Bread on our table
Bread has become for us a means of uniting people,
because people refract it at a common meal.
Bread has become for us a symbol of the greatness of labor,
Because it is extracted by the sweat of the face.
Bread has become for us an indispensable companion of compassion,
Because it is distributed on the days of disasters.
The taste of divided bread is not comparable to anything.
A. de Saint-Exupéry
Once, while in Kiev, we went to a cafe to have lunch. At the table, except for us, sat an elderly woman with a small granddaughter. The girl was capricious, did not want to eat borsch and demanded “mushrooms” – cakes.
On the platter lay neatly sliced fresh black bread, lush and fragrant.
“What a delicious and beautiful bread,” I said.
-True?! – the woman responded. – For me it is more delicious than any “mushrooms” and “Napoleons”.
And
This meeting reminded me of the story of K. G. Paustovsky “Warm bread”. There lived in the village Berezhki the boy Filka. He was sullen, he liked to say: “Come on, you!”
Bread has reconciled man and animal. The horse forgave the boy, and when he ate the bread offered by him, “put his head on his shoulder, sighed and closed his eyes from satiety and pleasure.”
The French pilot and writer A. de Saint-Exupery loved our planet, aviation and people, he dreamed of uniting them with the unity of noble goals. Dividing the meal with a simple farmer, he expressed deep thoughts and found very correct words to determine the value of bread for people.
So three people – a Ukrainian woman who survived the hungry years of military hard times, an outstanding Russian writer and a French humanist pilot – in different words expressed the same thought:
“The taste of divided bread is not comparable to anything.”
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