The Soup Has Many Eyes: From Shtetl to Chicago - One Family's Journey Through History

by Joann Rose Leonard

At home in her Pennsylvania kitchen, Joann Leonard makes soup. In her grandfather's pot, she improvises, using her great-grandmother's unwritten recipe. As she does, amid the fragrant steam rising from the pot comes a stream of memories, half-told tales, and departed ancestors asking that their stories be told.

And what stories they of a family terrorized by Cossacks in its Eastern European village; of a man hiding twenty-eight days beneath a barn floor to avoid being murdered; of a tiny girl left behind with others for safety, lost for twelve long years and then miraculously found. Theirs is also the vivid story of new lives made from old in America, "the Golden Land," lives rich in humor, wisdom, and bone-deep faith.

Written as a spiritual legacy for her two grown sons so that they may know their roots, and illustrated with old family photographs, this highly praised history of a remarkable family is a testament to the miracle of what happens when we invite the past into our lives.

Genres: Memoir, History

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 29, 2000

About the author

Wisconsin born JOANN ROSE LEONARD was Texas-raised and has chigger bite scars to prove it, theatre-trained and frostbitten at Northwestern University, and worked as an actress in New York. She studied mime in Paris with Marcel Marceau while dubbing films into English to earn her daily baguette; raised 9 kids (2 human, 7 goats) in State College PA, where she was founder and director of MetaStages, the youth theatre program at Penn State University, and, with her husband, Bob, a retired professor and theatre director, has relocated to CA to be nearer their sons, Jonathan (DJ Child, an award-winning music producer and founder of the multi-media company, Project Groundation) and Joshua (actor/filmmaker of more than 55 titles including The Lie, Higher Ground and The Blair Witch Project.) Joann is author of The Soup Has ManyEyes: From Shtetl to Chicago; One Family's Journey Through History, "From Page to Stage,” a chapter in Holt Rinehart Winston’s Elements of Literature and two collections of multicultural plays, “All the World's a Stage Volumes I & II” (Baker's Plays).

In her research for The Healer of Fox Hollow, Joann discovered that the truth the novel is based upon is infinitely stranger than the fiction she wrote.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The family history is interesting, but I found the writing distracting. The first 1/2 - 2/3 is full of unnecessarily flowery language. The soup analogy is persistent but feels forced. Joann and her sons are central to the writing as ghosts of family members passed visit to inform the story of their family history. Then, as Anna’s story deepens and becomes central, all of that sort of fades away and the book assumed a rather regular structure for historical nonfiction stories. I preferred this later structure, but it made no sense with the first portion of the book and I became even more distracted wondering how the original structure would be tied in with this new structure (it wasn’t). All in all, this wasn’t a bad read but I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend.

[Toni · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Life has so many hungers. So many mouths clamor to be fed--the mind, the stomach, the soul, the heart, the pocket. When you find a food that feeds several mouths at once, it is a special blessing in the eyes of God."

Beautifully written, this little book is a love story from a mother to her two sons, giving them an invaluable contribution to understanding the triumph of their own immigrant experience.

[Adele · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was okay. It certainly is an interesting family history of early 1900s Russia, and of being caught up in the pogroms of that time, and of emigration to America. However, I do feel sorry for Joann and her lack of [Jewish] faith. I quote her own words she tells to her two sons:

Without the steadfast rituals of my relatives, I am bereft of a starting place. Maybe that’s why geography baffles me – I have no locus. I lack the rites that wolf-mark the territory of our brief life

We wanted your spirits to be unfettered by dogma; unbound moving matter; to give you a faith that saved the unchosen as well as the chosen; in which sacraments were anchored in the moment

Without words, did you learn how to pray? In rejecting the rote, in considering everything sacred, did we make nothing sacred? In discarding Hallmark holidays or everyday words of love and support, did you receive the message that our passage through life is without milestones?

I envy those with unflinching faith … I want light and flight and daily transformation.

I long desperately for a faith of my fathers, of my mothers, a faith that can pray in the face of senseless death and unbearable misery. But the God of my understanding is some unnamable, unknowable mystery. Yes, I pray, I cry out, but not because I believe (as I yearn to) in answered prayers, in angels, in an omniscient and loving Mother/Father/Friend, but because I was born lop-headed, myopic, without breath and with too many worms churning inside not to believe.

[Susan Heiss · Rating 4 out of 5]

This soup feeds the soul. What fortunate sons to have this incredible history gifted to them. I never cease to be amazed by humankind’s capacity for evil and hatred. Books like this always make me wonder who I would be if faced with similar circumstances. I read the book in one afternoon during a power outage. It sure put my temporary inconvenience into stark perspective. At times I marveled at the author’s poetic language. At other times, I found it overdone and distracting. Looking forward to book club discussion, especially in light of current heartbreaking events in Ukraine.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book! A memoir and very interesting!!!