Shoreline Press Book Detail

A Taste for Paprika— Details
	Laura Elise Taylor Biography War, immigration, grief, love, and food -- all are ingredients in this narrative about the layered relationships between a grandmother, a mother and a daughter.      Three generations of feisty women, the foods and feelings they associate with home come to the fore as Laura struggles to come to terms with both her grandmother's harrowing experiences in the Austrio-Hungarian borderlands during WWII, and her mother's silent refusal to mourn the deaths of two husbands. While Laura cooks ethnic dishes, she works on a new recipe for living. ISBN1-896754-36-8 2004 192pp.  $19.95  Order This Book
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A TASTE FOR PAPRIKA — Reviews Master's thesis formed basis for family memoir By Tom Murray, Express News, University of Alberta, 15 October 2004 After the Second World War finally drew to a close, the Hungarian government decided to uproot German speakers along the Austria-Hungarian border, punitively deporting them back to the "homeland." Everyone in the border town of Jakobshof was kicked out, including the bewildered Laura Binder and her three children, who ended up in a war-ravaged village suspicious of outsiders. It was a harsh life with little to offer the family, so 11 years later she finally picked up and moved to Canada, where she joined eldest son, Frank, in Ontario. Almost 50 years later, Binder's granddaughter, Laura Elise Taylor, decided to set down the stories she heard on her Oma's lap as a child in her family memoirs, A Taste for Paprika. The book was published earlier this fall by Shoreline Press. "It's been fabulous," she says happily over the phone about press and public reaction to her book. "Completely overwhelming, actually - people are having very personal reactions to it. They find that it really reminds them of conversations they have with their grandparents. They wonder what life was like for the previous generation, and then they go home and start asking questions. So that element has been fabulous. The stories about the war have definitely been striking a chord with people who went through the Second World War and then came to Canada. It's resonating with everyone from Romanians to Yugoslavians to people from Czech Republic - everyone has had the same stories." That may be true, but it's also important to say that A Taste for Paprika is so much more than a rote recitation of family history. The book also explores the tension between Oma and Taylor's mother, Erika, who has no use for her mother's reminiscences about the past. Erika's brother, Frank, takes pleasure in hearing the stories, but Erika holds herself distant - she has her own tragedies to deal with. Finally, there's the warm bond that develops between grandmother and granddaughter, as Taylor's Oma spins tales of her past while teaching Taylor various recipes handed down through the family. In some ways, the book seems more like a private diary than a book for the general public. "Extremely," agrees the author, who holds an MA in English from the University of Alberta, where she studied creative writing with Greg Hollingshead and Janice Kulyk Keefer and set down the framework for A Taste for Paprika in her master's thesis. "This was a book that was very much born and created in the heart - not necessarily intended for publication when I wrote it. It was a very cathartic experience when I finished it, and the reaction has been fabulous, more than I could've hoped for." As recalled in the book, Taylor and her mother finally headed back to visit Oma's ancestral home in Jakobshof. There are no startling revelations, but it serves to bring mother and daughter closer as they puzzle out a little more of Oma's past. Family secrets and tragedies, moments of happiness and joy, these might make for compelling reading, but it also begs the question: why was Taylor compelled to open her family history for complete strangers? "So it wouldn't be lost, including the stories dealing with my mother and the trauma we've gone through in this family," Taylor candidly admits. "Stuff that had never been spoken before. My mother is a very private person, so it was hard to talk about these things. I felt that in order for me to move forward in my life I would have to write those stories." Janice Kulyk Keefer, author of Thieves: Advance Praise for a Taste for Paprika (from the back cover) This is a book for all those eager to explore that first fraught affair of our hearts: family love and the stories that express and sustain it. Laura Elise Taylor wrires of - and with - courage, passion and hope, bridging vast differences of age and experience, language and culture to bring herself, her family and her readers to that bittersweet place we all long for - home. Ajay Heble, author of Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice: Advance Praise for a Taste for Paprika (from the back cover) Food, memory, history, and a sparkling imagination are expertly thrown into the mix in this compelling and moving family memoir. Written with eloquence, wisdom, and ever the right spirit of discovery, A Taste for Paprika marks an impressive debut by a hugely gifted storyteller. Natale Ghent, author of No Small Thing: Advance Praise for a Taste for Paprika (from the back cover) A Taste for Paprika is a tenderly written history of love and loss and ultimately, renewal, its secrets unfolding through the commotion of generations in the quieter moments of life: in kitchens, at tables, beneath the silver ting of soup spoons.