Goldie Finkelstein was just 13 when she was sent to Wiener Graben, a work camp that later became a concentration camp. The youngster lost her entire family in the war, and among the things she never learned from them was how to cook. She had no family recipes and, according to her son, when she married Sol Finkelstein, also a Holocaust survivor, she didn’t know how to boil water or cook an egg.

Goldie’s experience illustrates the ways in which recipes, including those we think of as quintessentially Ashkenazi Jewish, have changed over the years. Survivors lost the ancestors who passed along oral recipes. Families’ personal artifacts, such as handwritten recipes, were abandoned when Jews were forced to flee. Read article