When I was a young child, the Holocaust lived in our kitchen drawer.
I grew up in a home where my mother’s Holocaust experience was Off Limits—never mentioned, never to be mentioned. Then one day when I was five or six, I saw my mother referring to a strange looking recipe booklet as she was cooking our dinner. I asked her what it was. She answered with a blank face and a flat voice that she had “written it in concentration camp” as her camp mates had been telling recipes. I froze with fear, realizing I had just opened the gates for the unmentionable to spill over the kitchen counter. The booklet then disappeared into the kitchen drawer.
A lifetime later I started volunteering at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, a museum that advocates tolerance by exploring the consequences of intolerance—the Holocaust being the prime example. The memory of that hidden recipe collection came back to me. After an intense search I found it tucked away deep, abandoned in a repository of my mother’s paperwork. Holding the recipes in my hands, I was drawn to discovering their history.
My journey into the Off Limits brought about the birth of Holding Onto A Flame.