(Jewish Group) This Jewish Restaurateur Died in the Holocaust, But Her Vegetarian Cookbook Lives On [View all]

When you think of Eastern European Jewish cuisine, which words come to mind? Light? Healthy? Plant based? Probably not. Heavy, homey and meat-centric are more like it.

Fania Lewando died during the Holocaust, but had she been given the full length of her years, Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine may have taken a turn to the vegetarian side and we might all be eating vegetarian kishke and spinach cutlets in place of brisket.

Lewando is not a household name. In fact, she would have been lost to history had it not been for an unlikely turn of events. Thanks to a serendipitous find, her 1937 work, “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook” (“Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh” in Yiddish), was saved from oblivion and introduced to the 21st century.

Vilna in the 1930s, where Lewando and her husband Lazar made their home, was a cosmopolitan city with a large Jewish population. Today, it is the capital of Lithuania but it was then part of Poland. Lewando opened a vegetarian eatery called The Vegetarian Dietetic Restaurant on the edge of the city’s Jewish quarter. It was a popular spot among both Jews and non-Jews, as well as luminaries of the Yiddish-speaking world. (Even renowned artist Marc Chagall signed the restaurant’s guest book.)



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