her. I feel fortunate and blessed. I think she's incredible.

In this most recent book, or really in any of these books, can you tell me anything that your editor said or did that helps to change the book and make it what it ultimately became?

Well, I think Nancy really understood about the four stories and that they should be about equal length. She helped me trim material that really didn't need to be there. So I do have a bit of a tendency to overwrite, particularly when I get to the end. I think it's a very Cuban thing. You know, Cubans say goodbye about five times. So if you like, are hanging out with friends, oh bye, you give each other a kiss, and then you get into a conversation and then you say goodbye again. And then you say goodbye again. So there's this Cuban goodbye, where you just keep saying goodbye and adding more and more. So I feel like she saves me from that, because I think that sometimes if I did have some of the endings that I originally wanted, they wouldn't have the effect. That's one of the things that I've learned working with her is that you really do need to end before the ending so that the reader can imagine what's going to happen next.

Excellent. Well, thank you to Nancy, because the books turned out great.

Thank you to Nancy! Thank you to Nancy.

So in Across So Many Seas, there's a musical instrument, an oud, and a song that gets passed down through the family. Can you talk about that and why you included those elements?

The oud is very important. First of all, on a personal level, because my paternal grandmother, my abuela, she was part of the inspiration for this book. She traveled alone to Cuba carrying an ood which is a Middle Eastern instrument played to this day in Turkey, Egypt, and many countries and many Sephardic Jewish young women played the oud in the 1920s and 30s in Turkey. So we know that she brought an oud, we know that she sang Sephardic songs. But then after she married, she just hung her oud from a nail on the wall in old Havana. And she never played the oud again, but I always heard about this oud. And so I thought that oud has to play an important role in this story because of my grandmother. And then the songs are very important because songs were the connection back to the Sephardic heritage. Some are more modern songs from the 19th and 20th century, but others do go back maybe not necessarily the tunes, but the lyrics are very old and a lot of the songs are love songs. There's songs of departure, there's songs of lost girls, you know, in the sea, and the major song that I love so much is "in the sea there is a tower" which I could try to sing the beginning part of it. [SINGING] "En la mar hay una torre, en la torre una ventana, en la ventana una hija, que a los marineros ama." Terrible, I'm not a singer.

No, that's great. I was gonna ask you to sing so I'm so happy that you volunteered without me having to beg!

So that song, I decided to make that the key song that comes in and out of the story: "in the sea there is a tower, en la mar hay una torre... in the tower there - wait - en la mar, in the sea there is a tower... I don't know it in English. En la mar hay una torre, en la torre una ventana, in the tower, there's a window, at the window una hija, a daughter, who sings to the sailors. So the idea of this young girl, you know, like caught in a tower in the middle of the sea. Is she being punished or has she just wanted her freedom and gone off on her own, but she's trapped in some way in the ocean? She's calling to the sailors to release her, to let her be, or we don't know exactly, it's like a fable. And I was just very drawn to that song, and I decided that that would be the song that would resonate through the whole story. Because they're constantly going from sea to sea, departing, needing to find a new home. It seemed like an appropriate song. There are other songs that come in Durme, Durme, which is a lullaby, you know, sleep, sleep. And then a very famous song, Adio Kerida, Goodbye, My Love, which is a modern song, 19th, 20th century song. There's a song about three sisters, because the second story about Reina was about a girl who was forced to leave Turkey by her father and go to Cuba and her two sisters stay behind. So it's a beautiful song about Tres Hermanikas Eran, Three Sisters They Were, and then there's one that is punished. So that song was just like, was so perfect. You know, I think for Sephardic Jews, the songs just really touch us very, very deeply.

So if people want to listen to these songs that you're mentioning, is there a particular website or album or artists that you can recommend?

I'm so glad you asked, because I now have a playlist on my own website.

Ah, perfect!

RuthBehar.com. Every single song that's mentioned in the book is on the playlist. And there's several versions of many of the songs. The key lyrics of each of the songs as well, and we're working on an educators guide, a really extensive... I think it's about 15 pages, educators guide with a lot of information about the language, about Ladino historical background, questions for kids to think about. So we have a lot of resources, and I wanted to make that accessible to both teachers and kids.

That's great, I'm glad to hear it.

We're going to take a short break now, so I can tell you about my plans for Jewish American Heritage Month. After the break. Ruth will tell us about the easiest and hardest parts of writing Across So Many Seas.

[MUSIC, ANNOUNCEMENT] May is Jewish American Heritage Month, and Canadian Jewish Heritage Month. In these troubled times, we need positive representation more than ever, so throughout May 2024, I'll be posting a Jewish kids' book a day on social media. I've chosen books that role model allyship and friendship between the Jewish community and our neighbors. It sooths my heart to read these books right now, and I hope it will inspire readers to make life imitate art. Listeners, please share these books with your own networks, especially with friends who aren't Jewish. Look for these recommendations on The Book of Life's Facebook, Instagram, or at BookofLifepodcast.com. Now back to my interview with the amazing Ruth Behar.

What was the easiest part of this story to write and what was the hardest?

The easiest one curiously, may have been the 1492 story of Benvenida, of the expulsion, the journey out of Spain, like the last days in Spain and saying goodbye to a place that you think of as a beloved home and now doesn't want you anymore. Somehow that story was very clear in my mind. And then I just had to figure out how are they going to get from Toledo, which is an inland city, to the coast of Spain and then leave Spain and go on to Naples and then to Constantinople which is now Istanbul. So that one just seemed like I had a clear journey in mind. The hardest one now that I look back on it was the last story, Paloma's story in 2003. I struggled with that one because I thought she's inheriting all the stories all the legacies that have come before her mother, her grandmother and way back to getting her voice right, think that one perhaps took the longest.

So all of your books seem to be about adapting to change, whether that's dealing with health or moving to a new home or a new country. Why do you think this theme runs through your work?

Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about it that way. Adaptation to change? Yes. Well, I guess part of it is personal. I am an immigrant, I came to the United States as an immigrant child. You know, this awareness of the double diaspora in our family, that I had European grandparents who settled in Cuba in the 1920s. And then my parents were born in Cuba, and they expected to live there forever, and then they had to leave. I think that was one of the reasons and, and I think the other is, perhaps growing up in Queens, which is such a diverse borough within New York, being not only an immigrant child myself, but surrounded by many other immigrants from many other places. Seeing that change is something that happens to people. I don't know that everything is explicable. But if I had to explain it, I'd probably say yeah, it's, it's it's a very personal part of my history.

Okay, that makes sense. You've been working hard to represent the Jewish Cuban experience with all of your books, with Lucky Broken Girl, Letters from Cuba, Tia Fortuna's New Home, and now Across So Many Seas. What do you most want listeners to know about Cuba?

Oh, that is such an interesting question. Well, there's so much to know about Cuba. But I would say that probably the most important thing that I tried to communicate, especially in Letters from Cuba, is that Cuba was this refuge for Jewish people. And that for many Jews, if Cuba had not taken them in, they would have almost certainly perished in the Holocaust. So this idea of Cuba as a haven, as a refuge, as a sanctuary for Jewish people, to me is so amazing. And it's one of the things that makes me feel so connected to Cuba is the sense that I am Jewish because I'm Cuban. Because my four grandparents found safety in Cuba. The Jewish community in Cuba is so fascinating because they were building their major synagogues and Jewish community centers in the late 1950s, literally on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, which begins in 1959. And they thought they were staying forever. They also bought more land for the Jewish cemetery, both cemeteries, a Ashkenazi and Sephardic cemetery on the outskirts of Havana, and a town called Guanabacoa. And they expanded their cemeteries also, thinking we're gonna be here for a long time. And then the revolution came and private properties were nationalized, Jewish people lost their mom and pop businesses. And they all left, like 90% of this Jewish community of about 50,000 people left in the '60s, that's when my family left. And yet they were so happy in Cuba that they thought it was going to be their promised land, their tropical promised land. And I always found that to be so poignant, and so powerful. It feels right to me to tell those stories, because there's so many stories I can still tell from a Jewish Cuban perspective.

You are half Ashkenazi and half Sephardic, as you mentioned. Can you talk about the experience of being from that mixture of backgrounds? And can you tell us is there anything that you want Sephardim and Ashkenazim to know about each other?

When I was growing up in New York, I was always explaining what it meant to be Jewish and Cuban because people found that combination so odd. Kids would say to me, is one parent Jewish and another parent is Cuban? I would say no, they're both Jewish and Cuban. And that already seems so complicated to people that to explain the Ashkenazi and Sephardic mix, I've rarely tried to explain that. The first day of Passover, the first Seder we always went to the home of my maternal grandparents, my Baba and Zeyda. So I got the sense that since we would go to the first Seder to the Ashkenazi grandparents that somehow they were more important. The second day, we would go to the Sephardic Seder with my paternal grandparents so as a child, I just got it into my head, Well, one is first and one is second. But I was aware from very early on about how different the two sets of grandparents were from each other. The Polish Russian food of my maternal grandparents, you know, the gefilte fish, the matzah ball soup, etc. was all so different from the Sephardic cuisine of the stuffed grape leaves, egg lemon soup, stuffed tomatoes, a tishpishti, this you know, amazing Passover dessert made from nuts and honey. I mean, these were two different worlds. One set of grandparents had grown up in Christian Europe and the other set of grandparents had grown up in Islamic Europe. The maternal grandparents spoke Yiddish. But then the idea that the other grandparents didn't speak any Yiddish, to my maternal grandparents was shocking. How can you be Jewish and not speak Yiddish? They never went around saying we speak Ladino. They just said, Espanol. Spanish with its own accent and its own vocabulary and different from Cuban Spanish, for example, or contemporary Spanish. So having those two cultures was quite incredible. And then seeing the differences play out between my parents as well. My father had very traditional ideas about women and what women should and shouldn't do that came from his Turkish Sephardic background. You know, for example, my maternal grandmother worked, she worked in Cuba, in a lace store. And then in the United States, she worked in a fabric store together with my grandfather, but the Sephardic grandmother didn't work, she stayed home and she cooked and took care of the house, it was my grandfather who would run out and do all the errands, but she never left the house. So just these differences in Ashkenazi and Sephardic culture. I think the only thing that Ashkenazi and Sephardic people need to do to understand each other better is to really respect the differences in their traditions and realize that their cultures developed in two very, very different systems of knowledge. We have to remember that when we attempt to understand how different the two cultures are from each other.

All right, thank you. In your day job, you are a professor of anthropology. How does that background affect your writing?

One of the good things that anthropology did for me is that I became a story listener before I became a storyteller. As an anthropologist, I've spent years and years listening to other people's stories, writing them down and try to understand them and try to do them justice. I think that was a good formation for becoming a storyteller. Now when I write fiction. It's as if my characters are talking to me in my head, and I have to listen to them and see what they want to tell me.

Sephardic children's literature has historically been rare, although we are starting to see an increase. Are there any Sephardic titles beyond your own that you would like to let people know about?

Absolutely, there's several. There's Sarah Aroeste's Mazal Bueno, which is a beautiful board book. And then I wanted to mention a book that I just started reading, We Are Not Strangers. This is a historical fiction graphic novel by Josh Tuininga, and it's really beautiful. It's based on true story from his grandfather. It's about the intersection of the Sephardic community and the Japanese community in Seattle during World War II. And then I have other books that I've read and reread, not for kids but very important background. Kantika is a beautiful book by Elizabeth Graver, based on her grandmother's story, it has a similar background to my paternal grandmother from Turkey, who lived in Spain, lived in Cuba, then came to the United States. And then another beautiful book is One Hundred Saturdays, Michael Frank's book about Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, a Greek Sephardic Holocaust survivor. This one's kind of closer to anthropology. It's based on recorded interviews with Stella Levi, so I would love to recommend those.

What are you working on next?

Well, I'm working on a verse novel. This is something I've dreamed of doing for a while. And it is a very contemporary story. It's taking place like now in the present, so a little bit different from what I've written before. And it is a story about loss and grief.

It's Tikkun Olam Time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Keeping with the Sephardic theme, there is now this wonderful organization called American Ladino League, just been formed. I'm on the advisory board. And it was founded by three amazing people who've been activists for the Ladino language, the language of the Sephardic Jews, which is now an endangered language. During the pandemic, many groups formed online to get together to talk in Ladino, to write to each other in Ladino and to hold on to this language, to revitalize this language. And so you can donate to the American Ladino League or you can become involved, if you just want to know more. It's just such an incredibly special and beautiful language. It's Spanish with all of these other layers that have been added during the different diasporas of the Sephardic Jews. So you'll find some French and some Italian and some Turkish and some Hebrew mixed in to the Spanish that was held on to from the 15th century. I would say, yeah, that might be a way to help heal the world, to do what we can not to lose this language that was spoken for centuries by the Sephardic Jews.

All right, great. I will put a link in the show notes to The American Ladino League.

Thank you.

Is there an interview question that you never get asked that you would like to answer?

Hmm. Well, how do you get started writing fiction?

You never get asked that?

Not really.

Oh, all right. Well, what's your answer?

What's my answer? Well, you know, I wrote nonfiction and poetry for a very long time, and memoir. And I was afraid to write fiction for two reasons. First of all, I really respect fiction writers. I think a good novel is such an incredible creation. And I just put novels so much on a pedestal that I thought, it's just too hard for me, I don't have the talent to do this. I better stick to nonfiction where I can record people's stories and use the words they tell me to write. But I felt often that I was more of a scribe than a writer, could I tell my own stories? And could I create characters just out of my imagination? I wasn't sure I could do that. So I don't really know how I wrote Lucky Broken Girl. But I think the important thing is there were things I wished had been different things that I wished had been more magical, that I'd been understood a little better when I was 10. And struggling with not only the cast, but when I came out of the cast, I struggled so much to learn to walk again. And I feel that sometimes people around me were impatient and didn't understand how hard it was, after a year in bed, to walk. So there were some things that I wished had been different. And I think that's where I thought fiction was what I need here, fiction will heal me because I can imagine a different reality than the one I experienced. And so I think that's where I kind of made the leap. And I realized this is something I can do with fiction.

That's a great answer. I'm glad you thought of the question. Is there anything else that you want to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you?

I just want to shout out to Hannah Pressman, who's one of the founders of the American Ladino League. She is the person that has created this educator guide. So it comes from someone who really is super knowledgeable about everything Sephardic.

All right, great. Ruth Behar, thank you so much for speaking with me.

Heidi Rabinowitz. It was great to talk to you too. Thank you so much.

[MUSIC, TEASER] This is Lesléa Newman, author of Joyful Song, A Naming Story, which is beautifully illustrated by Susan Gal, and published by Levine Querido. Susan and I will soon be joining you on The Book of Life podcast. And we would like to dedicate our episode to our fabulous editor and publisher Arthur Levine, who is not only a rock star in the world of children's literature, but a true mensch as well.

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473 or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com Check out our Book of Life podcast Facebook page, or our Facebook discussion group Jewish Kidlit Mavens. We are occasionally on Twitter too @bookoflifepod. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through Bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookofLifepodcast.com Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading!

[MUSIC, PROMO] Every year, the Research Archive and Special libraries division of the Association of Jewish Libraries, otherwise known as the RAS Division, gives awards for excellence in Reference and in Bibliography. Since these are obviously not fiction, they wouldn't ordinarily be a candidate for this podcast. But I got an opportunity to share the interview of last year's bibliography winner that I found too delicious to pass up. The Bibliography Award focuses on books written about other books. In this case, the winner András Koerner, won for his work Early Jewish Cookbooks: Essays on Hungarian Jewish Gastronomical History. Join me at Nice Jewish Books to listen to RAS vice president Eitan Kensky and author András Koernerr. Discuss Jewish food, cookbooks, and culture.