In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

It has long been a dream of mine to steal or reprise the premise of a column called War Nerd, which ran in the English-language Moscow newspaper the eXile in the nineties. As I recall, the column examined contemporary conflicts and current events with an awareness of the region’s history of war. Since war and war history are among my reading preoccupations, or were before I became a cooking-from-literature columnist and my reading list skewed almost entirely to “books with food in them” or “books that might have food in them,” I imagined myself qualified. The modern Italian classic The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), has both food and war, but alas it showed up that dream as a delusion—a brief Google search determined that the original War Nerd, Gary Brecher, is still at it for a relaunched online version of the eXile.

The Leopard’s setting is Sicily in 1860, the year Garibaldi returned from exile and the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, began. Prior to that, as many of us remember vaguely from high school history, modern Italy was a cluster of nation-states, often ruled by foreign powers. Sicily, united with Naples as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was ruled by a French Bourbon king. Lampedusa was a descendent of Sicilian aristocracy, and the book is loosely based on the experiences of his great-grandfather, who appears as the character Don Fabrizio Corbera, prince of Salina.

I have long wondered why, exactly, The Leopard is so popular in America—more than one well-meaning literary friend has tried to force it upon me, and until a recent decluttering, I had two copies of it, without having read it once. The book is beautifully written and has a sexy subplot about chaste young lovers feverishly fondling each other in the abandoned rooms of the baroque family castle, but don’t many deserving yet obscure works-in-translation fit those categories? Moreover, the Italy it presents is not the one we think we know. Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

I have unusually clear memories of early childhood, including one about the bright-white lines of a tennis court when I could only just crawl and one about learning to walk. I can recall being so small that the lower confines of the kitchen assumed the grand scale of a castle, the floor textural and crumb-scattered; its landmarks included a drawer of copper jelly molds and another of potatoes with hairy black eyes. As an older child, I had seemingly endless Big Wheel range of our suburban neighborhood, and my memories are of the rooms created by the undersides of shrubbery, of my painstaking collection of wet stones (which all dried disappointingly gray), of the delicate plant “surgeries” I performed on beds of glistening aloe. It seems impossible, but I recall that my thoughts at this age were mostly metaphysical; I would hide along the foundations of our house imagining infinity or seeing how many steps of “I’m thinking about thinking about thinking … ” I could grasp. Someone had told me that children forgot early childhood, so I swung in our hammock and tried to imprint the feeling of its abrasive fibers on my skin, for recollection when I got old.

Nothing has ever returned me to that childhood feeling like the work of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), a Polish Jew born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who lived his entire life in the provincial village of Drohobych (now part of Ukraine). Schulz was a funny little man, poor and unassuming, who taught art in a boys’ school and privately made semierotic drawings of cruel ladies in high-heeled shoes. His literary output was minuscule—two books of short stories in nine years—and his life was tragically cut short by the Holocaust. A devoted biographer, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, may have saved him from obscurity, and admirers such as John Updike and Philip Roth helped introduce Schulz’s work to the West.

The admiration could not be more deserved. Schulz is inimitable in both his prose and his metaphysics. (A note on the prose—it’s so spectacular it’s almost untranslatable, and having read two translations side by side, I much prefer the older Celina Wieniewska to the newer Madeline Levine.) His stories create what Ficowski calls a “Schulzian mythologic,” where the events of the writer’s life, the people and houses and town around him, the surrounding countryside, the sky, the sun, the groceries from the market, a friend’s stamp collection or the Emperor Franz Josef—all of it lifts off like a Chagall painting, is impregnated with new language and unmoored from time. What’s revealed is not a flight of fancy but the indwelling qualities of everything. Read More

I met the Canadian writer Amber Scorah at a party last winter. She was introduced by a mutual friend as the author of an upcoming memoir, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life. I tried but failed to bite my tongue (a frequent failure), and asked, “What terrible thing happened to you?” Scorah, it turned out, was a former Jehovah’s Witness who’d escaped the church while working as a missionary in China. Fortunately, she had a sense of humor.

The hard-knocks memoir is nothing new, but Scorah’s struck me as a story relevant to today’s cultural moment, and to my mission as the Eat Your Words columnist for The Paris Review, where I re-create meals from the pages of books, not just for fun (though it is fun) but because approaching a beloved book through its food is an estranging and fertile way to connect to the story.

What field of human endeavor is more estranging than being a missionary? You go, bearing the ultimate truth (as you see it), to a place where you know nothing, to a people you know nothing about, where you are a stranger and everything is strange to you. You’re there to teach, not to learn; to talk, not to listen; to show, not to see. Many people in this position gird themselves with disdain for those they’ve come to convert—it helps to keep up the conviction that you are right and everyone else is wrong. But for those who approach their potential converts with respect, the way Scorah did despite her training, the missionary relationship can become inverted. Of learning Chinese, Scorah writes, “It was a different way of being in the world. I was in a mild state of disorientation for a number of years, and one of the unexpected effects was that I was slowly made a little less sure that the world was in fact as I had always seen it.”

I’ve always been attracted to learning from experience. You sit down, you share food, if you’re paying attention, you’ll learn something. Being a missionary in a foreign country is all unfamiliar foods and new dining companions. And while the history of religious expansionism is littered with human tragedy, there are many inspiring individual stories. Shortly before meeting Scorah, I’d written a column on Pearl S. Buck, the author of a thirties U.S. best seller set in China, The Good Earth. Buck was a daughter of missionaries to China. Like Scorah, she renounced her church after gaining perspective from her contact with Chinese culture. And though her legacy is tarnished with accusations of racism (a 1937 movie version of The Good Earth in which the Chinese characters were portrayed by white actors is partially responsible), in her own time she was responsible for the first realistic depiction of the everyman Chinese farmer in either Chinese or American literature.

Scorah and I talked about Leaving the Witness, the parallels between her life and Buck’s, and of course, Chinese food.    

 INTERVIEWER

Where did this story begin? How did you become a Jehovah’s Witness?

 SCORAH

I was born on the prairies of Canada as a third-generation Jehovah’s Witness on both sides. From a young age, I heard what was preached from the platform at our meetings, and internalized its message of apocalypse and destruction in a deep way. When you’re a young girl from a family that has some problems, and you are offered clear guidelines about how to protect yourself from a violent end, you listen.

Our children’s books from the organization couldn’t have helped—they depicted children in the paradise God had promised would come after Armageddon, but also had graphic illustrations of the world’s end, with fire raining down on children from the sky, destroying them. It was a strong motivator. Plus, the people in the congregation were so kind and nice to me, it felt like a safe place to be. I’ve since come to understand that this is one tactic that groups like this use to control people: creating unresolvable fear and balancing it out with generous doses of love. The love, however, is conditional on your staying in the group.

When I was entering secondary school, my family moved to Vancouver. After I graduated from high school, I ended up becoming a “pioneer,” which is a Jehovah’s Witness who commits to at least seventy hours per month preaching, a missionary of sorts, except that we support ourselves in the work. It was in Vancouver that I first encountered Chinese people in my preaching work.

 INTERVIEWER

You’ve told me that for a smart, ambitious person, being a Jehovah’s Witness was boring, and your solution to that was to go to China. Is that right?

  SCORAH

Yes, especially as a woman. Women are not allowed to teach in the congregation, or to have positions of authority in the organization. Careers are forbidden, education is off limits, even getting too into any kind of hobby or sport is discouraged—because they are all a distraction. For a woman who liked to do things, there was only one acceptable place to focus her energies: preaching.

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