‘A fascinating book. ”Food of the road’: through memory, history, recipes – and love – a family, and an era’s, complex story is movingly traced’ – Judith Flanders, author of Rites of Passage

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, deep-pink stuffed quinces and herby green rice with a squeeze of lemon juice. It was only after reading their recipe books once they had both died that she began to understand their complicated past.

Taking us from Samarkand and Riga to the Middle East, Air and Love is a deeply human retelling of some of the major moments of the twentieth century, and a family story of migration and belonging, suffused with recipes of the food made along the way.

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.