Kinga Júlia Király: Recipes of new beginnings

Life, hunger, hope
Kinga Júlia Király’s book launch event with food tasting

She primarily planned to collect Jewish food recipes from Transylvania, but with these, a number of moving, enlightening, and sometimes anecdotic stories broke the surface, which mark the fascinating cross-section of the connections between a community’s worldview, lifestyle, customs, history, life-changing crises and individual life. The book launch and food tasting event of Kinga Júlia Király’s volume entitled ‘Recipes of new beginnings’ (published by Mentor, Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș, 2018) will take place in the garden of Park Hotel, moderated by writer István Miklóssi Szabó.

Well received by readers and experts, the book is a literary and scholarly work, a cookbook, a cultural dictionary and a memorial album of Transylvanian Jews at the same time. The author worked on it for three years, conducting hundreds of hours worth of interviews and joint cooking with Holocaust survivors and documenting the backgrounds of the deceased by considerable archival research. Years of peace and of war, concentration camps, joy and mourning, delicacies and famine, fulfillment and craving, kosher household and forced concessions, struggles and compromises, all within the inner command of survival and starting anew in a readable and gap-filling illustrated book, which conjures up the memories of its contributors ingeniously.

Kinga Júlia Kiráy (1976, Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș): writer, literary translator, playwright. She completed her major in dramaturgy at the University of Arts in her hometown. During her university years, she had already been writing dramas, and later she started teaching dramaturgy and history of theatre in the alma mater. She is an excellent connoisseur, translator and interpreter of Italian literature, devoting herself, in the latter regard, to numerous studies and volumes on the works of Carlo Gozzi.

Time and location: IX. 21. ► 17:00 ► Park Hotel garden