One part “Tuesdays with Morrie”, and one part “Like Water for Chocolate,” Nana Lena’s Kitchen by Amy Ostrower is an inspirational collection of stories and recipes from a Southern Jewish kitchen. These stories read almost like folk tales, fables from a mythic past handed down from generation to generation with love. As an extended family of sisters, daughters, and granddaughters gather to make a Passover meal or prepare the Shivah table, Nana Lena’s recipes are dispensed with an equal measure of wisdom– about life and death, courage and responsibility, family and faith.

We see the spirited Lena grow in these pages from a young girl and impetuous bride to a loving mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Her story mirrors the larger currents of her times. The daughter of immigrants, Lena Goodman was born on the Fourth of July 1912 in Berkley, Virginia. During her lifetime she saw the Flu Epidemic of 1918, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the invention of indoor plumbing– even a Jewish boy named Sandy Koufax played Major League Baseball. She continues to live on in these stories, fondly remembered by her granddaughter Amy Ostrower, who is retired from the film and television industry and has taken up residence in Wilmington, North Carolina, a place very much like the Tidewater area where she grew up.

Nana Lena’s Kitchen is a gem – and a perfect gift for mothers, daughters, bubbies, and best friends.