Genre Bending and Spiritual Resistance: Mina Pachter’s Concentration Camp “Cookbook”

ABSTRACT

This piece examines In Memory’s Kitchen, a collection of recipes, poems, and letters compiled by Mina Pächter in the Terezîn Concentration Camp. The author argues that a proper reading of the text involves understanding genre, acts of resistance, and genre bending. Without applying these complex concepts to the texts, readers are at risk of misreading Pächter’s text as a cookbook rather than a memory text of spiritual resistance.

Notes

1. Many thanks to RR reviewer Lynée Gaillet and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on this manuscript. In addition, many thanks to Suzanne Bordelon for reading an earlier version of the piece.

2. I have chosen to focus on In Memory’s Kitchen for two reasons: first, last summer I visited Terezín’s three major sites, where I first learned about Pächter’s book from our tour guide, Pavel Batel, who is a Terezín historian. Second, Pächter’s collection is widely available for examination through the reprint, and the original is housed in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

3. Because it’s difficult for historians to “place” Terezín as a particular type of camp, there have been few publications that focus solely on Terezín, and even fewer that have been translated into English.

4. In this stage of starvation, patients experience weakness and lack of temperature regulation. In addition, joints and the face swell from water retention in the cells (Wittenberg).

5. The decagram measurement occurs throughout the cookbook. From translation sites online, 16 decagrams of sugar appears to translate into eight cups; likewise 24 decagrams of chocolate is 12 cups. It’s clearly a large recipe meant for a celebration.

6. Terezín was a noted site for such cultural resistance, in particular because it was one of the few camps that had outside visitors in the form of The Red Cross. Because of the high number of musicians and artists in the camp, prisoners were told that there would be a formal presentation for the Red Cross workers. The musicians in the camp chose to perform Verdi’s Requiem, which includes lyrics such as “Liberate me, O Lord,” and “Grant Them Eternal Rest, O Lord” (Moou 32–33). This was an intentional choice, meant to send a message regarding the status of the prisoners.

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Notes on contributors

Lisa Mastrangelo

Lisa Mastrangelo is an Associate Professor at Centenary University, where she also directs the first-year composition program and the professional writing program. She has published articles on general community cookbooks as well as the suffrage cookbooks sold to raise funds for the suffrage fight. She has published articles recently in The ADE Bulletin, Peitho: The Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and Rhetoric Review.