Books: Bittersweet message

Food is front and center in Jessica Soffer’s first novel, but her true lessons are about the meaning of love and family.

By MIRIAM KATES LOCK
Halva market sweets candy food sugar dessert 390 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem / The Jerusalem Post)
Halva market sweets candy food sugar dessert 390
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem / The Jerusalem Post)
Lorca is a 15-year-old Jewish girl living in New York City with her mother, the busy head chef of an elegant gourmet restaurant. Victoria is an Iraqi Jewish widow struggling to cope with her husband’s death. The two are brought together by their mutual love of cooking, but it is something much deeper that creates the bond between them.
In Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, Jessica Soffer’s first novel, we are introduced to Lorca and Victoria in alternating first-person voices. Soffer, the daughter of an Iraqi Jewish painter and sculptor, grew up in New York City and earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her personal knowledge of the city and of Iraqi cooking serves her well in Apricots, which is filled with descriptions of delectable Iraqi dishes.
Lorca and her mother, Nance, move in with her Aunt Lou after leaving New Hampshire – and Lorca’s dad – when Lorca is seven. Lorca is a lonely and troubled girl who is constantly waiting for her beautiful, talented mother to show her some signs of love. Her mother, however, is emotionally unpredictable and unavailable, obsessed with herself, her career and her own loneliness. Her emotional neediness competes with Lorca’s, a state of affairs that leaves Lorca lost and miserable.
As a young girl, Lorca discovers that physical pain gives her a sense of power over the uncertainty in her life. As she gets older, she develops a repertoire of ways to hurt herself, and at 15 is occupied with self-mutilating behaviors as a way of dealing with her anger and sense of abandonment.
Although she is crying out for her mother’s attention, her mother cannot give her what she needs. When Lorca is caught cutting herself in school and is suspended for a week, Nance tells her that she just cannot handle her anymore and is planning to send her to boarding school.
Lorca believes that if she could just find the one thing that would make her mother happy, she would not be sent away. One night, when she is in bed, she overhears her mom telling Aunt Lou that her favorite dish is something called “Masgouf,” which she once ate at an Iraqi restaurant. Lorca sets out on a search for the recipe, believing that if she can just make a delicious Masgouf for her mother, she will be saved from boarding school. That search for an obscure Iraqi recipe is what brings her to Victoria just days after Victoria’s husband, Joseph, has died.
Iraqi Jews who arrived in New York City in the 1950s, Victoria and Joseph were the owners of a successful restaurant until Joseph became seriously ill.
The reader meets Victoria during the last days of Joseph’s life. As Joseph gets weaker and closer to death, Victoria thinks back to the early days of their relationship – their romance in Iraq and the trauma and challenges she experienced when she followed him to New York. She thinks constantly about the daughter they gave up for adoption many years before. It was a decision they never talked about, a hidden secret wedged between them throughout the years.
It is Victoria’s well-meaning neighbor Dottie (who has a secret of her own) who encourages her to give cooking classes after Joseph dies. Victoria is a gifted cook and was the force behind the restaurant’s success. She had stopped cooking altogether to care for Joseph when he became ill, and when Joseph dies, she is left without a purpose in life. Alone and frantic to fill the empty space, she takes Dottie’s advice and decides to give cooking lessons in her apartment.
Lorca, meanwhile, sees a sign advertising Victoria’s classes and becomes her lone student.
The two develop a tentative friendship as they make cardamom pistachio cookies, kubbeh with squash, and the famed Masgouf in Victoria’s kitchen.
They gradually grow closer as Lorca’s lessons become the focus of Victoria’s empty days, and Lorca finds in Victoria the love and attention she seeks. The time they spend together, surrounded by the delicious smells of Iraqi cooking, fills them both with an unexpected sense of happiness and purpose.
While Victoria and Lorca are both Jewish, their shared Jewish identity is not a major theme in the novel. The central themes of Apricots are not really found in the kitchen, either. This is a book about love and need, growing up and growing older, and the secrets that family members keep from each other.
The story will grab your attention, making the book hard to put down. If you are a sensitive reader, you might cringe at the descriptions of Lorca hurting herself, but you will get through them with a deeper understanding of her inner life and what she is looking for when she walks into the world of Victoria’s kitchen.
In the last chapter, it is Lorca who expresses a wisdom beyond her years.
“I knew that I was made up of my choices, the things I’d done, and whom I’d loved and how,” she reflects. “I thought only that things felt like themselves, but different. This was happiness, I realized, when I was pretty sure that I’d be happy later on, again and not, and then again.”