[Fishman] engage[s] with gendered migrant labor, offering nuanced portrayals of some of the dynamics between foreigners who share a Soviet past but belong to different cultures, waves, and types of migration ... Boasting recipes for dishes that Fishman’s late grandmother and other relatives used to cook, the book gradually becomes a collection of Oksana’s kitchen wisdom ... The recipes that Fishman includes in his book refer to Oksana’s practice of cooking this or that dish as a kind of imprimatur, a stamp of authenticity without which the instructional content of the self-described 'memoir with recipes' would scarcely work. Yet this stamp of authenticity relies on Fishman’s adept translations into the English of his intended readers ... Fishman skillfully avoids portraying Oksana, who has played a critical role in his life, as a matronly, obliging caregiver who exists for the purpose of serving his family. He depicts her with obvious affection and sensitivity, but also with some distance, perhaps as an acknowledgment of his lack of access to the inner life of a female migrant.

Reading Mr. Fishman’s story reminds us that all immigrant and refugee stories, regardless of their starting and ending points, are improbably heroic ... Mr. Fishman’s story—as a refugee, a seeker and an insatiable eater—is inherently compelling. But the book’s brilliance lies in the author’s self-awareness and honest appraisal of his, and his family’s, shortcomings. He writes from the perspective of someone who learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable in his own skin—someone with no secrets left to keep ... Mr. Fishman also writes wonderfully about food. Many of the Russian dishes he describes—braised veal tongue, fried buckwheat patties, liver pie—may be unfamiliar and seem unappetizing to a mainstream American palate. But Mr. Fishman convinces readers to salivate along with him ... The two dozen recipes interspersed throughout the text simultaneously enhance the book’s narrative and beckon readers to the stove ... By the last third of the book it is nearly impossible not to be rooting for the author. Mr. Fishman’s struggles and triumphs are uniquely his own, but his most primal desires are universal: to be seen and understood by loved ones, and to eat like a czar.

Enthusiastic meals — not all of them in transit — are the language of this book, the waypoints and transitions, the narrative beats and instigative sparks that drive the storytelling. The meals are fantastic ... Many of the best parts of this book will be familiar to readers of Fishman’s work; indeed, Savage Feast feels at times like a key to his novel A Replacement Life, which involved the creation of fraudulent Holocaust restitution stories — in other words, telling stories about your family. But here there’s a more straightforward desire for connection and a much less postmodern quest to find someone to eat with.

The result is a work of reminiscence and celebration that should appeal to a wide range of readers. If you like books about affectionate, colorful families... If you’re a fan of food memoirs... Anyone of Jewish or Slavic ancestry... will find the accounts of raucous, argument-filled holiday dinners hilariously familiar ... While Fishman, like all of us, sometimes feels ambivalence about his family, there’s no uncertainty about its food. His descriptions of even the simplest meals are mouthwatering ... [Fishman's] obvious flair as a fiction writer may explain my own tiny misgivings about “Savage Feast.” All memoirs tread a thin line between art and artfulness. Without design, a life narrative becomes a tedious jumble; with too much design, it starts to merge into fiction. In general, Savage Feast struck me as a bit too long: The stories tend to be overly drawn out, the often gorgeous prose slightly overwrought. More problematically, I wondered where memory left off and imaginative re-creation began ... Many readers will find this perfectly acceptable, but, alas, as a journalist, I always wonder about the degree of factuality ... Oh, well. Please don’t make too much of my cavils, especially when balanced against Fishman’s smorgasbord of humor, pathos and emotional insight. I very much enjoyed Savage Feast, and so will you.

A memoir to whet the appetite ... The book is a tightly written page-turner about the author’s childhood in Minsk, his extended family and their odyssey from Belarus to New York ... While reading it, I was frequently tempted to head to the kitchen and fry some onions, the step that starts many of the Eastern European recipes in his book.

... focused and multilayered ... Such stories of eastern European suspicion help raise the narrative from the personal to the public and historical ... Fishman’s story is also one of redemption ... Fishman’s food memoir is terrifically nuanced and multidimensional.

The author of two novels, Fishman lets his narrative move novelistically back and forth in time through key moments like his family’s emigration ... Fishman’s writing is brisk and vivid, and despite generations’ worth of trauma the family suffered, from pervasive anti-Semitism to the brutalities of World War II, his memoir is often funny ... where this book departs from other memoirs: Most chapters end with detailed recipes, adding a lovely, homey dimension.

It's easy to feel at home in Fishman's writing; it's warm, reflective and frequently funny. His relationships with his grandfather Arkady, and Arkady's Ukranian home aide Oksana, are particularly compelling ... Food anchors the memoir, but the recipes are the proverbial icing on the cake. The real meat of this story is its characters and the love that binds them ... This rich, memorable exploration of immigrant identity, culture clash and Soviet cuisine will linger long after the book has been closed or the last of the dishes within have been served.

The combination of flavors—blendedness itself—comes to define Savage Feast ... Though it mostly hews to the memoir’s first-person, for instance, two of its finest passages are chapters from family lore ... though it focuses on Fishman’s 'Russian non-Russian' identity—and the fraught dynamic this creates with his parents—it also features details of his clinical depression, his career and his relationships with women ... Savage Feast is episodic, almost disjointed. Among other questionable decisions, Fishman passes over the years between his family’s journey to the States...and draws the series of love interests at the center of the memoir’s second half so thinly that it begins to seem strange they’re included at all. It’s as if he doesn’t trust that immigration itself continues to be dramatic enough once the far shores are reached, and so he whisks in a slurry of underdeveloped ideas to thicken the plot ... this, of course, is the memoirist’s challenge, to accept that no recipe is a match for the actual experience, and then to tailor it accordingly. To paraphrase the old adage, too many subplots spoil the broth.

Central to Fishman’s insightful, absorbing memoir is hunger ... The trauma of cultural loss, shared by many immigrants, was assuaged by his grandfather’s home health aide, whose recipes for potato latkes, stuffed cabbage, braised rabbit, liver pie, and scores more make the memoir a succulent treat ... A graceful memoir recounting a family’s stories with candor and sensitivity.

This delightful, recipe-filled memoir from novelist Fishman (A Replacement Life) follows his Jewish family—and their richly-described dinner tables—across three generations ... There’s a large web of characters and anecdotes, but Fishman grounds the narrative with his witty prose and well-translated family recipes ... Fishman’s sprawling immigrant saga masterfully evokes a family that survives, united by food.