Savage Feast: Boris Fishman and Alana Newhouse

Food as the connection to history, identity, belonging, family, and love.

Beginning with novelist Boris Fishman’s roots in Soviet Belarus, Savage Feast is a bold family memoir told through meals and recipes. It describes how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. After his family’s emigration to the U.S., the cooking of his grandfather's Ukrainian home aide, Oksana, sends Fishman on a quest to re-connect with his past, which takes him to the lettuce beds on a farm in the Hudson Valley, the prep line in a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, and a Native American reservation in South Dakota before he finds his way back to Brooklyn. 

With contributions from Ruth Reichl, Éric Ripert, Joan Nathan, Yotam Ottolenghi, and Dr. Ruth Westehimer, Tablet Magazine’s 100 Most Jewish Foods, edited by Tablet’s founder and editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse, is a list of neither the most popular Jewish foods nor the tastiest (jellied calves’ feet, anyone?), but the most significant, culturally and historically. It goes without saying, you’re expected to disagree.

Join Boris Fishman and Alana Newhouse in a wide-ranging conversation about food as the connection to history, identity, belonging, family, and love – and how to write about it.

Fishman's novel A Replacement Life won the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal and was a New York Times Notable Book, and his journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet magazine.

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Registration does not guarantee admission. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A stand by line will form thirty minutes before the program.

The Program Room opens at 6 PM.

ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.