KOSHER: CUISINE JUIVE, GHETTOS MODERNES: ???

39. [Polish-Jewish Cookbook or Sterotyped Travelogue? OCLC Locates Only 3 Copies in North America] Pomiane, Edouard de

Edité par Paris: Albin Michel, 1929

A propos de cet article

1st edition. Original color-printed paper wrappers with later lamination, 12mo 241 pages. 19cm. In French. Title translates as: "Kosher: Jewish Cuisine, Modern Ghettos." Book was later re-issued under the less controversial title, "The Jews of Poland; Recollections and Recipes." Rebecca Miller discussed the book at length in the Jewish Forward in 2013: "De Pomiane (1875-1964), a physician, was also one of the most famous chefs and cookery writers of his day. Born Eduard Pozerski, he was born into the Polish aristocracy, brought up poor but refined. Both his parents were Polish patriots who fought against Russian domination of their homeland; his mother fled to France with the young Eduard when his father was deported to Siberia for insurrection against the Russians. Coming of age within the close-knit community of Polish exiles in Paris, he was sympathetic to liberal causes and was a proponent of the Dreyfus cause. His ethnographic book about Polish Jewish culture and cooking, written in 1928, was originally entitled 'Cuisine Juive; Ghetto Modernes' ('Jewish Cooking; Modern Ghettos'). It is, perhaps, the weirdest book I have ever read. A tantalizingly vague recipe for Carpe a la Juive ('Take a large, live carp. Kill it.') follows a horrifying description of a pogrom, relayed to de Pomiane by a museum guide who had survived the massacre by hiding under a heap of hay in which his sister suffocated overnight: 'A corpse, belly ripped open, lay with its guts wrapped around its neck.A child wandered aimlessly, haggard, mute, crazed, its body beaten to a pulp.' In de Pomiane's writing, appreciative paragraphs about the accomplishment of certain refined Jews rub shoulders with unwittingly racist pseudo-science. 'I observed as a biologist.wrote as a scientist,' claims de Pomiane, as he cheerfully divides all male Jews into three types: 'The dark-haired Jew, with a long beard and a delicate, aquiline nose. His lips are often thin, his ears lie flat against his head. His eyes are deep, almost mystical. He is less excitable than the others. It could be said that he belongs to an ethnic aristocracy. He has an Egyptian profile.' 'This type is also dark-haired, and much more common. His beard is black, shorter, his eyes are bulging and bloodshot, his nose is squat, his lips are thick and very red.This is the excitable Jewish type. When he laughs, he sniggers. The face, overall, has a cruel and bestial appearance. Certainly this type of Jew would frighten a child in France, even if that child were himself Jewish.' 'A third, and rarer, type is completely red-headed. The beard is shorter and divided in two. He has the same negroid facial characteristics as the preceding type. The lips look even thicker and frame the teeth with two red borders of equal size. Although they are red, the peyes look brown from being rolled, twisted, and curled between fingers that are constantly being licked.' Having provided us with this helpful diagram of Jewish types, he takes us on a tour of Jewish Poland, beginning with Kazimierz, the Jewish Ghetto in Crakow since the Middle Ages: The whole place seems fairly, and in some places, extremely, poverty-stricken. The more so since the population is dirty and strange. In Kazimierz, everyone dresses in black, everyone rushes about in a hurry, they all bustle about irritably, pushing, shouting, arguing. One would think the whole city was in the grip of some nervous disease. De Pomiane believes that these poor, nervous Jews give us a sense of what the tribes of Israel must have been like, 'these people who when settled among us became the educated and refined individuals with whom we are familiar.' So, De Pomiane argues, the less 'Jew-y' the Jews are, the more European, the more refined they are-and hence, it seems, equal to non-Jews. Unfortunately in only a few years there was no refinement that could save a Jew in Poland, or indeed, France: being Jewish was considered a racial fact, not a cultural subtlety. But de Pom.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: KOSHER: CUISINE JUIVE, GHETTOS MODERNES: ???
• Éditeur: Paris: Albin Michel
• Date de parution: 1929
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• Édition: Edition originale
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Judaica (all)
  • Poland
  • Antisemitism