Great Books: Herring, A Love Story

Firstly, mo’adim le-simkha – a Happy Passover – to all of the readers. I hope you are having a pleasant and joyous Passover!

Anyone who knows me well knows my lifelong obsession with herring – one that I’ve documented for several publications, New Voices Magazine and Roads and Kingdoms among them. I eat some form of preserved herring – pickled, smoked, canned, or dried – at least a few times a week, and for long stretches the fish is part of my daily diet. I grew up with herring, and still love it. You should all look forward to a herring series in June.

Now, herring was long part of the Ashkenazi Jewish diet, since at least the Middle Ages. The fish – whose industry, pickling, and trade has encompassed most of Northern and Central Europe for a millennium – was incredibly cheap in its preserved forms across the regions where Yiddish-speaking Jews were settled. Herring was so common that the British-Jewish columnist Chaim Bermant claimed, “On Sunday, one had a pickled herring, on Monday soused herring, on Wednesday baked herring, on Thursday herring fried in oatmeal and on Friday herring with sour cream.” This herring also produced, in the 19^th and 20^th century, a whole corpus of artistic media evolved around the fish.

It is this media that Daniel Rozensztroch and Cathie Fidler profile in their new book, Herring: A Love Story. The book was originally published under the title Hareng, une histoire d’amour  in France – another country which also loves its herring. In the coffee-table book, Rozensztroch and Fidler exhibit the former’s enormous collection of “herring art.” The bulk of this collection are the beautiful, 19^th– and 20^th-century ceramic serving dishes that factories across Central Europe produced for a rising consumer class that wanted their daily herring plated nicely. Alongside these, you have postcards, posters, stamps, and paintings that depict the fish, its fishing, and its consumption in all its glory. From the herring industry of Iceland to the newfound popularity of herring among many American Jews, the artistic heritage surrounding this fish is celebrated.

I have the English translation from the original French, and the writing between the postcards is, to me and others fluent in both languages, very obviously translated from the French. That aside, the information in the book is fascinating, and the art is beautiful and magnificent. Some of it is also quite funny! I strongly urge you to buy this book, and explore with me the history of the glorious herring.

Herring: A Love Story, by Daniel Rozensztroch and Cathie Fidler. New York, Pointed Leaf Press: 2015.

Disponible en français en Europe.