The Man Who Ate the World by Jay Rayner Page A

the most soothing of chicken soups, and liked to fry eggs with wurst, a kind of beef salami that always stained them pink. Most of all, she made gefilte fish, both boiled and fried. The boiled, which she loved, I hated. The mix of sweetened white fish (in some recipes ground almonds are added, giving an unpleasant crumbly mouth feel) would be formed into balls, boiled, then allowed to cool and served with a clear fishy jelly. I thought it was disgusting, a creation that should go from pan to bin without troubling the plate, and it was that dish that the stuffed carp at Sirena most reminded me of.
    Her fried gefilte fish, though, was something else, the crisp, salty exterior giving way to light fluffy insides. The only peculiarity was that my mother insisted it should be eaten cold rather than hot. This was a relic from the days of observance that she so firmly rejected. Fried gefilte fish would have been made in advance of the Sabbath, and then eaten cold when cooking was forbidden. We ate bagels and onion platzels, garlicky new green pickled cucumbers (which she sometimes made herself ), and salt beef, which ideally came with its own ribbon of amber fat.
    When I left home, and moved even farther away from my roots, I came to think that the only thing that defined me as a Jew was my love for these dishes. All of this food marked my family out as Ashkenazi Jews, who came from the Pale of Settlement, those parts of Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Byelorussia, annexed in the late eighteenth century by Catherine the Great of Russia (a country that, until that point, had been closed to Jews).
    Throughout the centuries of wandering, the Jews had been famously good at adapting the local culinary traditions to the demands of their religious dietary laws, and because they settled for so many centuries in the lands of Mittel and Eastern Europe, and became so established, they appropriated an awful lot of what was there. As a result, many of thethings that I had always associated with the Ashkenazi—the use of soured cream and dill, of caraway and poppy seed, the chicken soups and dumplings and pickles—were really just the foods of the Slavic peoples (minus, tragically, their love of all things pig, a relationship I have since put a lot of effort into rekindling).
    In London, where I grew up, my taste for schmaltz—literally, for chicken fat—was the last remaining vestigial stump of all those historical and geographical associations. My need for a regular fix of salt beef on rye was like the phantom itch from a long-ago amputated limb. My wife, Pat, who is not Jewish, hates this stuff and says I would, too, were it not for the cultural attachments. She also says that Jewish cuisine is an oxymoron. On this we are agreed. The word “cuisine” suggests finesse, and if there’s any finesse in Jewish food, it isn’t being done right.
    A few years ago a cousin decided to trace our family tree and, though I had not looked at it in any detail, I had brought the documents with me on this, my first trip to Russia. It begins with my ancestor Boruch, born near Lublin, Poland, in 1796, a major achievement of genealogy for the Jews who, notoriously, can claim thousands of years of collective history but none of the paperwork to back it up.
    From Boruch it works forward through nine generations to describe a family, mostly unknown to one another, which now spans the world from London to Jerusalem, from Canada and the U.S.A. to Brazil and Argentina. My line of the family comes from Josef Boruchowicz, my mother’s grandfather, who was born in Sarnaki, Poland, in 1882 and died in London in 1942, having changed his surname to Berk. What intrigues me most is not what happened to the ones who left Poland but what happened to those who stayed. Obviously, large numbers were murdered during the Holocaust. The accounts of the fifth, sixth, and seventh generations, who were still living not far from Lublin at the outbreak of World War II, are