A gorgeous, evocative memoir of family, food and migration.
As a child, Or Rosenboim's knowledge of her family history came mainly through the food her grandmothers cooked for her - bright orange carrots tzimes in buttery caramel sauce, round kneidlach balls in hot chicken broth, cinnamon-scented noodle kugel, stuffed vine leaves, Oshi-bahsh (herby green rice with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice), a 'Turkish salad' of red peppers and aubergine in tomato sauce or a slice of rich buttery almond and walnut cake. Or always knew that her family had a complex past, but it was not until both of her grandmothers died in 2017 that she reopened their recipe books and began to seriously explore the facts of their history - her history - for the first time.
In Air and Love, Or follows the migration routes of her ancestors, conjuring the journeys they took and lives they forged in the turbulent and ever-shifting Europe of the twentieth century. This family history, of displacement and escape, is not an unusual one, but it is one often overshadowed by the massive political shifts and conflicts of the period. Opening in Samarkand and concluding in London, Or retraces a network of journeys via which her ancestors travelled to the Middle East and back, always in search of safety and a better life, and always cooking along the way. The paths they took were long established migrant routes whose existence paved the way for the Europe we recognise today - and yet these journeys, and this long tradition of migration, would now be largely impossible.
The result is a beguiling mixture of history, memoir, travel and food, offering a fresh and deeply human retelling of some of the major stories of the twentieth century.
