A Short, Very Satisfying Meal: A Review of Rebecca Tiger’s “Zaftig”

Diane Gottlieb, MSW, MEd, MFA is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness (ELJ Editions). Her writing appears in 2023 Best Microfiction, River Teeth, HuffPost, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus Magazine, The Rumpus, Chicago Review of Book, About Place Journal, and 100 Word Stories among many other lovely places. She is the winner of Tiferet Journal’s 2021 Writing Contest in the nonfiction category, on the 2023 Wigleaf Top 50 longlist, and a finalist for The Florida Review's 2023 Nonfiction Editors Prize. Diane is the Prose/CNF Editor of Emerge Literary Journal. You can find her at https://dianegottlieb.com and on FB, IG, and Twitter @DianeGotAuthor.

She had me at “Zaftig,” the delicious title of Rebecca Tiger’s spicey little CNF in Bending Genres. Reading the Yiddish word, which celebrates a woman’s curves and/or criticizes the same, brought back visions of my Holocaust-surviving aunt, with her Aqua-Netted sheitel and thick folds of flesh. I again smelled her sweat along with the rich, meaty cholent simmering on her stove—the salt of both following her like sea air. So much of our culture is grounded in food—and trauma—and in how the former does its best to contain, while providing an escape from, the latter. It’s layered and complicated, as are our bodies, as is this gorgeous, braided flash.

Tiger immediately set us up in what seems like familiar place and action: “I sit at a table with Danny. Lunch time. Bologna sandwiches with potato chips,” a combo of salt and crunch one might consider “comfort food.” But before we get too cozy, Tiger pulls the chair out from under us: “‘I’m a foodie,’ Danny tells me. ‘Oh! How does that work in a prison?’”

 “Zaftig” is full of such masterful turns and surprises that feel—and are—perfect and which pull us further and further away from comfort. In this first braid, Tiger is on one end of a “college prison education learning program,” Danny on the other. He shares more information than Tiger’s prepared for: “I killed my girlfriend. I was high on crystal meth.” She says he doesn’t need to share his story. “I want to tell you.” he says.

 Tiger, in the next braid, tells us hers. Through food details, we learn her family dynamic. She used food as rebellion and balm, recognizable territory, I’m guessing, for many readers. We learn that Tiger was “chubby.”

 In the third braid, we meet Tiger’s mother in the “Café Bistro at Menorah Village Memory Care Center.” Her mom has dementia—and a sweet tooth—though she weighs only 85 pounds. She also has an “enlarged” belly from “the spreading cancer she doesn’t remember she has.”

 There are literal and figurative prisons here and explorations of how those outside those bars present hard realities. Tiger sugar coats. She calls her mother’s room an “apartment,” tells her she will get to go home “when she feels better.” The education program that brings Tiger to Danny prefers the term “people living in a prison” to “prisoner,” which it considers “stigmatizing.” Danny, of course, knows better: “Call me a prisoner,” he says. “I am being held against my will.” Yes. And maybe he’s also a prisoner of that will and whatever trauma he carries and has caused. (He tells Tiger that when he was young, high, and angry at his girlfriend, he took an icepick to her face, rendering her “unrecognizable.”)

Are we all prisoners of our will, trauma, actions, diseases, bodies? Tiger doesn’t answer those questions, nor does she ask them—directly. Yet she brilliantly shows our shared humanity—and our not-so-basic need for food.