{"id":11497,"date":"2025-08-04T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11497"},"modified":"2025-08-03T19:54:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-03T23:54:03","slug":"plums-paprika-and-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11497","title":{"rendered":"Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts<\/a><\/em>, a wonderful book by my friend and fellow crime-writer A.J. Sidransky, is a success on many levels. This nonfiction book is part travelog, part family history, part culinary adventure, and part coming of age story, as seen through a father\u2019s loving eyes, and it satisfies on many levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I particularly liked the author\u2019s writing style. It was as if he and I were sitting at a tiny outdoor caf\u00e9 table somewhere in Hungary and, over a plate of cherry strudel (not apple for me), he was telling me a story. It\u2019s that personal, immediate, and written from the heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don\u2019t have to be Hungarian as he and I (not my Texas half) are to enjoy the touches of Old Europe he found, interspersed with enough history to make events unfolding there today more meaningful. He tells the story of his Jewish immigrant ancestors and how they came to America from Hungary and Slovakia (which was part of Hungary until after World War I) and made new lives here. Not all came, though, and many of those who clung to their homeland perished in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My grandparents were likewise Hungarian and Slovakian, from the same part of the country, though they were Roman Catholic, and I treasured each detail and scene. But you needn\u2019t share his family\u2019s history to find a thrilling tale in his forebears\u2019 determination, their courage in embarking on the long journey and starting their lives anew, their daily difficulties in a country whose language they didn\u2019t speak. When Alan found remnants of the family\u2019s homes and the businesses they left behind, it was compelling evidence of their past lives, like a lingering fingerprint in the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alan had envisioned taking this trip ever since he became interested in family history several decades ago. Finally, as his son Jake graduated from law school, they decided to do it together. As a result, you see several Central European countries not just through Alan’s eyes, a man who has \u201clived it\u201d vicariously for a long time, but through the eyes of his son Jake, who came of age more than a half-century after the Holocaust. Alan wasn\u2019t sure Jake would be interested, but the young man’s observations proved him a perceptive, compassionate observer. In this way, it\u2019s a story about the maturing of a father-son relationship that is heart-warming to read amidst all the tribulations and disconnects in the world, past and present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alan is also a trained chef, and you\u2019ll be extra-pleased to find several family recipes he\u2019s collected at the back of the book. They are just another way he transforms the abstractions of history and culture into something meaningful in daily life. J\u00f3 \u00e9tv\u00e1gyat!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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P.S. I’m told my grandmother’s strudel dough was so thin, your could see the pattern of the cloth beneath it, as in this photograph. Alas, none of her six daughters did what Alan has done and preserved those precious recipes.<\/em> — VW<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts, a wonderful book by my friend and fellow crime-writer A.J. Sidransky, is a success on many levels. This nonfiction book is part travelog, part family history, part culinary adventure, and part coming of age story, as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,1288,41,266,118,267,126,78],"tags":[258,2285],"class_list":["post-11497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-culture","category-genealogy","category-history","category-memoir","category-non-fiction","category-reading-2","category-travel","tag-hungary","tag-slovakia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Zr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11500,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11497\/revisions\/11500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}