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.

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