Linda Grant’s 2023 novel The Story of the Forest is a story about stories.
It opens with the sentence: ‘In the olden times, in the old country of Latvia, a girl walks out of the city into the forest to gather mushrooms in a basket, like a child in a fairy-tale.’ It is 1913, the girl is 14-year-old Mina Mendel, and her walk into the forest acts as a catalyst to shape the course of the rest of her life. An integral episode in Mina’s life story, the event also becomes a story that is told and retold through the generations. Mina’s daughter, Paula, ‘could not remember when she had not known about the forest’, and her great-granddaughter, Zoe, following Mina’s death, recalls her great-grandmother as ‘an unpredictable presence who talked on and off about a forest’.
In the forest Mina meets a group of young men who introduce themselves as Bolsheviks. After lecturing her about their political beliefs, they invite her to dance with them. On accepting the invitation, she experiences a sense of freedom hitherto denied to her: ‘She breathed a new kind of oxygen, the potent chemical mix of freedom. Frei, frei! thought the girl who was a good Jewish daughter, destined to become a good Jewish wife and a good Jewish mother.’ Returning to the forest a few days later – ostensibly to reclaim her mushroom basket – Mina meets the men again and, this time, enjoys a kiss with one of them.
Back home, Mina confides in her brother Jossel about her adventures in the forest. Fearing that Mina will be caught up with the revolutionaries to her – and the family’s – detriment, Jossel decides to take action. Concerned that if he tells his parents what Mina has done, she will be married off to ‘some hastily selected old widower with hairs in his nostrils who would oppress and destroy her spirit’, Jossel proposes to his parents that the whole family leave Latvia – which is on the brink of revolution – and emigrate to the United States to make their fortune. Whilst the father is opposed, their mother (who has recognised Mina’s rebellious spirit and wants to protect her from the fate of an arranged marriage to a misogynist that befell her) urges Jossel to take Mina and leave.
So Jossel and Mina board a ship and set sail from Riga. Docking in Hull, they disembark with Lia, a Jewish woman they have met on board who persuades Jossel to marry her. And then the newlyweds and Mina travel across the Pennines to Liverpool to await the next ship to America. But the First World War intervenes, and they are obliged to remain in Liverpool. Jossel is eventually called up (in 1916), and is sent to Palestine where he meets a fellow Jewish soldier, Louis Polack, who is critically wounded on the battlefield. Keeping watch over Louis, Jossel tells him his story, of his family, his life and his journey from Riga to Liverpool, and tells Louis about Mina (whom Louis eventually marries). Jossel’s storytelling subsequently becomes the stuff of legend; regarded as saving Louis’s life, Jossel’s war story is told and re-told, a story that ‘reverberated down the generations’ and ‘became the Mendel gold standard for storytelling, a challenger even to Mina’s story of the forest’.
Whilst Mina settles into a very ‘English’ kind of life – a world away from Bolsheviks in a Latvian forest – even Anglicising her name to Millie (when outside the home), the story of the forest remains and grows in strength and power. Told and re-told, it inspires a film (also called The Story of the Forest) and acquires almost mythological status.
This notion of stories being told and re-told, and moving into the realm of myth, seems appropriate for a book peopled with Jewish characters (Grant herself is Jewish). Judaism is steeped in storytelling, its rituals, rites and food all underpinned with stories, as I wrote in my post on Francesca Segal’s novel The Innocents .
Food is bound up with Jewish traditions and stories in The Story of the Forest. When Louis and Mina receive an anonymous hate letter signed ‘Anti-Jew’, they seek solace in ‘cholent’ (a traditional meat and bean stew eaten at midday on the Sabbath but prepared on the Friday and left to cook overnight to evade the prohibitions on working on the Sabbath) and ‘strudel’ (a dessert made with paper-thin pastry and filled with fruit, originating from Central Europe). Then, every Friday night in Liverpool the Jewish families dine on chicken, with ‘carrots and celery and lokshen pudding’. As Claudia Roden writes in The Book of Jewish Food, a book with as many stories as there are recipes, the Yiddish word lokshen comes from the Polish lokszyn for noodles. Through their trading and rabbinical connections with Italy, Jews in Germany were making pasta as far back as the fourteenth century, with lokshen being made every Friday by Jewish women for two main Sabbath dishes: the chicken soup and the kugel or pudding (which could be either savoury or sweet). I suspect the lokshen pudding Grant is referring to is a savoury one, but I wanted to try the sweet version. Roden provides the recipe for a sweet lokshen pudding which is eaten at Shavuot, the Jewish Festival of Weeks which celebrates the wheat harvest and the revelation of the Ten Commandments to Moses.
This is my version. Like a rice pudding, but made with pasta, I made it on an exceptionally cold January day, and it provided the warmth and comfort I was desperately craving.
LOKSHEN PUDDING
Ingredients (serves 2-3):
120g egg noodles / vermicelli
25g unsalted butter
1 small egg
120g cream cheese
150ml sour cream
40g caster sugar
Grated zest of half a lemon
Handful of raisins
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180C / 160C fan / gas mark 4.
Cook the noodles following the instructions on the packet until they are just done (al dente), then drain, return to the pan and mix with the butter.
In a separate bowl, use a fork to beat together the egg and cream cheese, followed by the sour cream. Then add the sugar, lemon zest and raisins and mix in. Finally add the cooked noodles and mix thoroughly.
Spoon the mixture into an ovenproof dish. Bake in the preheated oven for 20-30 minutes until set.
