“To make this cake,” Elisabeth said, “all you have to remember is six: six eggs, six tablespoons of sugar, six tablespoons of flour.”
She held up her thumb, and added her forefinger, then her middle finger as she listed each ingredient.
“No milk?”
“No.”
“No butter?”
“No.”
“Not even baking powder?”
“No. Add chocolate, if you want. For Passover, you can use potato flour.”
“Amazing!”
“But you don’t like it.”
“I do! I do like it!”
“You’re hardly eating anything.”
This was my signal to take another helping, and I gladly did. “Amazing,” I repeated, between bites of evidence that her formula worked every time.
Soon, it was time to clear away the dishes and lay out Elisabeth’s manuscript. Working together this way was not new for us. Long ago, she had been a student in one of my creative writing classes. Eventually she became an editing client, and soon after that, a friend. Recently, she had asked me to help her assemble some of her essays for publication. Week after week we sat at her gleaming dining room table, going through my latest edits. This collection would be “just for the family,” she told me, and she planned on publishing it herself. It could easily have found a home with an established press, but self-publication gave her control over the timeline, and that was important. She was over ninety years old.
This was Elisabeth’s second book. The first, And Peace Never Came, was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press when Elisabeth was in her mid-seventies. It was a memoir of her experiences in Nazi-occupied Hungary and her post-war journey through several countries until she finally made a home in Toronto. Writing it demanded tough choices. Elisabeth told me she did not want to “hurt the reader” by being too blunt about her worst experiences. She wrote about losing her family and friends at Auschwitz, but somehow managed to do it with delicacy. The book is remarkable not just for what it says, but for what it leaves out. Even her daughter’s murder is not talked about directly. She writes instead about the kindness a friend showed in carving a trinket out of scrap metal to commemorate the child. Elisabeth may have protected her readers, but she couldn’t protect herself from reliving her painful memories, and she writes about that, too. The book is as much about the aftermath of trauma as about the experience itself.
In the manuscript of her second book, I saw fragments of the stories she had brought to the creative writing course I taught at a Toronto seniors’ centre in the eighties. Elisabeth said very little in the classes, but her body-language spoke of inner turmoil. Week after week she would sit with her hands in fists, occasionally using one hand to help the other open and flatten on the table before the fists somehow returned. Whatever she was going through inwardly, Elisabeth always looked wonderful. Each blouse or sweater was complimented by a scarf knotted at the neck, a crisp blazer, and impeccably chosen nail polish and lipstick. All of this was in keeping with her meticulous selection of words and phrases. She was the only one I stayed in touch with after I left the seniors’ centre. Upheavals in my life meant I had to let go of the patchwork of writing-related jobs that never quite paid the bills. Another teacher took over the classes, but I worked privately with Elisabeth on the first stages of And Peace Never Came. From there, our friendship evolved. There was something we understood about one another, as writers. I didn’t share her traumatic past, but—like her—I agonized about having anyone read my work. It took years to even consider submitting anything for publication.
Slowly, I built up my courage, and two decades later, Elisabeth was there to see my first book published. I was fifty-two. The book was a memoir, and I felt terribly exposed. It was the scariest experience of my life. From the time it was accepted until months after it launched I woke up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart. I burst into tears at the slightest provocation. I couldn’t get lost in my feelings, though, because I had a book to promote. There were seminars on self-branding, workshops on pushing myself past my comfort zone to get attention. I always seemed to be online in those days, haunting blogs, social media feeds, and websites for mentions and reviews. I was a middle-aged woman, but a newly published writer, and the whole process dragged me back to feelings I thought I had left behind twenty years before. As a perpetually single thirtysomething, I had flirted and primped and waited by the phone, wishing I could afford to play hard to get. No one really wanted me, and there was no space for my mixed feelings when I had to do all the pursuing.
Elisabeth invited me over one afternoon, I thought, for a friendly cup of tea, but this was a professional visit. We sat with a copy of my memoir, Outside the Box, on the coffee table in front of us and—in a tone I can only describe as severe—she praised the book. She spoke carefully, likely as carefully as she had read it. I owed it to her to listen with equal care. Elisabeth’s considered words reminded me of my responsibility. I had a story to tell. I didn’t have to let go of my dignity, but I did have to believe in my own work.
For Elisabeth’s second book, I did some light editing, and helped with the practicalities of self-publishing at a time when she could not get out into the world anymore. She paid me, which caused a tussle because I wanted to give her my labour as a gift. She would not hear of it. The cheques were bigger than the invoices. The result was that I worked so hard to get it right I could barely see straight. I still made mistakes.
Visit, eat, clear the dishes, work. Whenever she had the strength and energy, that is. We were lucky to get three good weeks in a row, then two. Then came a time when the routine disintegrated and her beloved helper, Magda, would call and say Elisabeth was having a good day, and could I stop by? Yes, I could. I must. The book provided a focus for our visits, but there was another reason for our time together, and we both knew it. She was saying goodbye.
The Holocaust had stolen from Elisabeth the chance to have an adult relationship with her parents. I think that losing them early had made her especially attentive to her own children and grandchildren, and friends, including me. She had seen so much, suffered so much in her long life, yet here she was, week after week sitting across from me, the embodiment of resilience. Somehow, I never felt my own worries and dilemmas were trivial in comparison to hers. She had a way of asking questions that made me feel that in the wake of the inhumanity she’d experienced, it was more, not less important for her to listen attentively, more, not less important for me to make good choices and be true to myself. She often reminded me it was okay to be tough, to say no, and sometimes even to walk away from relationships when my time and energy were at stake. I clung to every piece of advice she gave.
But most of her life-lessons were concealed in housekeeping and grooming tips. I had always believed that in order to look good, I had to feel good, but my mood seldom justified a nice outfit. Elisabeth taught me it was the other way around. Sloppy dressing was simply not an option, unless I cared to endure a withering comment. Soon I began to notice a pattern. With a freshly ironed blouse, a dash of lipstick, my problems always felt more manageable. One day, when I tucked her tiny frame under my chin for a hug, she drew back and told me I needed a magnifying mirror. “You do not want to look at it, but you must,” she said. It was the best editing advice anyone has ever given me.
She always asked me what I was going to cook over the weekend. Subtly reminding me not to leave things until the last minute, she extolled the virtues of make-ahead quinoa salad. She warned against using a blender to make chopped liver. “If you cook it properly, you just need the back of a fork.” And there was the cake, with its three simple ingredients, which I never made. And then she was gone.
Passover, 2024: I decided to make Elisabeth’s cake.
Why now? Peace had finally come for Elisabeth in 2016. I had missed her every day since she died, but this year, I wanted even more keenly to bring her memory close. I was about to send another book out to publishers, and being in my sixties didn’t make me feel any more mature about it. This was my third book, but I was hardly a household name. I was bracing myself for a succession of rejections and radio silences. If and when my book came out, I would once again be in the position of striving for attention while internally cringing at the exposure. Why bother? I thought. Who cares what I have to say? I wished I could see Elisabeth, hear her calm, measured advice but mostly just sit at her table, sharing a meal and some conversation. She was as much a part of my writing process as I had been of hers.
That’s when I thought of her cake recipe. Of course, I remembered it perfectly. Six. Six. Six. What could go wrong? But I realized—yes, only then—with a carton of eggs staring accusingly at me on the counter, that the list of ingredients was not all I needed to know. Elisabeth had not told me how. I asked Google, or tried to. What to call this creation? “Six-egg cake?” Hundreds of recipes showed up. “Three ingredient cake.” Yes! It’s a real thing, a type of sponge cake that has been eaten all over Europe since medieval times. But these recipes only brought new questions. To separate the eggs or not? When and how to add the flour? What kind of beater to use, how hot to make the oven? Was it different for the potato-flour version? Would potato starch make more sense? None of the recipes I found online called for so little in the way of dry ingredients. To make the cake as light and evenly textured as Elisabeth’s would call for years of practice. This was no simple cake.
It looked gorgeous in the oven, rising in a golden dome. Then I watched it slowly crumple as it sat on the counter to cool. I’d left it until the last minute, of course. There was no time to make another one. I decorated it with strawberries and took it to the Seder. To deflect attention from the sunken mess, I read aloud a passage from And Peace Never Came. It was a section that took place in the work camp where Elisabeth was sent after her stay in Auschwitz. The women in her barracks were flea bitten, freezing, and starving, but at night they sat around sharing recipes, invoking a time when they presided with dignity over their family kitchens. Elisabeth recorded the recipes on stolen scraps of paper, and a friend created a cover. At a time when everything had been taken from them, they still found a way to create.
That night at my friend Shoshana’s Seder table, I discovered a new dimension to what, for me, was a familiar section of the book. The women’s recipes did not include any “method.” In Elisabeth’s words: “Hungarian recipes don’t direct every movement because the culture assumes cooks know.” The ingredients may be simple, but you have to figure out the rest for yourself.
Everyone loved the passage from the book, and a serving of fruit salad made the cake mostly palatable, though I noticed a few blobs of unmixed flour found their way discreetly to the shelter of napkins.
“Elisabeth would have been so proud of you,” Shoshana said.
I laughed. “Are you kidding? She would have told me it was terrible. She would have told me to try again.”
“To make this cake,” Elisabeth said, “all you have to remember is six: six eggs, six tablespoons of sugar, six tablespoons of flour.”
She held up her thumb, and added her forefinger, then her middle finger as she listed each ingredient.
“No milk?”
“No.”
“No butter?”
“No.”
“Not even baking powder?”
“No. Add chocolate, if you want. For Passover, you can use potato flour.”
“Amazing!”
“But you don’t like it.”
“I do! I do like it!”
“You’re hardly eating anything.”
This was my signal to take another helping, and I gladly did. “Amazing,” I repeated, between bites of evidence that her formula worked every time.
Soon, it was time to clear away the dishes and lay out Elisabeth’s manuscript. Working together this way was not new for us. Long ago, she had been a student in one of my creative writing classes. Eventually she became an editing client, and soon after that, a friend. Recently, she had asked me to help her assemble some of her essays for publication. Week after week we sat at her gleaming dining room table, going through my latest edits. This collection would be “just for the family,” she told me, and she planned on publishing it herself. It could easily have found a home with an established press, but self-publication gave her control over the timeline, and that was important. She was over ninety years old.
This was Elisabeth’s second book. The first, And Peace Never Came, was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press when Elisabeth was in her mid-seventies. It was a memoir of her experiences in Nazi-occupied Hungary and her post-war journey through several countries until she finally made a home in Toronto. Writing it demanded tough choices. Elisabeth told me she did not want to “hurt the reader” by being too blunt about her worst experiences. She wrote about losing her family and friends at Auschwitz, but somehow managed to do it with delicacy. The book is remarkable not just for what it says, but for what it leaves out. Even her daughter’s murder is not talked about directly. She writes instead about the kindness a friend showed in carving a trinket out of scrap metal to commemorate the child. Elisabeth may have protected her readers, but she couldn’t protect herself from reliving her painful memories, and she writes about that, too. The book is as much about the aftermath of trauma as about the experience itself.
In the manuscript of her second book, I saw fragments of the stories she had brought to the creative writing course I taught at a Toronto seniors’ centre in the eighties. Elisabeth said very little in the classes, but her body-language spoke of inner turmoil. Week after week she would sit with her hands in fists, occasionally using one hand to help the other open and flatten on the table before the fists somehow returned. Whatever she was going through inwardly, Elisabeth always looked wonderful. Each blouse or sweater was complimented by a scarf knotted at the neck, a crisp blazer, and impeccably chosen nail polish and lipstick. All of this was in keeping with her meticulous selection of words and phrases. She was the only one I stayed in touch with after I left the seniors’ centre. Upheavals in my life meant I had to let go of the patchwork of writing-related jobs that never quite paid the bills. Another teacher took over the classes, but I worked privately with Elisabeth on the first stages of And Peace Never Came. From there, our friendship evolved. There was something we understood about one another, as writers. I didn’t share her traumatic past, but—like her—I agonized about having anyone read my work. It took years to even consider submitting anything for publication.
Slowly, I built up my courage, and two decades later, Elisabeth was there to see my first book published. I was fifty-two. The book was a memoir, and I felt terribly exposed. It was the scariest experience of my life. From the time it was accepted until months after it launched I woke up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart. I burst into tears at the slightest provocation. I couldn’t get lost in my feelings, though, because I had a book to promote. There were seminars on self-branding, workshops on pushing myself past my comfort zone to get attention. I always seemed to be online in those days, haunting blogs, social media feeds, and websites for mentions and reviews. I was a middle-aged woman, but a newly published writer, and the whole process dragged me back to feelings I thought I had left behind twenty years before. As a perpetually single thirtysomething, I had flirted and primped and waited by the phone, wishing I could afford to play hard to get. No one really wanted me, and there was no space for my mixed feelings when I had to do all the pursuing.
Elisabeth invited me over one afternoon, I thought, for a friendly cup of tea, but this was a professional visit. We sat with a copy of my memoir, Outside the Box, on the coffee table in front of us and—in a tone I can only describe as severe—she praised the book. She spoke carefully, likely as carefully as she had read it. I owed it to her to listen with equal care. Elisabeth’s considered words reminded me of my responsibility. I had a story to tell. I didn’t have to let go of my dignity, but I did have to believe in my own work.
For Elisabeth’s second book, I did some light editing, and helped with the practicalities of self-publishing at a time when she could not get out into the world anymore. She paid me, which caused a tussle because I wanted to give her my labour as a gift. She would not hear of it. The cheques were bigger than the invoices. The result was that I worked so hard to get it right I could barely see straight. I still made mistakes.
Visit, eat, clear the dishes, work. Whenever she had the strength and energy, that is. We were lucky to get three good weeks in a row, then two. Then came a time when the routine disintegrated and her beloved helper, Magda, would call and say Elisabeth was having a good day, and could I stop by? Yes, I could. I must. The book provided a focus for our visits, but there was another reason for our time together, and we both knew it. She was saying goodbye.
The Holocaust had stolen from Elisabeth the chance to have an adult relationship with her parents. I think that losing them early had made her especially attentive to her own children and grandchildren, and friends, including me. She had seen so much, suffered so much in her long life, yet here she was, week after week sitting across from me, the embodiment of resilience. Somehow, I never felt my own worries and dilemmas were trivial in comparison to hers. She had a way of asking questions that made me feel that in the wake of the inhumanity she’d experienced, it was more, not less important for her to listen attentively, more, not less important for me to make good choices and be true to myself. She often reminded me it was okay to be tough, to say no, and sometimes even to walk away from relationships when my time and energy were at stake. I clung to every piece of advice she gave.
But most of her life-lessons were concealed in housekeeping and grooming tips. I had always believed that in order to look good, I had to feel good, but my mood seldom justified a nice outfit. Elisabeth taught me it was the other way around. Sloppy dressing was simply not an option, unless I cared to endure a withering comment. Soon I began to notice a pattern. With a freshly ironed blouse, a dash of lipstick, my problems always felt more manageable. One day, when I tucked her tiny frame under my chin for a hug, she drew back and told me I needed a magnifying mirror. “You do not want to look at it, but you must,” she said. It was the best editing advice anyone has ever given me.
She always asked me what I was going to cook over the weekend. Subtly reminding me not to leave things until the last minute, she extolled the virtues of make-ahead quinoa salad. She warned against using a blender to make chopped liver. “If you cook it properly, you just need the back of a fork.” And there was the cake, with its three simple ingredients, which I never made. And then she was gone.
Passover, 2024: I decided to make Elisabeth’s cake.
Why now? Peace had finally come for Elisabeth in 2016. I had missed her every day since she died, but this year, I wanted even more keenly to bring her memory close. I was about to send another book out to publishers, and being in my sixties didn’t make me feel any more mature about it. This was my third book, but I was hardly a household name. I was bracing myself for a succession of rejections and radio silences. If and when my book came out, I would once again be in the position of striving for attention while internally cringing at the exposure. Why bother? I thought. Who cares what I have to say? I wished I could see Elisabeth, hear her calm, measured advice but mostly just sit at her table, sharing a meal and some conversation. She was as much a part of my writing process as I had been of hers.
That’s when I thought of her cake recipe. Of course, I remembered it perfectly. Six. Six. Six. What could go wrong? But I realized—yes, only then—with a carton of eggs staring accusingly at me on the counter, that the list of ingredients was not all I needed to know. Elisabeth had not told me how. I asked Google, or tried to. What to call this creation? “Six-egg cake?” Hundreds of recipes showed up. “Three ingredient cake.” Yes! It’s a real thing, a type of sponge cake that has been eaten all over Europe since medieval times. But these recipes only brought new questions. To separate the eggs or not? When and how to add the flour? What kind of beater to use, how hot to make the oven? Was it different for the potato-flour version? Would potato starch make more sense? None of the recipes I found online called for so little in the way of dry ingredients. To make the cake as light and evenly textured as Elisabeth’s would call for years of practice. This was no simple cake.
It looked gorgeous in the oven, rising in a golden dome. Then I watched it slowly crumple as it sat on the counter to cool. I’d left it until the last minute, of course. There was no time to make another one. I decorated it with strawberries and took it to the Seder. To deflect attention from the sunken mess, I read aloud a passage from And Peace Never Came. It was a section that took place in the work camp where Elisabeth was sent after her stay in Auschwitz. The women in her barracks were flea bitten, freezing, and starving, but at night they sat around sharing recipes, invoking a time when they presided with dignity over their family kitchens. Elisabeth recorded the recipes on stolen scraps of paper, and a friend created a cover. At a time when everything had been taken from them, they still found a way to create.
That night at my friend Shoshana’s Seder table, I discovered a new dimension to what, for me, was a familiar section of the book. The women’s recipes did not include any “method.” In Elisabeth’s words: “Hungarian recipes don’t direct every movement because the culture assumes cooks know.” The ingredients may be simple, but you have to figure out the rest for yourself.
Everyone loved the passage from the book, and a serving of fruit salad made the cake mostly palatable, though I noticed a few blobs of unmixed flour found their way discreetly to the shelter of napkins.
“Elisabeth would have been so proud of you,” Shoshana said.
I laughed. “Are you kidding? She would have told me it was terrible. She would have told me to try again.”