Last fall, I was thrilled to record a piece for NPR's Berlin Stories series. Berlin Stories are "short, personal pieces" about Berlin that are broadcast on NPR's Berlin station. (By the way, did you know that Berlin is the only city outside the US with an NPR station?) For my piece, I adapted a chapter from My Berlin Kitchen, telling the story of how my mother, when she first moved to Berlin in the 1970's, got a German tradition involving doughnuts, mustard and New Year's Eve very, very wrong indeed.
At the time of the recording, Berlin Stories didn't have a recording studio yet, so we met at my friend Anna Winger's house to record the piece in her basement! (It's really, really quiet down there.) I had originally planned to simply read the chapter into the microphone, but it turns out that radio writing is quite different from book writing. So the producers and I sat around the kitchen table for a while working on the piece and eating salad until we were all happy with it. (The hideous nausea from the beginning of my pregnancy had just subsided and I was able to expand my diet beyond pretzels and potato chips. Lettuce never tasted so good!)
To get a little sneak preview of the book, you can listen to the piece here. I hope you like it.
(P.S. We buy our New Year's Eve doughnuts at this legendary bakery in Berlin. They're glorious.)
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