How to Tell the Truth While Writing Memoir, With Boris Fishman

As a memoir coach and writing teacher, I hear all the time from people who have what they refer to as complicated family stories. How do you tell your family tale, they wonder, when within it are many themes, too many stories and lots of issues? For instance, since this is America, many of us have stories of immigration, within which travel tales of food and culture, religion, assimilation, family splits, as well as the normal growing pains of growing up. If you have so many, simultaneous themes, I wondered, how to tell the truth while writing memoir?

Boris Fishman is the author of a gorgeous new memoir entitled Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table, a Memoir with Recipes. You’ve read his work in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. And he has written two novels. And he’s here today to talk with us about how to tell the truth when writing memoir.

Read along as you listen to the first episode of QWERTY, my new podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher.

How to Tell the Truth While Writing Memoir

Marion: Hi, David.

David:  How are you?

Marion:  I’m good. How are you?

David:  I’m doing good. Now, today’s guest is Boris Fishman. He’s the author of this terrific new book called Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table, a Memoir with Recipes. He’s covering a lot of territory there in that title.

Marion: Yes.

David: And it’s a beautiful and haunting and really surprisingly funny account of his family’s immigration from Belarus to America through Vienna and also Rome and the struggles of fitting in or not in their new home. And I don’t know if you know this. I met Boris about two years at a reading in Providence, Rhode Island, and we were reading from our works. And I thought I had slam dunked my reading Notes on a Banana. And then Boris gets up and very quietly he starts to read about these women who are cooking, and they’re huddled to the kitchen. And I remember them wearing spangly knit tops, and they’re huddled around, and they’re arguing, and they’re cooking, and they’re tasting.

David:  And I was so humbled, because the writing was beautiful. His presentation was beautiful. But more than anything, Marion, I knew these women. I could see these women. I understood these women. And I’m not Russian. I have no connection at all to that kind of a culture. So that’s how powerful the writing is. So please, let me introduce you to Boris.

Marion:  It’s so lovely to meet you, Boris. Thank you so much for coming along with us today. And I knew these women, too. And I come from about as goyish a culture as there is. I have no known ethnicity is what people say about me. So I think, David, I think the way, and Boris, the way you did this is your setup is so gorgeous, illuminating for us the tension between intimacy and distance, like I don’t want to be the person I am, but I’m related to these people in this delicious, insightful, ancient, nourishing, infuriating ways. And I do want to … Oh, so talk to me first, talk to us about how you sculpted out of this big huge life of yours to hone in on this crucial universal tension of the distance and intimacy and the pressure between the two of those to be our own selves.

Boris:  Thank you, Marion. And thank you, David, for that introduction. Before we begin, I do want to issue a small factual correction. David must have done something right in his reading in Providence that night, because when it was all said and done there were about 20 people in the line to buy David’s book for every one in mine.

David: Oh, go on, Boris.

Marion: Oh, go on, Boris. No, really. Go on, Boris.

Boris:  Unfortunately, writers recall those moments with shameful precision, so I’m actually not exaggerating.

Marion: Yeah. We count how many people are on the other guy’s line. I know.

Boris: That’s right. That’s right. I spent my lonely time at my desk counting how many people… You ask a really great question, because I think you don’t have to be an immigrant kid at the age of 12 or 15 or 18 to look for certainties in life, kind of semi-fundamentalist certainties. It’s where a lot of 19-year-old poetry comes out of. You’re looking for things that are eternally true. And I think that’s doubly so for an immigrant kid whose known context has vanished completely and a kid who’s has no introduction, no explanation to what he’s about to encounter from his family.

Nobody ever told me that we were emigrating. Nobody told me to wear … Of course, they themselves didn’t know much about what awaited us. But I think I come from a culture where discussion, disclosure, deliberation, perhaps, are not the first priorities. And so the way that you ease a path for a young person is you don’t say anything at all about what awaits them. It’s the same way in our culture that if somebody, god forbid, is ill, you lie to them and pretend they’re not, if this is, for example, an elder. The most kind thing is to save them from painful information, rather than prepare them constructively for the pain ahead.

And so one of the things I craved the most in my early years in America was to understand who was I, Russian or American? What a boring, blunt, binary question, except it wasn’t in my imagination at that time to formulate it in any other way. And so considering the ways in which the persistent, old habits of these people were slowing me down in my assimilation, my first and great desire was just to get away from them. And I made the mistake of thinking that if you could just get away from this physically, geographically, different neighborhood, different borough, different city, you could erase them from out within yourself emotionally as well.

That, of course, was a very immature thing to assume. And so then as you get older you begin the difficult task of trying to get them out of yourself emotionally. And only when you hit your 30’s do you realize, “This isn’t possible. They’re a part of you.” And only then, quite belatedly do you begin the great task of reconciling within yourself these various parts that will neither become fully one or the other nor … Let me put it a different way. Only in your 30’s do you begin this great task of no longer trying to find a final answer to either part of yourself but reconciling the ingredients instead.

Marion: Mmm. And you made that decision to open the book with this. I’d just love you to drill into that a little bit to think about the people who are writing their own and maybe giving them a little help, how amid all the other possible ways to approach this book. Is that because that’s what interested you most, or because that’s what hurt the most, or that’s what was most clear to you is that this was the way you viewed the world at this point?

Boris:  I think that was a craft decision. I wanted to give readers an idea of what was up ahead, because the story takes place largely chronologically. I was a bit insecure, I think, about keeping their attention through a period, a pre-war period and then post-war years in the Soviet Union that to me are fascinating, but I didn’t want to presume that they would be to the same degree to all readers. Meanwhile, they’re necessary to get through in order to set up psychologically and emotionally what follows. And so I thought I’d begin with a kind of, the Yiddish word for it is forshpeiz, an appetizer of some of the issues that would arise in the course of the book.

Marion:  Oh, and I’m learning another language. It’s so wonderful.

David:  There you go. You’re not going to be a shiksa any longer after this. Well, I think that the way you started it with going over to your grandfather’s house, first of all, Boris, I think people would follow you anywhere with where you go with the story, because of your skill as a writer. I mean that. Your language is so beautiful. And there’s a light touch to what you do, but there’s such depth and meaning and heft to what you’re writing about. And that’s a very hard thing to pull off, a very hard thing to pull off.

David:  And another hard thing to pull off, and I was just fascinated by it, because I was so afraid to do it in my memoir that I just told Marion, who was my coach, I said, “No, I’m not going there,” was you talked about things that happened before you were born. And what’s interesting is they are as compelling and as immediate as the things you write about that you experienced firsthand. How did you pull that off? How did you get that information, and how did you create those scenes when you weren’t even born yet?

Boris:  Well, that’s multiply gratifying to hear, because as I’m about to tell you, I am not once but twice removed from those facts. I, for whatever reason, and I understand this is quite different from most people, recall almost nothing about my childhood. I don’t know why, but my memory and a painful version thereof, begins quite vividly only after we arrive in America. I have fragments from zero through nine, but only fragments. And so I wanted to construct a coherent narrative. I basically had to interview my parents about who I was from zero through nine. But then reinterpret critically, because I had to correct for the illusions and fantasies that I think they continued to carry about who that person was, considering their feelings about who I am today.

My parents have come around to what I’ve chosen to do with my life. They’ve come around, let’s say, partially to the kind of person I am, my personality and temperaments. But I think there is within them a kind of longing for that boy who did everything that they told him to, a feeling that lasted into my teenage years but not beyond. And so I had to correct slightly for their slightly rose colored recollections of me as a boy. Though, who knows? Maybe they were rose colored not for that reason. Maybe they were rose colored because their lives in the Soviet Union, though very difficult and painful in some ways, were also comprehensible to them in a way their American lives will never be.

So when you get into this memoir work, you’re really doing your best to triangulate or quadrangulate or pentagulate between various people’s best guessing in five different departments. And so I feel like … I remember reading somewhere that when people read fiction, they’re constantly combing it for clues as to what might have really happened. I also feel that we should read memoir constantly combing for clues to things that might have not happened this way at all.

Marion:  Of course. That old truth, that idea that everybody in a family has their own version. I always say that every family is a pizza, and you only get your one slice. And when you take it away, that’s your truth. But the Christmas 2018 that you thought was the best one of your life, your sister, A, will say it never happened, or B, that it was a trauma event of enormous proportion.

Boris: That’s exactly right.

Marion:  Yeah, it is. And one of the things, I think, that grounds the book, then, in the undeniable truth, which is something that’s been done a zillion times, but you did so differently, is supplying the recipes. And so I’ve seen it done. I’ve seen it done a million times. And when I saw that you were doing it a different way, I said, “Oh, thank you.” And just to clue in the listeners, let me just tell them that the first page of each chapter along with the chapter number and a date, we get descriptions of recipes as they will appear later in the chapter, but they’re not the recipes or their ingredients. Instead, they’re plot points of major importance that will happen in the chapter. And my favorite of them is this one. “What food to pack to get five mouths through one iron curtain?”

David:  That’s brilliant.

Marion: You have this gorgeous way of describing the recipe but also its importance in your story. So I want in on that decision. How did you come up with that device? That’s gorgeous.

Boris: Well, that actually has not been flagged in any conversations I’ve had about the book. So I’m very pleased, because I spent some time on those introductory-

Marion: I bet you did.

Boris:  And of course as David mentioned, it’s so important to balance humor with some sorrow for the simple reason that temperamentally that is who my people are. We imagine, perhaps, more sorrow than there needs to be in some situations, but we’ll always leaven it with humor, because that’s our go-to remedy. And vice versa. It’s kind of hard to laugh about anything without remembering that there are difficulties at the margins of any piece of good news. This book began its life as a pure cookbook. There’s a woman at the heart of this story. Put another way, this is a book about two women, my grandmother and this woman, Oksana, who looked after my grandfather in the last 15 years of his life and is fully responsible for keeping him alive for that long.

And Oksana’s recipes were so striking and so, I think, unknown to the American palate and so unlike what many people think of when we think of ex-Soviet food, because she’s from Ukraine, and Ukraine, especially in the South has a kind of nearly Mediterranean bounty. But I wanted to create a cookbook consisting of nothing more than her recipes. But I am not a cookbook writer. It was a very humbling experience to try to articulate and test some of these recipes. And so with time, that morphed into a combination memoir with recipes.

Boris: But it was unimaginable to put this forward as nothing more than a written document, because food has been so pivotal at so many pivotal moments of our lives. And some of these dishes are so rich and unknown to American diners, that it just felt essential to include directions on how to make some of them.

David: But I think even more so what Marion’s talking about, because I’m looking at … I just opened up to chapter five, “what to cook when you’ve been let through avid so dolce you can’t stop eating.” And or “what to cook while you’re waiting for the most fateful verdict of your life.” What I started to … The first chapter I didn’t quite get it. I thought, “Okay.” As I started reading, I went, “This feels like a worn copy of a family collection of recipes that is kept under that cast iron Nazi pot that your grandmother had that she looked up whenever they were …

David: It wasn’t like we’re going to eat polemi or we’re going to eat, stroganoff, whatever it is, we’re having a decision to be made or verdict to be made, let’s find the food that’s right for that. It’s almost like a witch’s book of spells of knowing what to eat for a particular situation. And to me, Boris, I’ve never experienced it done that way. I’ve read a thousand and one food memoirs. And, of course, this, I think, is so much more than just a food memoir. But it’s always so straightforward. And this was a unique way of doing it. Hats off to you, because it brought me so much more closer. I got so much out of that about your family and how your family and how your family thinks and also how you think. And you made it so clear to us the connection between food and action and life.

Marion:  Absolutely. You made us think about it. I mean, you made us really consider our own food and action life. And even in my sort of nondescript ethnicity we have food of my culture and food that we trade and food that we trade in and standards. Following up on what David just said, you make such shrewd observations in this book, both about America and Americans, about Russians, about yourselves, about your family. And I wonder when you think of yourself or when people describe you, do they call you an American writer? Do they call a Russian writer, do they call you a food writer? And do any of these have any value with a book with this kind of a range?

Boris:  Well, before I answer that question, I just want to say that one of the best things about … I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, putting a book out into the hands of readers is their readings of it end up revealing things to you about the book. And as David was speaking, one of the things that I was realizing is that what you’re describing, that wonderful witch’s spell notion that I’m absolutely going to steal and use in my various readings-

David: Feel free.

Boris:  … probably without attribution is that-

Marion: Because he had more readers wanting … more people lined up at his table than you did? Are we getting back to that, Boris?

Boris: There was that, and it never dissipates. Is that there’s a dark underside to what you’re describing that doesn’t de-legitimize the positive lining, which is that at a moment of stress, the first place you look is toward the fridge. If there’s bad news in the family, god forbid, there’s a kind of genericized American notion of comfort food. Maybe this is the ex-Soviet version. But to make a moment more tolerable, even if you’re not necessarily hungry, you look toward the fridge. Right, you know that phrase, “I could eat.” It’s never untrue for a person from my family. But Marion, to answer your question, very interesting to me, I seem unable to graduate, if graduate is the right word, in the minds of many critics and reviewers, though not necessarily readers, to an un-hyphenated designation.

Marion: Oh, I’m sorry.

Boris:  I’m never an American writer. I’m always a Jewish-American writer, Russian-American, Russian-Jewish-American, depending on how many hyphens they have at their disposal. However, when I talk to the very same people about how non-American I continue to feel despite having technically emigrated more than 30 years ago, they’re just so surprised to hear that I’m anything but American, because I speak fluently, and I seem so fluent in the culture. And there’s nothing explicit about me that seems to scream immigrant or not American. So I’m also going to steel that and ask a future interviewer why that contradiction prevails. But to me, I would love to be an American writer and an immigrant person, if that makes any sense.

Marion: Mmm. That’s lovely.

David: It does. I’m often pinholed that same way, too, or pigeon holed that same way. I’m a gay writer. I’m a Portuguese-American writer. And the hyphenates go on and go on. I’m a Portuguese-American writer who has mental illness. All these things that go on as opposed to I’m a writer. And I don’t like the term food writer, because I think that is so … It diminishes, I think, what someone does. Because as Marion and I know and as you know, you’re not writing about food. You’re writing about what you do with food, as Marion always says. You’re writing about what food means. You’re writing about food as the lens to the story. And to diminish someone and say, “You’re a food writer,” or, “You’re a cocktail writer,” I think that just, it diminishes. But people like to pinhole.

Boris: I agree. It takes imagination and certain amount of discomfort to pick up a book that has no shorthands anywhere to indicate sort of what category it slots into. Then you really have to just start reading and see whether you connect to it, whatever it’s about. And I understand why that’s challenging in the commercial environment that we live in. There’s a lot of noise. People need shorthands. And I’m sometimes guilty of being reductive in my perception of books that way as well. But precisely because it’s done to me so much, it really motivates me to avoid it as much as possible with regard to the books of others. And even if they’ve been classified in some very limiting way, to try that ignore that classification and read it as if it hasn’t been reduced in that way.

Marion:  Mmm. Very important. And then as if to make it more … Well, to me, it’s truly global. And that’s what we should be dealing with is these non-binary definitions, and no definitions really work here, because as if to, then, bust out even further, in part three you take on this deeply personal part, the depression element and what food had to do with you pulling out of it. And your hungers, your many and differing hungers. So for me that’s when you just broke my heart and informed me and made me feel like you’re writing the global book for today that we all need to read and should be required reading for some people. So let’s talk about that, the decision to go into the depression element. When was that decision made, and how did you first see the connection in the hungers as such?

Boris: I really wanted to be open, but I think it’s equally critical. It’s as important not to be defensive or self-serving as it is not to be exhibitionist. I think when I was a younger, less seasoned writer, sometimes when I wasn’t sure how to get the reader’s attention, I would sell myself too cheaply by revealing something tawdry that I didn’t earn narratively.

Marion: Not the first guy to do it, let me tell you.

Boris: Yeah. It’s a gesture of desperation. You want to keep the reader’s attention, but you don’t know how, and so you resort to cheap trickery. In this case, it felt important to include partly because without putting a fine point on it, four things having to do with food pulled me out of it. And it wasn’t as if, “Oh, I’m writing a book. I should try food-related activities to pull me out of this, so that I can write about them later.” When you’re in that kind of depression, at least I was so terrified that I’d never exit, that kind of contrivance was the very last thing on my mind. I wasn’t remotely creative enough to think of that.

And it just so happened that four separate things related to food contributed to pulling me out of it. There were others that were not related to food. But the other thing is that there are these two mother hungers, as I call them, that I come out of. They belong to my grandmother. One is that she didn’t have anything to eat for a large part of World War II, and it made her crazy on the question of food. And the other was that she lost most of her family. My grandmother was a holocaust survivor and lost most of her immediate family.

My grandfather, most of his immediate family survived, but he lost most of his extended family, dozens and dozens of cousins, aunts, uncles. And so they came out of the war with a fanatical, fanatical terror of being physically apart from their closest people. And we really have to use our most perverse imaginations. This meant it was a problem if you went into the other room. No, I’m exaggerating. But whenever you left the home, you opened yourself up to unimaginable dangers. My grandmother’s sister, when her son went to the theater, she would wait for 8:00 p.m. to roll around so the show had begun, and then get on the bus and go to the theater and make sure that his coat was … Everybody put their coats on a coat hanger in the hallway, that his coat was on a coat hanger.

David: That broke my heart.

Marion: Absolutely. It’s so beautiful it makes me cry just hearing you retell it.

Boris: And I wasn’t there. I was a boy when this was going on, but imagine learning of that from your family when you’re sitting across from them and interviewing them. And, again, the thing that fascinates me is that when we talk about how minds work, how trauma works, how these psychoses work, it is never, ever literal. It mutates and transmutes from generation to generation taking on new forms so that in my case, and it took me a very long time to understand this, for the reasons I mentioned earlier in our conversation, I really wanted a way for my people. I wanted to strike out on my own, find my own answers, repudiate theirs. Guess what? It’s not as simple as that.

Boris:  That was a superficial solution. I was still their son and grandson and carried their untranscended traumas within me. And so I was desperate to not be alone, to not walk through my life by myself. What did that mean in the context of my life? It meant pairing up with the first person I came across. It meant fighting hard, so hard in order to persuade some skeptical New York woman that she should be dating me right now and that we should get serious right away. Anything informal and incremental was problematic, because the deal wasn’t sealed. And by the deal, I’m not referring to anything sexual. I’m just referring to, “Are we going out? Are we going out? We’re together right?”

It’s a kind of obsessive desperation whose insanity and the kind of tricks you pull in order to make it work. You don’t realize for many years later at which point you feel terrible and really want to apologize for wasting a lot of peoples’ time. Because it’s only once you persuade that person to give the relationship a shot, and you feel some sense of togetherness, and you can count on seeing each other on a regular basis, do you ask yourself, “Does this person and I, do we actually have anything to talk about? Are we a good match?” Right?

When she sat across from you in the restaurant, and you told the best jokes that you could, did you actually have any interest in telling those jokes, or were you trying to acquire some end for reasons completely unrelated to a genuine connection to this person? And I think when relationship umpteen finally failed, I fell through some floor. Because I was now deep into my 30’s about 10 to 15 years after I should have solved this question already and the understanding of my culture, I kept making mistakes and getting it wrong because I was barking up the wrong tree.

And I think I was sinking lower and lower with each failure without fully understanding why, only knowing that there was some terrible mistake at the heart of it all. And then, like I say, when number umpteen rolled around, I finally fell through a floor and couldn’t get up from bed for three months. And that felt, even more than the fact that food pulled me out, it felt like that was a story worth telling. Everybody comes to their episodes of depression for very different reasons. But sometimes it’s purely chemical, but sometimes it has some connection to past experience. Sometimes experience that has nothing to do with their firsthand experience. And I really wanted to explore that.

Marion:  Well, it hurdles through your family, and that’s what’s so magnificent about it, the same way recipes hurdle through our families and tastes and traditions. There’s this sense, this disenfranchised, or this sense of terror or this sense of dishonor that hurdles through families. And whether there’s been this horrific history of massacres because of our religions or our ethnicity, we’re carrying it in ourselves. Yes, it’s told to us in story, but it’s also told to us in gesture, in things that we cannot repeat, except we see it, we do it. Maybe we do repeat it, but we repeat it within our souls. So what you took on there was massive. And I’m so grateful that you took it on. It was such a generous thing to take on. I hope you got some joy writing this book. This book has enormous moments of joy. I laughed out loud. People gave me the eyeball in public while I read it. Just talk about that. Talk about putting in the joy, please.

Boris:  Well, first of all thank you for saying that. I come from a culture where, as I mentioned earlier, disclosure and discussion are not prized. But the confusion and the hurt and the longings passed down to a child anyway, because a child reads … No one reads between the lines like a child. You hardly have to articulate something to a child. I think it’s useful to articulate it, because they can put meaning and language to that complicated feeling. But in my case, so much was never explained or brushed off or laughed about. And so I wanted to include it in the book not least because I finally wanted to articulate the unsaid and the unspoken that I think continues to cast a shadow over so many families, including mine.

That said, have you ever met people who laugh as uproariously, as loudly, whose sense of humor is as wry and witty and deadpan as the people I come from? The same sort of … In the book, I mention the same “doubtful laughing eye” that connected me to somebody I was in a relationship with. That is just as apt a description for the people that I come from. There’s no situation so dark that we don’t … It isn’t a matter of effort. I think the Soviet life was so full of certain … It was so hypocritical and stupid in so many ways that at a certain point you have no choice but to laugh.

One of my favorite, and it persists in the post-Soviet period. One of my favorite sayings that’s current in Moscow is, “Did you know that Russia is the safest country in the world? All the crime has been saved for the government.” Right? That joke about which I will be interrogated at sort of Moscow customs next time that-

David: The next time you go.

Boris:  That’s right. They’re probably listening to it now. For me epitomizes sort of the sense of humor. It is the opposite of slapstick. It isn’t even necessarily something that garners a belly laugh. But it’s so, so, so funny to us and so wonderfully ironic and witty and thoughtful. And that’s been with us at every single meal.

Marion:  Gorgeous.

David: Boris, one thing I’d like to ask you about … And I think a lot of our listeners are always curious about this. Can you talk a bit about your writing day or your writing process? Because I don’t know if you recall, but after we first met, I was so intrigued by what you had written, I wanted to get together for coffee. And I can’t remember the exact statement that you had in the email, but it was something like, “I would love to, and don’t take this personally, but if I sort of go off track on something, I won’t get back to my writing, and I need to focus on my writing.” And I thought, “Wow.” I’ll use any excuse to not write. My house is never cleaner than when I need to write.

Boris:  Of course. Of course. Well, I think what you’re referring to there is the habit I had when I was just getting started and trying to keep it going of trying to be up at what is for me an honest responsible hour, which is 8:00 a.m. and be sitting by 8:30 with a cup of coffee and a book. I need to read something before I start my own writing, because ideally that something will get me hopped up about what words can do. It’ll get me excited enough about trying for the same, the same distinction of expression or the same richness of characterization or the same sparkling dialog that I toss away that book before I’ve reached my quota, which for a morning is, let’s say, 50 pages, and just sit down and start typing on my own manuscript.

And then ideally I do that without any interruption except for bathroom breaks for three to four hours. Three or four hours is the max I can pull off. After three to four hours, I my brain is like a rung out towel. I got nothing left. I’m having a hard time completing sentences to the people around me, and I incidentally am famished.

Marion: Of course. It’s the hunger.

Boris:  I’m famished, and I’m famished in a way that goes beyond the typical passage of three to four hours. There’s something utterly consuming and overwhelming. Now, that said, increasingly that is a fantasy day rather than a reality day.

David: Sure, of course.

Boris:  I can pretend it’s because my wife and I have a newborn. I can pretend it’s because we’re between homes. I can pretend all sorts of things, but it’s been a good, long while since I’ve had a day like that. I always say to, especially people working on their first book, the extent to which you can treat it like any other workday is the extent to which you will have a draft, perhaps terrible, but nonetheless the absolutely essential prerequisite to having a second draft that is less terrible after a year or a year and a half.

Marion: Oh, such good advice and such direct advice for writers that you-

David: That really is.

Marion:  Yes.

David: Well, Boris, thank you so much for taking some time out of your writing day to talk to us. We really appreciate it.

Marion: Loved it, Boris. Thank you. And go write some more, please.

Boris:  I’m so grateful to you both for the way that you edit and for the things about it that you engage with. They’re quite different from some of the other conversations I’ve had about the book. So I appreciate it very much.

David:  Sure. The book is Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table, a Memoir with Recipes. You can find it at your local bookstore or online or, trust me on this, an audio version which I’ve also listened to, and it’s fantastic. You can visit Boris also at his website, which is Boris Fishman dot com. Again, thanks, Boris.

Boris: Thank you both.

More about Boris Fishman

• See Boris Fishman’s website
• Buy Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table, a Memoir with Recipes.

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