A gorgeous, evocative memoir of family, food and migration.
As a child, Or Rosenboim's knowledge of her family history was based on the food her grandmothers cooked for her – round kneidlach balls in hot chicken broth, cinnamon-scented noodle kugel, stuffed vine leaves, herby green rice with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and aubergine in tomato sauce. She knew that her family had a complex past but it was only reading her grandmothers' recipe books after they both died that she began to explore that past for the first time.
The result is a vivid chronicle of displacement and escape, retracing the complex network of journeys her family took from Samarkand and Riga to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in search of safety and a better life, punctuated by the food they ate and cooked along the way. Today, though, these journeys, and this long tradition of migration, would now be almost impossible.
A beguiling mixture of history, memoir, travel and food, Air and Love is also a fresh and deeply human retelling of some of the major stories of the twentieth century. Dr Or Rosenboim is an intellectual historian specializing in twentieth-century political ideas. She is Director of the Centre for Modern History at City University of London. She is a trained pastry chef (Cordon Bleu, Paris), and the founder of The Migrants' Supper Club in London. Her award-winning book The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 was published by Princeton University Press in 2017 (paperback, 2019). She has written for various international magazines and websites, and co-authored with Ilana Efrati an art and food book, Orto: Nature, Inspiration, Food (2019). She has lived in Tel Aviv, Bologna, Paris, Los Angeles, Cambridge and Florence, and now divides her time between London and Umbria. A gloriously evocative memoir of one family's journey from Samarkand and Riga to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which will appeal to readers of Claudia Roden, Nigella Lawson and Stanley Tucci.
