Michael W. Twitty

Michael W. Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene, turns his attention from Southern cooking and genealogy to his experience as an African American Jew and how his experience cooking has been a fusion of his identities.

It's really hard to describe Twitty's work because he takes all sorts of elements - food, history, identity, culture, his experiences as an African American, his experiences as a converted Jew, and his experiences as an African American Jew - and blends it into a memoir as unique as the food on his table. When I reviewed The Cooking Gene, I said, "it's sprawling, dense, thoughtful and chock full of information. I enjoyed it and was challenged by it in equal measure." Koshersoul is similar, while focusing more on Twitty's faith and conversations he's had with other Jews. In fact, Twitty includes not just conversations he's had but other people's experiences and stories, too. Instead of a single person's memoir, you get a multifaceted picture of the intersection of identities many African American Jews experience - and, of course, the food they eat. As a non-Jew myself, I found it a really fascinating window into the culture, and would love to some day pull up a chair and sit at Twitty's table.… (more)

ugh I once again forgot to put in the right edition (and I thought I did, but maybe this was before I deliberately entered ISBN numbers) so my page numbers are off.

anyway, Twitty is a lyrical author, and here he has crafted a gorgeous, personal narrative that feels the weight of historical trauma and a yearning for what was lost due to institutional slavery obscuring names, places, and lineages. This knowledge (and book) is derived from his crowdfunded rel="nofollow" _target="_top">Southern Discomfort tour, seeking out the old foodways and digging into his own ancestry with genealogists and historians. The family tree in the book goes back generations, but this is the achievement of hard digging, as many slave records merely give first names, if at all as part of the dehumanizing process.

The structure felt rambly, which I initially disliked, but in the author's note at the end, he says if he could've given a linear timeline he would've considered it, but instead the genre-shifting narrative that revealed itself to him as he learned about the ancestors is what he arrived at, and it makes the story all the more stronger. At the end of most chapters are relevant recipes, though once again I did not try to cook any of them.

Between genealogists and a DNA test, Twitty finds he's about a quarter Caucasian, and there are several points in his great^3 grandparent line where forcible assault introduced white men into his family tree, and this is explored through visiting both the Bellamy plantation and a few weeks in Ireland/England (though for the latter, he finds more familiar culinary DNA between the foodstuffs of west Africa to the South than England).

I initially started reading this last spring, but had to return it. I resumed at the beginning of 2019 when a library hold came back. Might reread earlier chapters too.… (more)