TTT Interviewee: Dalia Carmel Session #2 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York, New York Date: October 1, 2009 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. I’m with Dalia Carmel. This is the beginning of our second interview. Good afternoon. Carmel: Good afternoon. Q: We were talking about In Memory’s Kitchen. Play that out a little bit. The book took a long time being published because I guess money had to be raised or— Carmel: First of all, the issue was to find somebody that will run with it. Cara had an agent, whose name escapes me, who was willing to take it pro bono and go to the various publishers and see. She had the same result as I had when I first went, you know, being totally unprofessional. I went to the various publishers, thinking that they will grab it. Q: You mean that they thought it was too ghoulish? Carmel: Too ghoulish and there would be no interest. The publishers only look at the subject if it’s marketable. I think the only time that the subject was more, was The Diary of Anne Frank, when Judith Jones found it. I think that’s the only time that really the subject carried, and not the bottom line. So she found this Jewish publisher, I think called Abramson, who gave very little money as an advance, I think $2,000 as an advance. Cara, at that time, was not working. The paper in New York had closed. So she didn’t have any income, and she was working very diligently, very thoroughly. Cara always, if you tell her to check the color of a wall, she will check the colors of all the walls in the building to find that one wall, so she literally wastes a lot of time. Then when the deadline is right here, then she gets cracking, with all the nerve that go with it. But she did it. I guess she had to meet a deadline and she did that, and it was published in ’96. I bet you there were two thousand copies printed the first— Q: Initially I think there were very few. Carmel: The first printing, I think was two thousand copies. But it was published. Unfortunately, Annie was no longer alive. But the reception, the reception around the country, I don’t know if it was the whipping of Fern Berman, whipping the interest. I mean, every newspaper, every newspaper from the littlest little towns, everybody had an article about it. Q: Fern Berman as the publicist, who was also doing this pro bono, as I recall. Carmel: Yeah. So I don’t know if it was the interest in the book or Fern whipped it up into such a frenzy, because it was unbelievable. Q: I have a feeling that she might have started calling before the Jewish holidays. I have a feeling that there was a timing that seemed right to write the story. Carmel: Could be. Q: That’s my memory of it, anyway. Carmel: Because I don’t remember the dates. I have a ton of clippings here. But for PBS to do a twenty-minute interview— Q: And that was with Cara? Carmel: Yeah. Q: And the rest of you were not involved in that? Carmel: Bianca was very often involved and Cara a few times called me to say, before the book was published, that she was worried that once it will be out, Bianca will get all the attention and not her, because Bianca— Q: Was in Theresienstadt. Carmel: —was a survivor. But very often she said she’s worried about that, so I guess she was worried about me getting some attention too. Q: I’m not sure we talked last time about actually what was in the manuscript, so perhaps if you could describe what was on those pages, that would be good. Carmel: On the manuscript? Q: On the original manuscript. Carmel: Just there were the recipes, handwritten, and some pages were very faint ink, and then there were loose pages, which I think was a poem that Mina Pachter wrote. There were some loose pages that I didn’t look into that because what interested me mostly was the recipes. Q: And the recipes were women who were prisoners at Theresienstadt and their recollections of— Carmel: This I think we can surmise, because it was only recipes. Q: We could surmise that these were their memories of the food they made? Carmel: It could be that these were Mina’s memories of—there were some recipes written in Czech and others in Mina’s handwriting. Mostly in Mina’s handwriting. I don’t know if they sat together and sort of reminisced and wrote down the recipes. I don’t know. I don’t know. By just looking at the notebook, it looked like the recipes written one after the other. Q: And Annie, did she know her mother? Carmel: Yeah, sure. Q: I mean, her mother was alive for a period of time after this. Carmel: After what? Q: After the war. Carmel: No, she died in Theresienstadt. Q: And so Annie was also there? Carmel: Annie was in Israel. Annie had immigrated, and the mother did not want to leave Germany because she had an antique store and she felt that the intelligentsia was not going to be harmed, so she wouldn’t leave. Q: You mentioned at one point hat you had shown the manuscript— Carmel: I showed it to Barbara K-G. I shared it with her. Q: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Did she keep that copy? Carmel: Yeah, sure. Q: And do you have a copy? Carmel: No. I gave my copy— Q: You didn’t want to make another copy? Carmel: First of all—no, I didn’t. I gave my copy to Bianca. Somewhere around here there is a copy floating, I don’t know if here or up in my storage, that sort of wound up coming back to me, but I don’t know if it’s the complete thing. I know that we needed the recipe for the bonbons, and the gal that was doing the movie for French TV in Paris wanted that recipe and I didn’t have it. Wherever I looked, I didn’t have it. Barbara didn’t know where she put hers. I remember that the recipe was in a separate page, and Barbara looked and looked and she finally found her copy and she helped us out with the recipe. Q: What was on French TV? Was it a reenactment? Carmel: I don’t know. Actually, I had the movie, but I loaned it to friends of mine. Anne Georgette interviewed Cara and Bianca, and went with Bianca to Theresienstadt and they sort of moved around in Theresienstadt when Bianca was showing where they were, what they did. Then in Bianca’s home, when Bianca was cooking and baking and she was telling the story of Mina, that she interviewed Annie’s son and showed him and their family, and interviewed me and took pictures here and took pictures from the roof of my building. Then they were taking pictures and drawings. I should go and bring the book to you. Q: I believe it was Annie’s son who negotiated with the Holocaust Museum in Washington. He was the spokesperson when they were having those conversations. Carmel: Yeah. Q: That is now where the manuscript is, yes? Carmel: Yeah. Q: Then after that, that part of your life closed, that relationship with— Carmel: The relationship with Cara ended. Q: I mean and the book. Carmel: It took a while. Here was another situation of anger being built. I was so angry, I can’t begin to tell you. And because I split with Cara, the food writers, all my friends the food writers, stopped being in touch with me. Q: Oh, my. Carmel: Yeah. They’re all Cara’s buddies. In the beginning, I was being gracious and I wasn’t telling the story of how she did it. Ultimately, I decided that I can hang my laundry out, and people were extremely surprised how ungrateful she was. Q: And really all you wanted was to be the link in the chain that you were. Carmel: Yeah, just acknowledge the fact that I’m the one that really saw the importance of the book coming out and thank me for giving it to you. I have to tell you a story that developed from this. When the book came out, Cara put—I don’t know if she had a website, but she put the information on the Internet that the book is coming out. And an e-mail arrived from Australia saying that a similar book was seen at the Jewish Museum in Sydney, that was owned by Edith Peer. Q: Edith Peer? Carmel: Edith Peer. P-e-e-r. Edith Peer was in the labor camp of Ravensbruck, and when she left Ravensbruck, her only possession was a cookbook, a collection of recipes that they sat together and wrote. The inmates of the camp sat together, I guess, in the free time and they wrote. She moved to Australia. When she moved to Australia, she contacted the—I don’t know if right away, but she contacted the Jewish Museum and showed the curator—I think the name was Rosenthal or Rosenblum, Rosenblum. Rosenblum curated a show and included the manuscript in the show. The meantime, Edith Peer decided that she’s going to have it translated and printed out of her own money. She made five hundred copies, and she was going to donate it to a Jewish charity so they could raise funds by selling them. The printing was done, and B’nai B’rith Sydney refused to accept the book because the recipes were not kosher. Q: Oh, my goodness. As though there you are in a death camp, thinking that your memories must be kosher ones. Carmel: Not only that, in the labor camp there were other people. There were not only Jews. So why would they write kosher recipes? So B’nai B’rith refused it. So Edith Peer was stuck with five hundred copies of the book. I guess age did its share and she had to move to smaller quarters, so she had a friend destroy all the books minus a dozen. A dozen were left. Now, how did I find this entire story? Cara told me that she got this e-mail from Australia and she doesn’t have the time to look into it, so I said, “Okay, I will look into it.” I found all this information and I decided to locate the curator from the Jewish Museum and I wanted to buy the few copies that were there. Believe it or not, I managed. I got the last few copies. I figured I will try and do something with that too. But in the meantime, In Memory’s Kitchen came out, and I broke up with Cara. I was not going to give her another project, and I let it sort of rot in the back shelf. All of a sudden, somebody sent me from Israel a tiny little article from the Hebrew newspaper, telling that Yad Vashem opened a museum for things that were used during the war in the camps. Q: Material culture. Carmel: Material, you know, combs, cups, plates, because if you didn’t have a cup, you couldn’t get something to drink. If you didn’t have a mess thing, you couldn’t get anything to eat. So I thought, that’s very interesting. And amongst the items that were given was a small collection of recipes from a woman by the name of Judith Taube, T-a-u-b-e. Judith Taube. So, you know, it stayed in my brain and I went to Israel. I brought with me a copy of In Memory’s Kitchen for Yad Vashem because I knew that Cara wouldn’t send it to them, so I brought them a copy, and I brought a photocopy of the Edith Peer book, because I didn’t get the booklets yet from Australia. I was still in search of who has them to buy them. So I brought Yad Vashem a copy of the manuscript that whatever her name was, Rosenthal, Rosenblum, sent to me. The museum, the Yad Vashem, was partially in the dark. They were redoing things, so I was coming through an empty hall and I saw light sort of beyond the hall, so I decided to go in that direction, and that was the room where the curator of the new museum was sitting. So I’m all alone. I said, “Look, I brought you this,” and I said, “and I would be very curious to see that recipe collection of Judith Taube.” She said, “Where did you find out about that?” I said, “It was in the paper.” She brought out a piece of cardboard that was formed into an envelope, sort of handmade, with flimsy, thin paper with recipes. “Take seventy-two eggs and four kilos of flour,” you know, some imaginary, literally imaginary recipes. It seems that Judith Taube had two other friends that when either one of them was sick and they had to bring them the dry breads and water, they would give them the recipe to read so that their mind could think of nicer things. So I said to the curator, “You know, Judith Taube was in Ravensbruck. Edith Peer was in Ravensbruck. Do you think they knew each other?” So she says, “Let’s call Judith Taube.” Judith Taube was in her eighties. So I said to her, “You know, I have a vision that they know each other, that they didn’t know that they’re still alive, and I want to bring them together on the Oprah show.” Q: Oh, my. [laughs] How fabulous. Carmel: That’s what I wanted to do. [laughs] So she called Judith Taube. Judith Taube is resting. So she said, “Go, go on your way.” I had to go back to Tel Aviv because I was leaving the next morning for New York. I get to my office the following day and there is a Telex on my desk saying “Bingo.” Q: Oh, my. Carmel: “Yes, they know each other.” So I was in touch with Judith Taube, and Judith Taube tells me, “You know, a very interesting book came out that you should look at. The name is In Memory’s Kitchen.” So I said to her, “You know, I’m the one that actually found the manuscript.” So she says, “Where do I see it in the book?” Q: Oh, my. Carmel: I said, “Well, you don’t see it in the book, but you can see that I’m mentioned.” So she hung up. Ten minutes later, she calls me back and she says, “This is what you got?” She said, “Isn’t that a shande?” I said, “You know, that’s life.” And I said to her, “What I would like to do is I got copies of your recipes, and I’ve got Edith. Maybe one could combine them in one book, Recipes from Ravensbruck, and get that published.” So I was in touch with Bell. What’s her first name? Harriett Bell, who was interested. She was then cookbook editor at Broadway Books Q: Where was she? Carmel: At that time I don’t remember anymore. She changed companies so often. Q: But in a New York publishing house? Carmel: Yeah, in a big one. She was interested, but one had to get the permission of Yad Vashem for the recipes of Edith Peer and the permission of the Jewish Museum in Sydney. Well, guess what? The director of the museum in Sydney, a rabbi, refused. Why? Because Sylvia Rosenblum was involved. Harriett Bell wanted to know how did the story come about that I found the facts about it, and I told her from Sylvia. So she said, “You and Sylvia should write together, in an introduction, how this came about, and get the clearance from the museum, from Yad Vashem.” From Yad Vashem I got it right away. The rabbi said, “If Sylvia Rosenblum is involved, I do not give clearance.”
 Q: What was that about? Carmel: I don’t know. I have no idea what was the issue between them. I have no idea. And I was not going to go into it. I only said to the rabbi, I said, “You know, Edith Peer survived the Nazis, but between B’nai B’rith and you, you’d kill her.” Q: [laughs] Were these recipes like in Memory’s Kitchen recipes in the sense that they reflected wartime scarcity? Carmel: You know something, I don’t remember. Let me—I’ll bring the booklet for you to see. Q: Because my memory is that In Memory’s Kitchen that there were very few recipes in fact that could be made in today’s world. Carmel: First of all, In Memory’s Kitchen, the way the recipes are written was, first of all, as if the people know how to cook, which is one element that cannot be considered today. Q: They were not precise directions. Carmel: They are not precise because they knew that you know that if you take an onion, you have to peel it and you have to chop it. You don’t have to tell you, you know, peel it and that. Then there were also ingredients missing, probably because they didn’t remember. Either that or the shortages, I have no idea. I mean, I’m not a historian that can build the missing links. Q: And when you’re in a camp, it might be hard to recollect all the things. Carmel: Yeah, I mean, you recollect the aroma, you recollect the image. Whether you remember exactly how it was done, you have to be an extremely good cook. And very often the people had cooks; they didn’t do the cooking themselves. Q: This is a continuation of my conversation with Dalia Carmel. When all of this happened with In Memory’s Kitchen and then with the Australian manuscript, you were living here. Carmel: Yeah. Q: And you had lived here about how long, here in New York? Carmel: From 1960. Q: From 1960, on, right. We talked before about that Lavon Affair, but we didn’t really talk about the aftermath of it and then how it played a role in your deciding to stay in the United States. Perhaps you could tell me about that. Carmel: You know, it was not an active decision. When I came back from the interrogations in January of 1961, I was angry, I was disappointed, I was disillusioned. Q: Because you felt the truth had not come out? Carmel: First of all, you know, I was telling the truth and they wouldn’t believe me. And there were certain things that I knew that people are lying. Wherever I was involved, I knew they were lying. And the way my parents behaved to me, I mean, the way my boyfriend, my parents, the whole thing— Q: They didn’t trust you or what? Carmel: My parents didn’t support me. Q: Because? Carmel: Because that’s the way they were. In Israel, gossip was more important than fact. So the further away I was from the newspapers and from the people, because basically, Israel is so small, you know just about everybody. So I was delighted that I had a place to go to where I could immerse in music and opera and art and photography, in whatever, just not to be involved in the politics of the country. And one year led to the other. I didn’t make a decision. Q: You were working for El Al that whole time? Carmel: Not the whole time. I started working for El Al in ’62. Q: Doing what? Carmel: I was in charge of the claims department. So that kept my brain working, and New York kept the soul working, so, you know, I found a niche and I was happy. I had a small studio apartment. I had my friends around. I didn’t make a decision that I’m staying. It’s sort of leaves upon the water, you know, that’s where they flowed. Then in ’77 I met Herb, and in ’78 we got married, so that clinched the setup altogether. Q: While you were in this studio apartment, were you still collecting cookbooks? Carmel: Yeah, I was collecting, but I was collecting the books for use, from the Cookbook Club, from the remaindered stores, you know, ethnic cookbooks of cuisines familiar through restaurants that I frequented. I was curious to see what they were, like Indian food, Hungarian food, Greek food. Q: Did you make some of these recipes as well? Carmel: Yeah. I cooked from them and I enjoyed that. Whenever I invited people, I always cooked dishes that I’ve never cooked before. There was some audacity in doing it, but I always did that. [laughs] And I basically enjoyed it. You know, I built a cocoon around me, and whenever an Israeli would come into my life, I was like a bad animal. Q: What did you think the image of you in Israel was? Carmel: I don’t know. Q: But what were you fearful of? Carmel: I was fearful of the gossip. The gossip, you know, some of it had legs and some of it had no legs whatsoever. You know, one of the basic things that bothered me was that they believed that I had an affair with my commander. Q: Your commander in the army? Carmel: In the army, and that I’m covering up on him and blaming Mordecai for having asked me to alter the documents. Q: Oh, I see. Your commander in the army had what kind of position that— Carmel: He was the Chief of Intelligence. Q: I see. And who was that? Carmel: Binyamin Gibli. You have the article. Come on. Q: Okay. I’m just trying to get you to say it on the— Carmel: I forget that we have a tape here. Mordecai was one of the subordinates. He was in charge of the unit of foreign activities and he reported to my commander, who was a colonel, a colonel at the time. And they blame me for having an affair with him, which I didn’t. I mean, it went all the way up the government ladder. The Prime Minister asked me, “How come you didn’t have an affair? He’s such a good-looking guy.” He looked very much like Gregory Peck. I said, “Imagine that every good-looking guy I’m going to have an affair with?” “How come you didn’t have an affair with him?” And then Ben-Gurion said, “You know, you admired this man and you admired that man.” Who is this man and who is that man? One was Eshkol, one was Gibli, you know. [laughs] So in this kind of atmosphere, and then when I’d go to ask to meet a bus, they’d tell me that they interrogated me. Who needed this? You know, I told you the story that I went to the travel agency to make arrangements to meet a bus, to take pictures of the bus. So what was the image? Whenever there was anything written in the paper—as a matter of fact, this week there was something in the paper. Q: In which paper? Carmel: Not here. In Israel. It was forty-five years to the—forty-five years? Fifty-four. Yeah, forty-five years to the affair. Let me try and show you. It was the affair in highlights. I didn’t print it. Q: So which newspaper was this? Carmel: Which newspaper I don’t know. Q: It was a feature, as it were? Carmel: I’ll show you. I didn’t go so deeply into it. I spoke to the guy that sent it to me. Can you imagine? I’m in touch with the girl that reported to me when in the army. That’s fifty-some-odd years ago. So we’re in touch since the movies came out or the articles in the papers came out. They found me. Here it is. Here it is. There you are. It says September 2009, the history branch and heritage of the intelligence. Q: Is that you? Carmel: No, no, no, this is Marcelle Ninio. These are the people that were caught in Egypt. Q: I see. When it failed. Carmel: When it failed, yeah. So there were seven; there were six men and one woman. This guy was separate, I think. He was on a different assignment. Q: If it had been successful— Carmel: Everybody would have taken credit. Q: So none of this would have happened. Carmel: Yeah. Q: I see. And you wouldn’t have had to change the document. Carmel: Right. She was the only woman amongst them and she tried to commit suicide and jumped off the second floor of the courthouse and didn’t succeed in killing herself. Q: So here in New York it must have been an enormous relief to be anonymous. Carmel: Yeah, although there were times—here’s the picture of my commander in the army. That was his deputy. This was Dayan. This was Pinchas Lavon. Hated him with a passion. Q: You hated him because? Carmel: I told you, from my experience, he was such a liar. I hated him for putting people in situations like he did with me. You know, I didn’t even go all the way down to see if my name is mentioned. Here is Gibli as an old man. Here he is as a young man, a corner of him. He died and took to the grave the actual secrets of what went on, what was the truth. But this is September 2009. Q: It’s amazing. How soon, then, did you re-meet Herb? Carmel: How soon? Q: Yes, I mean after you came back to New York. Carmel: In ’77. Q: You met him in ’77, so it was that many years later? Carmel: I meant to tell you that this was all of a sudden forty-five years later and still— Q: And still alive. When you were in your studio apartment, were you collecting other things besides the cookbooks? Carmel: Record, classical records. Q: As a collector or because you loved the records? Carmel: I love music. When I was single, I collected—there are two ways of collecting. Collecting, you get a notice that such-and-such a book has come out. You want it, you don’t want it. This is sort of at random. But there is collecting where you see something is out there and you’ve got to get it. Q: You mean with a purpose. Carmel: Or when you go to a place, knowing that there is a used bookstore, because you want to go see what’s there because there might be something that you don’t have. And in cookbooks, sometimes you know the titles of what you don’t have that you are trying to get, but more often, the title that you never knew that existed. Like I went to Melaka in Malaysia. We landed in a bookstore. My god, it was a trove of cookbooks. I didn’t know they existed. You know, Malayan, Singaporean, Melakan, and what have you cuisine. You know, if Herb wasn’t with me, the whole suitcase would have been only books. Q: When you started all of this, was it expensive to collect these books? Carmel: Oh, my god, yes. It’s a very expensive proposition. Q: So how complicated was that for you to fund your habit? Carmel: When I was single, I went to the cheap stuff. I mean, in those days, a book was ten dollars, twelve dollars, you know, in the sixties. And in the remainder stores, it was near three dollars, four dollars, you know. It wasn’t that bad. But when I became a serious collector, it was hundreds of dollars a month. Luckily, I was married so I could use some of the funds that I earned on my job. It was a craze, literally a craze, sometimes an absolute craze. Q: How did your husband feel about that? Carmel: About the funds, he didn’t care. Q: I meant about the habit. Carmel: About the habit, I think I told you, once Jackie Newman came to the house, and Professor Bill Lockwood and Herb realized that it’s a collection that is serious, then he didn’t mind anymore. What he did mind is that there was no room for his stuff on the shelves by the bed. Q: [laughs] Yes. At its height, how big was the collection, before you gave— Carmel: About 10,000. I don’t know exactly. We didn’t count. But according to Fales, I gave them 8,500 volumes. I’m not so sure that they’re right. Q: But you still have more than 1,500 books here. Carmel: Yeah. Because I have here, I have in the dining room, I have in the living room, and I have a lot in the bedroom. Q: How did you decide what to give them? Carmel: I went first by the cuisines that I didn’t care for, that I never cooked from, and that went for the Japanese and Korean and Mexican and Scandinavian. I don’t like the cuisine, so I never cooked from that. Then I had here really a collection of books that was really a library, a reference library. Every book that came out about food, I had. I said I will leave myself some dictionaries and encyclopedias, and the rest I can send to them. There were a few books that I haven’t read, so I decided I’ll keep those, maybe I’ll get around to reading them, which I haven’t. Then in the bedroom I had a big collection of fundraising cookbooks. Do you know what they are? Q: Yes, but you describe them too. Carmel: They’re spiral-bound plastic or metal, very lovely books, but ugly. Q: I think they’re called community cookbooks. Carmel: Yeah. I made a point of collecting as many as I could from Middle Eastern churches. I was always looking for fund-raising books from mosques. I found one mosque in Canada that came out with a fundraising book, and the Jewish books from synagogues, especially Sephardic synagogues-- you know, I don’t go to synagogues, but the books interested me. But then amongst the fundraising books, Ashkenaz books were repetitious and the Sephardic books interested me. So those books were in the front layer of the books in the bedroom. When Marvin [Taylor] came, he was drooling that he was going to get these books, and I said, “Marvin, forget it. Those books you’re not getting. This was a labor of love to collect those, to find the churches, first of all, to assume where the churches were and then to call and to find and to get and to pay. You’re not getting them.” Then one morning I got up. I think I had the flu. I said, “What are these ugly books?” [laughter] “What the hell are they facing? It’s so ugly.” I sent most of them. Most of them, not all of them. Some of them, the Middle Eastern ones had stories connected of how I got them. The Sephardic books I kept as a point of interest, but they will all go to Fales, ultimately. Q: What made you decide to make this donation to the Fales Library? There must be some stories involved with how that happened. Carmel: Didn’t we start with that story? I was sort of a little friendly with Marion Nestle from the school. What’s the name of the department there? Q: It’s changed, anyway. Carmel: So I was sort of friendly with Marion, and Marion heard about my collection and she came up to look. “Oh,” she said, “I would love to have that in the school.” I said, “Do you have a closed library?” She said, “No, it’s open bookshelves. Everybody can come and pick up a book. ” “Thank you very much. It stays here.” Then one New Year’s Day, eleven years ago already, I met Marion at Mimi Sheraton’s house, at a New Year’s Party, and Marion says to me, “By the way, we have a library.” So I said to her, “You know, why don’t you send a guy, whoever is the curator, send him up to me.” Q: But what made you willing to give them up? Carmel: First of all, Herb passed away, so I really wasn’t cooking. Secondly, one of the reasons that I was collecting books was to provide the food writers a source of interesting books to refer to Q: You mean that they could come in and use your library? Carmel: Yeah, as reference. Some of them came to use it and thought that this was a commercial place. Q: To do research was your idea? Carmel: To do research, to have a reference. They could do the research someplace else, but they could get the citations and the reference here. Q: From primary sources. Carmel: Yeah. And some writers were so ungracious, you know. Terrible. But Paula would come and Barbara Kirshenblatt sent me some of her students. They would come and they were nice. They would come and sit and look and put everything back in place. And when they cooked something, they brought a sample. Q: Very nice. Carmel: Really nice, nice folks. I remain friendly with them until today. And then Cara, naturally, Cara was the chief person. She would call, “Dalia, can you look up this? Dalia, can you look up that?” And the others would say, you know, “Do you have a recipe for this? Can you tell me what it costs for—?” And I would do that gladly, you know, whoever called. But once I broke up with Cara, as I told you, the other food writers disappeared. So what do I need all these books here? I don’t cook. Q: Did you want them to go to a library? Carmel: I didn’t know what I should do, but Jackie, Jackie Newman, had a tremendous collection of Chinese cookbooks in the English language, and she gave them to the library at Stony Brook. So that gave me the idea that it would be a terrific thing to donate it to a place that people could use it, because the collection was really a serious collection. I had about sixty books on Hawaiian cooking. Q: Yes, that’s serious. Carmel: You know, when you collect, you collect one at a time, so you never realize how many are on the shelf. When all of a sudden sixty books came down on Hawaiian cooking, my god, why so many, for the life of me, I don’t know. You know, certain collections have a mind of their own. So Jackie’s idea sort of took root in my mind, because the other way was to sell the collection as a whole collection, and that’s a very tall order. Just to give you an idea, in view of the fact that we logged all the books that were given to Fales with the price that I paid— Q: You had all of that information? Carmel: Yeah, $100,000. Q: Oh, my. Carmel: And this is only part of the library. Q: That’s the amount that you paid, as opposed to what they might be worth now. Carmel: Exactly. Not all the books, but some of the books are definitely more valuable no. At some point I decided to collect books from various islands around the world, in the South Pacific, in the Caribbean. There’s an island called Dominica, and the consulate of Dominica is up the road here on 43rd Street, so I went to see the consul there, who happened to write a cookbook. She was a teacher of economics originally. She gave me a copy of her draft. The book, until it came out, took years. When it came out, I bought it, and it’s somewhere on the shelf. Lo and behold, after the surgery now in august, I got a physical therapist from Dominica. We are talking, and she says, “Oh, my god,” she says, “have you got a cookbook from Dominica?” I said, “Believe it or not, yes.” She said, “There is no cookbook from Dominica.” I said, “Yes, there is.” And it’s very difficult to look for books with one arm. [laughter] That’s why I couldn’t find the book for you. I can’t reach. So I was looking, and, you know, with one arm, I couldn’t find it. So I went online and I didn’t remember her name either, but lucky for Google, I found the name, I found the book, and the book is now $238, because there’s one copy available in London and one copy available in Frankfurt. Q: What kind of food is the food from Dominica? Carmel: It’s a lot of fish and curry and roti. It’s all very similar. But it was funny that they have some kind of empanadas that Grace, the physical therapist, liked. So I said to her, “You can order it online, $238, and it’s a paperback.” So that book is really totally out of line. But I’m sure that many of the books are very expensive at this point because many cookbooks don’t have a long shelf life. Q: That’s true. They become dated. Carmel: It’s not that they’re dated. Look how many Italian cookbooks there are. I can show you in the bedroom, I have a whole half cabinet full of Italian cookbooks and I gave Fales the equivalent of the other half. When I decide to cook Italian food, it never tastes Italian. It always tastes Middle Eastern. I don’t know how to let something alone. So I buy more and more Italian cookbooks. Q: In the hope that someday— Carmel: That I will learn to stop from spicing things. And because so many cookbooks are coming out, each book is kicking the other one off the shelf, because why do you need Marcella Hazan, Arthur Schwartz, Lynn Kasper? What’s in there? Everybody. Q: Everybody at the same time. Carmel: All at the same time. So they kick each other off the shelf. Q: Did you keep the books that you particularly like to cook from? Carmel: Yeah. Q: Do you have favorites? Carmel: There is one favorite that I have. Q: What is that? Carmel: It’s the Love of Cooking by Uta Hagen. I love that book. Q: Why do you love that one? Carmel: Because she has recipes there of dishes that are very similar to what my mother made, like chicken paprikash. I made quite a few things out of her book. Another book that I love is the blue book of the New York Times. Q: The New York Times Cookbook? Carmel: Yeah. Q: That was, and still is, a great cookbook. Carmel: I love that cookbook. And then I love a cookbook called Arabian Cuisine by Anne Marie Weiss-Armush. She wrote a cookbook on Middle Eastern food that is fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. I love Claudia Roden’s books, both the Middle Eastern and the Jewish. But as far as Jewish cooking, as much as I love the books, I didn’t cook a lot of Jewish food. It’s too brown. I love chicken soup and I love soups altogether, so I used to cook a lot of soups, all kinds of soup. I was a glutton for soup. So, you know, I did that a lot. Herb had a sweet tooth. Q: Are you a baker as well? Carmel: Yeah, and I’m a glutton for every pot. I needed every pot. I had to try it all and the only way you could try it was to buy it. So if it was Calphalon or All-Clad or copper, Cusinart or Le Creuset, I had to have it all. I have more pots than a restaurant. Q: There was a book written about in the New York Times a couple of months back that purports to be the way French woman really cook, as opposed to the thoroughness with which the Julia Child books are written. So I ordered it. It hasn’t been published yet, but it sounded very interesting. It’s slowly making its way— Carmel: I was turned off French cooking. Q: I was just curious to see what the difference would be. You were turned off it because? Carmel: Because some of it was too long to do. Some of it was too long. Some of it had too much butter, too much cream and too much fat. Given a choice in going to a restaurant between an Italian and French, I would always choose Italian. When I choose to cook Italian, it winds up to be Middle Eastern. But it’s a disaster. Herb would never let me cook a steak. I killed them too. Q: But they’re hard to cook perfectly if you’re indoors. Carmel: He used to cook the steaks and the baked potato. He would call me in the office and he would say, “Dalia, today just call me before you leave the office. I’m cooking today. He bought the meat, He bought the potatoes.” And he was doing the cooking and I was doing the cleaning up. But he would never let me, never let me touch a steak. [laughter] He would get shoe leather. But no, French cooking, I had the whole cabinet, one half of Italian cookbooks, and the other half was French cooking. I used Julia Child’s cookbook once for one dessert. Q: Which one was that? Carmel: How was it called? Crème Bavaroise à l’Orange. Q: Oh, that sounds serious. Carmel: Four pages. Herb invited members of his distant family who were known to be very good cooks and very good bakers. There were two sisters living in the same building. One did the cooking, one did the baking, and whenever you were invited to them, you had the dinner in one apartment and then for dessert you went to the other, Kitty and Netty. And I decided that I had to shine. I had to show off. And whenever I was in the kitchen, I had to be a showoff if I had company. In creative areas, in photography also, when I go to class, I go to show off, which is childish, but enjoyable. So I decided to do this Bavarian crème, and at one point I was holding two hand mixers, whipping cream and egg whites, and Herb comes by and I said, “Oy, Herb, can you flip the page? Flip the page. I have to read the third page.” The result was outstanding, outstanding. When I brought it to the table, I said to the guests, “You have to eat it very slowly. Relish every teaspoon, because I’m never going to make it again.” [laughter] I didn’t see the movie yet of Julie and Julia. Did you see the movie? Q: Yes. Carmel: And you liked it? Q: Yes and no, but it’s a sweet movie. Carmel: I didn’t see it. There’s a movie that is starting on the ninth that I’ve got to see. I have to tell you about it. When you talk about Julie, Julie was cooking every page. I had enough with the four pages. [laughter] But I love to cook unusual stuff that I’ve never seen before. I had company and I decided to have a Sudanese dinner. Q: Oh, my. Had you ever had Sudanese food? Carmel: No. So I had a book that had—I don’t remember which university it came from. It was a fundraiser. Professors and professors’ wives gave recipes and there was one woman that gave Sudanese recipes. So there were enough to make a dinner and there was some kind of lamb and okra. I cooked it exactly according to the instructions because I had never had it before, and, oh, to serve it en famille was terrible. [laughter] Q: Because of the okra? Yes, tell me. Carmel: Because if you put the ladle in there and you lifted it, all the— Q: Fuzz. Carmel: Not fuzz. Gunk. Q: Slime. Carmel: I said, “Please.” I said, “How am I going to serve this?” It tasted delicious. So the woman was from Maryland—American married to a Sudanese. Q: Your guest? Carmel: No. Q: The person who had submitted the recipe to the fundraising book? Carmel: So I— Q: Called her. [laughs] Carmel: I called her and I said, “I’m making your Sudanese meal today and, I mean, you cannot bring this to the table. People are going to run away.” [laughs] So she said, “You know what? Why don’t you put the rice on the plate and serve the stew on the rice and bring this to the table.” I said, “You’ve got a point.” And it went over well. [laughter] Q: But you never have made it again. Carmel: No, but, you know, the thing is that she used long lady fingers. Had I done it again, I would have bought the mini okras that you can get dried or frozen from the Middle Eastern store, and without cutting those, then you don’t have that slime. Blech. I never forget that. I had two situations. I decided once to make a mousse of prunes. Q: [laughs] That is an unusual decision. I like prunes, but I’ve never thought of making a prune mousse. It probably was very good. How did you lighten it? [laughter] Carmel: Good, but the color. And when you put the cream and the egg whites and the lemon, the color looks like baby shit. [laughter] Q: Where did you find the recipe? Carmel: Here. Q: Oh, I see. Carmel: And I’ll never forget, I invited the lawyers that I worked with through various companies, and we were very close friends. So one of the lawyers comes in the kitchen. He says, “What the hell are you making?” He says, “I can’t eat that.” [laughter] Q: Oh, my. Tell me something. What is your hope for the books that you have given to the library now? Carmel: I know that the students love it. I had an e-mail from some student saying that she was looking for particular information from a certain book all over the city and nobody had it, and she said, “And here it’s at Fales,” and it came from my library. Q: Oh, that’s wonderful. Carmel: So it’s nice to know. It’s really nice to know that it’s being used and Marvin—I hope he lives long enough—is treating the books so gently, because my books, you know, if I took a book to the kitchen, I never took it to the kitchen. I would put it in the dining room table and go to the dining room table to check the recipe. Q: Oh, you mean you were very careful not to get them dirty? Carmel: That’s right. But what I did mostly, if I decided on a recipe or a few recipes together, I would make photocopies and bring the photocopy to the kitchen. I would never bring the book. I told you that whatever I made, I used to come to the office and type the recipe and make multiple prints, and people could come and take copies so they would leave me alone and just pick recipes from the envelopes. When I left El Al, I had a darling boss who overstayed his welcome in the company by many years. I think he retired at age eighty-five, eighty-three, eighty-five. He became forgetful and he lied that you could die. He was American in an Israeli company, so he had a lot of problems, and rightfully so. They tried to get him to leave somehow, so they chopped his personnel one after the other. Q: His staff? Carmel: Yeah. He stayed and he would become nasty to the personnel that was left. The last year, two years, we had a terrible relationship, terrible. You know, I had no respect. He lied, you could die. For instance, he would tell me that he’s going to the lawyer’s and not to call him, he will call. All of a sudden, the general manager is looking for him. “Where is he, where is he?” “He went to the lawyer’s.” He had a house in the country in Carmel, so I would call the house in the country and he answered the phone. And he said, “How did you find me here?” I said, “Didn’t you say that you were going to the lawyer’s?” Or he hated to make decisions. He would be in the country and he would call in and I would want to talk to him. He would be in a phone booth. He’s in a phone booth, and he would tell me, all of a sudden, “Oh, I’m sorry, Dalia. I have a call from Israel.” [laughter] “I can’t talk to you now.” Q: When did you decide to leave? Carmel: To leave what? Q: El Al. Carmel: In the beginning of ’99. Herb was sick. I couldn’t stand my boss. I couldn’t stand it. I used to love him, adore him for many years. I loved him. You know, we were good friends. He did my wedding, to give you an idea. I mean, we were really close friends, but it became sour. So one of the things, because of my relationship with all the food writers and with Cara, Cara would call you—she never asked, “Are you in the middle of anything?” Never. “How much salt did you say I had to put there or what was—?” Cara, no, she’s got to have it now or she would need a connection to somebody who was Yemenite, or somebody who was Libyan. We had in the company a variety of people from all over. I would say, you know, “Hold your horses. Tell me and I’ll—.” “No, no. Right now.” I said, “You know, we’re working in an office.” So as a result, you could overhear that I was talking about food while I was working on claims. My boss made me always give recipes to his wife. But when they gave me sort of a go-away party, my boss got up and said, “You know, whenever you passed by the office of Dalia, you would hear classical music and recipes, but in spite of it, she managed to save us enough money so that we could have this party.” Well, he’s another one I don’t talk to anymore. Q: So you stopped working then— Carmel: In April of ’99. Q: I mean you stopped working there. Carmel: And I never worked again. Q: I was going to ask you. Well, never worked in that context again. Carmel: First of all, Herb was sick until 2003, when he died. So first I was taking care of him here, and then I transferred him to a nursing home for a year and I was in the nursing home every day. Once he passed away, I cleaned papers or what have you, and then I decided to go back to my first love of photography. I went to classes and moved into digital. Q: Very impressive. And when you cook now—or do you cook? Carmel: Do I you cook now? What is that? Q: Thank you, Dalia. This is really so interesting. Carmel: I put eggs on the stove. I love hard-boiled eggs. The moment I put them on the stove, I forget that they’re on. I’d be sitting here and I’d say, “What the hell is that noise? The eggs are calling.” [laughs] [End of interview] Carmel - 2 - PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 1