Air and Love

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.