Imaginary Feasts + Mina’s Recipe Book

These two films by Anne Georget present a haunting examination of one of the coping mechanisms by which prisoners in concentration camps psychologically fought their confinement, mistreatment, and hunger: not merely dreaming and talking about the food they enjoyed before being jailed, but using scraps of paper to record recipes of favorite and exceptional dishes they could never actually prepare. Imaginary Feasts offers a broad treatment of the subject: the camera scans across pages from little notebooks written not just at Nazi death camps but also Japanese wartime prisons and Soviet gulags, while voices dreamily whisper the contents. Interspersed are recollections from camp survivors and reactions from a variety of experts—a master chef amazed by the texts, as well as historians, linguists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and scientists, who try to explain what the compilations must have meant to those who created them. Mina’s Recipe Book focuses on one surviving document, the notebook of Mina Pachter, an art historian sent to the "model" camp of Theresienstadt at Terezin in Czechoslovakia, where she died in 1944. After tracing the circuitous route through which the notebook made its way to Pachter’s daughter Anny Stern in 1969, the film records how it was translated (by a survivor of Terezin) and published in 1996. In interview footage, Anny’s son David recalls his grandmother and her cooking, and offers his own grandson the opportunity to sample caramels made from her recipe. An unusual Holocaust-related offering, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)