Monday, November 23, 2026 7:00 PM
YIVO
15 W. 16th St., New York, NY 10011
Admission: $15
YIVO members & students: $10
Tickets

The documentary Fania’s World of Flavors, Smells, and Colors tells the story of Fania Lewando, a Polish Jewish woman born in 1886 in Kowal. Before World War II, she ran the popular Dietojarska Jadłodajnia in Vilnius, where she served vegetarian specialties rooted in Ashkenazi cuisine. She combined unusual flavors with a focus on healthy cooking, believing that a meat-free diet rich in vitamins was essential to good health. Her culinary talents became widely known and admired, attracting prominent visitors, including the young and then little-known Marc Chagall.

Lewando was also the only woman invited to serve as a chef aboard the Polish ocean liner M/S Batory, where she prepared kosher meals for the ship’s passengers. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she published a cookbook in Yiddish and Polish editions featuring 400 vegetarian recipes.

Tragically, the outbreak of the war brought Lewando’s international career to an abrupt end. In 1941, Fania Lewando and her husband perished, and her cookbook was lost amid the chaos of the war. Decades later, a copy was unexpectedly discovered at an antiquarian book fair. Translated into English by YIVO in New York, the cookbook became a bestseller and has since been published in Lithuanian, Polish, and Czech.

Join us for the New York premiere of this documentary followed by a Q&A with director Andrzej Ciecierski, moderated by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

Beautifully translated for a new generation of devotees of delicious and healthy eating: a groundbreaking, mouthwatering vegetarian cookbook originally published in Yiddish in pre–World War II Vilna and miraculously rediscovered more than half a century later.

In 1938, Fania Lewando, the proprietor of a popular vegetarian restaurant in Vilna, published a Yiddish vegetarian cookbook unlike any that had come before. Its 400 recipes ranged from traditional Jewish dishes (kugel, blintzes, fruit compote, borscht) to vegetarian versions of Jewish holiday staples (tsholent, kishke, schnitzel) to appetizers, soups, main courses, and desserts that introduced vegetables and fruits that had not traditionally been part of the repertoire of the Jewish homemaker (Chickpea Cutlets, Jerusalem Artichoke Soup; Leek Frittata; Apple Charlotte with Whole Wheat Breadcrumbs). Also included were impassioned essays by Lewando and by a physician about the benefits of vegetarianism. Accompanying the recipes were lush full-color drawings of vegetables and fruit that had originally appeared on bilingual (Yiddish and English) seed packets. Lewando’s cookbook was sold throughout Europe.

Lewando and her husband died during World War II, and it was assumed that all but a few family-owned and archival copies of her cookbook vanished along with most of European Jewry. But in 1995 a couple attending an antiquarian book fair in England came upon a copy of Lewando’s cookbook. Recognizing its historical value, they purchased it and donated it to YIVO. Enchanted by the book’s contents and by its backstory, YIVO commissioned a translation of the book that will make Lewando’s charming, delicious, and practical recipes available to an audience beyond the wildest dreams of the visionary woman who created them.

A Polish edition of the book is also available here.

The event is co-sponsored by American Friends of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Polish Cultural Institute New York