Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir Literary Elements

Historical Non-fiction/Memoir/Food and Cooking

Poland before World War II; a Nazi concentration during World War II; Germany after the war; Detroit and Brooklyn in the second half of the 20th century.

The author narrates in the first person from her perspective for most of the novel, but the perspective changes over to Miriam’s recollection of the past in sections presenting the perspective of World War II from Polish Jews sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Varies from lightheartedly nostalgic in parts where the author recalls her childhood to profoundly tragic and deeply emotional when Miriam speaks about the horrors of Nazi atrocities.

Protagonist: the author’s mother-in-law, Miriam. Antagonist: Nazi Germany/anti-Semitism.

The protagonist/antagonist dyad of the past informs the decisions which lead to the major conflict rather than playing an active part. The conflict at the heart of the book is that between the author’s secular past and her decision to pursue a more traditional Jewish lifestyle, many aspects of which place extreme pressure upon the entire family to alter their daily routines and long-time habits.

The climax is actually an anticlimax. The author leaves the reader upon imagery which makes it uncertain if the conflict can be resolved.

The later detailed accounting of the horrific atrocities perpetrated against Jews by Nazis during World War II is foreshadowed in the opening pages.

That foreshadowing of the excruciating detailed Nazi atrocities is revealed as profound understatement: “My mother-in-law Miriam, born in a small village in Jewish Poland, survived the Holocaust.”

The infamous Detroit riots are alluded to: “It was August 1967. `They’re burning Livernois!’”

While most of the book is dominated by vivid imagery related to food and cooking, it is also a literary device put to excellent use in layering the narrative’s historical context: “All my life in Detroit I knew black aficionados of Jewish culture and vice versa—Pentecostal grandmothers who would only buy kosher meat, black teenagers who knew the right Yiddish word, countless Jews aspiring to soul music, and later, to nonwhite righteousness.”

The entire point of the book hangs on the paradoxical nature of trying to eat kosher and observe the sabbath while deciding which aspects of eating kosher and observing the sabbath can be sacrificed while still insisting that one eats kosher and observes the sabbath.

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“The war” is a far-ranging metonym used to cover all the various Nazi atrocities committed during the Third Reich.

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