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 Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bologna. 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. She has written for various international magazines and websites, and co-authored with Ilana Efrati an art and food book, Orto: Nature, Inspiration, Food. She has lived in Tel Aviv, Bologna, Paris, Los Angeles, Cambridge and Umbria, and now divides her time between London and Florence.