Cara De Silva, a journalist and historian of food and culinary culture who in 1996 edited a groundbreaking collection of recipes collected by Nazi concentration camp inmates that became a surprise hit, died Dec. 7 in Manhattan. She turned 83.
Her close friend and fellow food writer Fred Plotkin said the death, in a hospital, came after a very short illness, but the exact cause had not been determined.
A lifelong Manhattanite who made a name for herself as a reporter for Newsday and later as a freelance writer for such publications as DailyExpertNews and the food, wine, and travel magazine Saveur, Ms. De Silva was less interested in hot trends and bustling restaurants than in the culinary byways and subcultures that supported a community, and the way a place’s history could be understood through its food.
“The venerable socca symbolized an older, perhaps less dazzling, but more romantic Nice – that of Queen Victoria, Matisse, the Tsars, the early days of the Promenade des Anglais, summery English aristocrats, the belle époque and distinctive Niçois when they were still speaking Italian all the time,” she wrote in a 1998 Times article about a kind of chickpea pancake.
In the early 1990s, she wrote a column for Newsday titled “Flavour of the Neighborhood,” highlighting small delis, obscure salumerias, and out-of-the-way pizzerias long before it became fashionable to seek out such places.
She was particularly fond of Italian culinary culture and its impact on American cuisine, and with her name – a nom de plume – and her Mediterranean complexion, she was often mistaken for Italian. In fact, she was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, and she was equally faithful to Yiddish and Central European eating habits.
In other words, Ms. De Silva was the perfect choice to edit “In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin,” a thin book of recipes put together by a Jewish inmate at the concentration camp known as Terezin. Theresienstadt in German – during World War II. These were not records of what they ate in camp. Rather, it was the memories of what the women of the camp had made before the war, food richly reminiscent of Jewish Mitteleuropa: deviled eggs, stews, and all sorts of dumplings.
Mina Pachter, the prisoner who compiled the book, died of starvation in 1944. Before her death, she entrusted the approximately 70 recipes to a friend, with instructions to take them to her daughter Anny Pachter Stern, who had emigrated to Palestine before the war. . But Mrs. Stern had since moved to New York and it took more than 20 years, and several intermediaries, to get them to her.
It was another two decades before a friend of Mrs. Stern urged her to have the recipes edited and published. Bianca Steiner Brown, a translator and a Theresienstadt survivor herself, was hired to translate them from German to English, and Mrs. De Silva joined in as editor.
Mrs. De Silva decided to leave the recipes largely as they were, even though many were incomplete. This was not a cookbook, she insisted, but a document about the Holocaust and a record of what she considered “psychological resistance.”
Published in 1996 by Jason Aronson, a small business specializing in Judaica, the book became an unexpected hit (selling more than 100,000 copies to date) and sparked interest in European Jewish eating habits. When it was published, Mrs. De Silva and friends managed to recreate some recipes for a small party in honor of the women behind them.
“The feeling of tasting the food of their dreams was extremely overwhelming and moving,” she told New York Jewish Week in 2014, “because it was the materialization of something they could only dream and remember, and it was in my mouth and in the mouth of others We celebrated them by celebrating their food.
Carol Eileen Krawetz was born on March 3, 1939 in Manhattan. Her father, Mayer (sometimes spelled Meyer) Krawetz, had emigrated somewhere near today’s Polish-Belarusian border as a child. He worked as a manager for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and wrote plays and essays in Yiddish. Her mother, Rose, was a sculptor.
She grew up near the northern tip of Manhattan, along 204th Street, in what was then a heavily Jewish neighborhood. The family lived simply, and whatever extra money the parents had they put into Carol’s cultural education. She was especially fond of trips to the Metropolitan Opera.
In her youth, Carol was active in Yiddish theater, including a starring role in a stage version of Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel, “The Rise of David Levinsky.” Along the way, she adopted a stage name, Cara De Silva, which she kept as a pseudonym after she became a writer.
Mrs. De Silva graduated with a degree in English literature from Hunter College in Manhattan. She received a master’s degree, also in English, from the City College of New York in 1966 and later pursued graduate work in medieval English literature at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She briefly lived in England while her husband, Robert Ackerman, did his own graduate work at Cambridge University.
Mrs. De Silva and Mr. Ackerman later divorced. She leaves no immediate survivors.
After the publication of “In Memory’s Kitchen,” Ms. De Silva spent several years lecturing on Jewish foodways in the United States and Europe, and advising museums and historical projects.
While on a lecture tour in Israel, she came across a bookstore filled with copies of “In Memory’s Kitchen,” the windows of which overlooked Jerusalem, an experience she recounted in a 2014 interview with the Yiddish Book Center.
She was struck, she said, “the thought of having been just a vehicle, that’s all I was, saving these women from obscurity, and here they were, in a book, with their work, embodied in a – or embraced by – in book covers, gazing at the sunshine pouring down over the hills of Jerusalem.