In the hours between elementary school pick up and dinner, my mother and I frequently drove around Cincinnati in her bright yellow Chevy Caprice, dropping in on her friends. This was the 1970s; it never occurred to me to complain or ask to go to my best friend’s house instead. As my mom and her friends spoke in hushed voices, I was usually relegated to the basement with a bag of junk food I was normally prohibited from having and explicit instructions “to behave.”
I dreaded these afternoons unless we were going to Hanna Lewin’s house. Hanna was my mom’s fancy friend. Whenever she opened the door and saw it was us, it was as if she had won the lottery. She clapped her hands, pulled us inside, and took our coats. And then said my three favorite words, “Are you hungry?”
Every time we stopped by on one of our unannounced visits, Hanna was dressed as my mother would say, “to the nines.” I can’t recall ever seeing her without pearls around her neck or in her ears. Her short hair was perfectly arranged, not a flyaway in sight. She wore floral dresses that fell just below the knee and high heels that belied her petite stature.
It never failed: Hanna would have just pulled some of her apricot strudel–that famed Viennese dessert known for its paper-thin dough–out of the oven. The whole house smelled of butter and fresh marmalade. We sat in the kitchen near the oven, at a round table set with a lace tablecloth and linen napkins. Hanna poured coffee from a stove-top percolator for my mother and her, and milk out of a sterling silver pitcher for me. She didn’t use mismatched mugs like we did at our house, but cups and saucers with elaborate designs. In the middle of the table, a three-tier serving platter displayed her baking handiwork: mandel bread—a biscotti-like cookie made with slivered almonds, cinnamon, and orange juice—almond cookies, and, of course, strudel.
The only inelegant thing about Hanna was the numbers tattooed on her forearm that revealed themselves every time she poured another cup of coffee or replenished my milk.
Hanna’s strudel was almost too beautiful to eat. She sprinkled it generously with powdered sugar and cut it on a bias to reveal the dessert’s delicate layers of dough interspersed with apricots, nuts, and wafers. Light as air, these oblong bites were dangerously easy to pop in your mouth, which I did at such a clip that my mother repeatedly admonished me to “slow down.”
The only inelegant thing about Hanna was the numbers tattooed on her forearm that revealed themselves every time she poured another cup of coffee or replenished my milk. We never talked about her eight months shuffled between Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Salzwedel—camps run by the Nazis—but I learned the grim outcome over time. Hanna lost her entire family in the camps, except for a brother who died from starvation prior to being taken.
As a child, I was shielded from much of Hanna’s story. But in a 1991 interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hanna recounted the harrowing details of her life under Nazi rule, including the last conversation she had with her mother. They had just arrived at Auschwitz and were waiting to be sorted into two lines. As Hanna’s mother went one way and Hanna another, her mother turned to her and said, “Take care of yourself.” Hanna never saw her again. She was 18 years old.
She had grown up in Lodz, Poland, the daughter of a successful businessman and mother who busied herself keeping an Orthodox home while raising seven children. Every Friday night after religious services, the family sat down to a Sabbath dinner, often inviting friends and relatives to join them. Then, her childhood was only marred by the neighborhood Polish kids who regularly called Hanna and her siblings “dirty Jews.”
It’s no wonder that Hanna treated every afternoon at her kitchen table as if it were a special occasion. She, more than anyone, knew that it always was.
After the war, Hanna met Karl, another survivor. They married, had one daughter in Germany, then emigrated to Cincinnati, where they had two more girls. Karl found work as an electrician, where he met my father, who ran a construction company. It didn’t take long for their wives to meet and become fast friends, though my mom was nine years younger.
It’s no wonder that Hanna treated every afternoon at her kitchen table as if it were a special occasion. She, more than anyone, knew that it always was.
Hanna loved being American. “People born in the United States didn’t understand how lucky they were,” she said in her 1991 interview, noting then that Europe still wrestled with antisemitism. That said, when it came to desserts, she was loyal to the Eastern European ones. Perhaps it was the way they reminded her of her years in Poland when her family was still alive. I imagine now, looking back, that every sheet pan of strudel she pulled from the oven was like a visit from her mother. Or maybe after years of surviving on bread crusts and watered-down soup, she was still hungry for something that truly nourished.
Hanna died in 2017 at the age of 91. She was the only person I ever knew who lived through the horrors of Nazi Germany. She didn’t like talking about those years; perhaps that wasn’t how she wanted to be remembered. So I bake her strudel, set my kitchen table, pull out some of my “fancy” dishes, and enjoy the moment.
It’s always a gift. That is Hanna’s legacy.
Allrecipes / Julia Hartbeck
Hanna’s Apricot Strudel
Ingredients:
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup sour cream
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 12 ounces apricot preserves
- 6 vanilla wafers, crushed
- 1 cup chopped walnuts
- Confectioner’s sugar, for sprinkling
Directions:
- Place flour, sour cream, and butter in a bowl. Stir until combined, then knead with clean hands in the bowl until you have a smooth dough. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C). Divide dough in half; wrap and return 1 portion to the refrigerator.
- Lightly flour a work surface, and roll one dough portion into a 15×8-inch rectangle.
- Stir apricot preserves, vanilla wafers, and walnuts together in a bowl. Spread half the mixture evenly over the dough, leaving a 1-inch border on all sides. Dampen the border with a water using your finger or a pastry brush.
- Roll strudel up, beginning on a long edge, from bottom to top, pulling the dough gently with every roll, to form a tight, long log. Pinch dough to seal on all sides.
- Place strudel on ungreased sheet pan with rolled edge down. Score the top with a knife, cutting 1/3 of the way down. Repeat with remaining dough and filling.
- Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown, 40 to 50 minutes.
- Remove strudel to cool on a rack.
- Sprinkle generously with powdered sugar before serving.
