You’re a very funny writer whose books often talk about the Holocaust.
I think a lot of people have been perplexed by how you can be funny when writing a book in which the Holocaust features. The crucial thing to remember is that I’m writing about contemporary life and contemporary life is very funny. One of my saving graces is I have a sense of humor and in particular I can laugh at myself. One of the miracles of my mother and father living through the Holocaust and being the recipient of barbaric behavior and witnessing indescribable atrocity was the fact that they were able to laugh afterwards. I’m not saying they rolled out of Auschwitz and killed themselves laughing, but my Dad in particular retained his sense of humor. When I was very young and he laughed I used to think everything was okay with the world. If you’re alive, your life has to have a lot of joy and a lot of humor. So I don’t think there’s a conflict.

What was your family’s experience of the Holocaust?
Both my parents were born and grew up in Lodz in Poland. My father was a child of a wealthy family and my mother was the child of a relatively poor family. They were both, like all the Jews in Lodz, imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto by the Nazis. They were there for almost five years. They were on the very last transport out of the Lodz Ghetto to Auschwitz.
My father had three brothers and a sister, and my mother had four brothers and three sisters, and they each had uncles and aunties and nephews and nieces and cousins as well as having a mother and father and grandparents. Everyone they were related to in the universe was murdered, except for one brother of my father’s. Growing up I felt that the dead were more present in our house than the living.
So I knew when I was growing up in Australia, where my parents migrated with me in 1948, that we were different, and not just because we didn’t speak the language. We were different because of what we had experienced. And I felt it was we who had had the experience, not just my mother and father. I felt I had absorbed it by osmosis in the way children can absorb what has happened to their parents.

You Gotta Have Balls celebrates food while exploring women’s complex relationship to it.
I’ve written about the good part of my mother’s life in You Gotta Have Balls. She was a fabulous cook. She would make flowers out of radishes and butter. Sun baking and cooking were two things that gave my mother peace. I started cooking from a very early age and had my own restaurant when I was about nineteen. My younger daughter is a very good cook. Making food central to this book was a way of making a connection with the pleasurable and joyful aspects of the past.
The meatball recipes in the book are contemporary variations on what was my mother’s basic klops (Yiddish for meatloaf) recipe, the same ingredients and the same proportions. more

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