A gorgeous memoir. The addition of the recipes really integrated the feeling of getting to know the family better.

Air And Love is a beautifully written memoir. It's rich in history and familial anecdotes, spanning through many generations of family that was misplaced, relocated many a time and yet still managed to retain its traditions and pass on love for its members and their food. Because, as many people know, food and feeding people in many cultures and families is a sign of love, it's that deeply imbedded way of passing on and preserving of who you and your ancestors are.
Or Rosenboim delivered a beautifully written, filled with love and compassion story of her ancestors and food they all love and share, food that ties them in unbreakable bond regardless of time and space it's shared in.
Extremely well researched, written sensitively, Air And Love is a must read for any food lovers with interest in history and familial connections.

In her memoir, Or Rosenboim intricately weaves together her Jewish family's history through diaspora, love, and, crucially, food. Starting from the 1800s, family recipes serve as a unifying thread, connecting generations navigating a changing world. The memoir is particularly resonant now, offering insights into the complex history of Palestine with both historical accuracy and engaging narrative.

Rosenboim, an associate professor of Contemporary History, presents her story with warmth and compassion, avoiding judgment while delivering rich historical context. As someone who appreciates books where food symbolizes love, history, and identity, I found this memoir exceptional. The book is enhanced by its captivating cover, which beautifully reflects the colours, scents, and flavours of the narrative.

"Air and Love" by Or Rosenboim is a novel that weaves together themes of connection, longing, and the intangible forces that shape our lives. Rosenboim’s writing is both poetic and deeply reflective, exploring the intersections between the physical and emotional landscapes that define human relationships.

The story centers around characters who are searching for meaning and fulfillment, often through their interactions with each other and their environment. The title suggests a dual focus on the ethereal qualities of both air, as something that sustains life but is often taken for granted, and love, as a powerful but sometimes elusive force. Rosenboim's prose is likely to be rich with imagery and emotion, capturing the delicate balance between these two elements.

"Air and Love" is a thoughtful and introspective read, ideal for those who appreciate literary fiction that delves into the complexities of human experience with subtlety and depth. It’s a novel that invites readers to ponder the unseen currents that influence our lives and the ways in which we seek out connection and understanding in an often chaotic world.

Really enjoyed this memoir and the recipes were a lovely personal addition which made me feel connected to the family. I think the book would have benefited from a family tree at the beginning of the book to see how each member related.

I like the idea of this book: telling the story of a family ancestors and migration through food. Though the topic was very interesting and appealing, I found the recipes could have been either put at the end of each chapter or at the end of the book. As I found them a distraction.

Having said that- this is such a compelling read, and it spotlights the complexity of people moving from country to country.

3.5 stars

Air and Love - A Story of Food, Family and Belonging by Or Rosenboim is a beautiful novel. A popular quote is that "The Kitchen is the Heart of the Home" and this is so true, but also, it tells a tale of sociopolitical trends, of feast and famine, of the changes in trade routes and availibility

Air and Love incorporates the history of the Silk Roads, across Eurasia, the Middle East and incorporating the rich diversity and interactions between cultures, predominantly that of Jewish Diaspora and how this impacted traditional Jewish cuisine and adopted elements from the locations and countries encountered on the journey

At the core of the book is the story of two families, highly illustrative descriptions of mouthwatering dishes, a chronicle of family history, their trials and tribulations in the search for a better life. A novel that touches the heart, mind, soul and stomach

Highly recommended

Thank you to NetGalley, Pan Macmillan | Picador and the author Or Rosenboim for this beautiful ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

Having recently finished Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads, some locations of Air and Love (mainly Samarkand and Tashkent) feel so familiar to me inspiring greater love for this book and the people keen to find a home within its text. A stunningly beautifully written and researched travelogue/cookbook/memoir/history book, this story details the vast travels of Or Rosenboim's ancestors.

Seamlessly blending a sense of place, in whatever time and country the amazing generations of people might be, with the comforts of home cooking, make this a story unique and inspiring. Overcoming great challenges and relocating, when necessary, provides the backdrop to absorb a wider range of regional customs and cookery know-how than most might experience in one lifetime. A truly migratory existence adapting favourite recipes to suit a different climate with new food stuffs, I am humbled by the journey and keen to try out the many recipes sprinkled throughout this lovely book. Thank you for all your vast research and making a story that resonates so strongly with today's world.

Food is a good way to make people meet, to create or pass traditions and it's always a piece of history.
This a book about a Jewish family of the Diaspora and it's also a way to remember those who went and their life through what they ate
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

T.he book was interesting and I enjoyed it to a point. I thought I would discover my own Jewish Heritage more but sadly not. Glad to have had the oppotunity to read it and the theme of food crosses all cultures and religions. Thaks to Net Galley for an ARC

Title: Air and Love: A Story of Food, Family and Belonging
Author: Or Rosenboim
Genres: Cooking, Food & Wine | Biographies & Memoirs | History
Pub Date: 23 May 2024
Pages: 272
Format Read: EPUB
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐⭐

Fans of culinary memoirs will find much to love in 'Air and Love', a beautiful biography interwoven with family recipes.

I was initially slightly disappointed that this wasn't more of a "cookbook with family history" - ie, heavier on the recipes - but after a few pages I was pulled in by the fascinating story of the author's ancestors and transported back and forth along the silk roads, from Central Asia to Latvia, Russia, Israel, Eastern Europe, back and forth & beyond. The writing is as warm and inviting as the journey, with the author striking that rare balance in this genre of never overly-romanticising the past, or indeed her own family members, while at the same time inviting us to understand the specific challenges, socio-political conditions & world events that helped to shape their worlds.

She is careful to give voices, autonomy & dignity to women (and men) in her family who struggled with the strictures of family & societal expectations that didn't suit their natures.

And she rewards us with some beautiful, deeply personal recipes such as Osh-Palao (rice & lamb), Bichak (a pumpkin pastry), Shulamit's Bakhsh (fluffy rice with beef), Mahlab Kaak (cookies with mahlab) and many more. She explores how these recipes changed with her ancestors' movements - sometimes remaining traditional, oftentimes adapting to local ingredients in the diaspora.

For those not familiar with Bukharian or Mizrahi Jewish recipes (at this time even Sephardic food is still underrepresented in media, though thankfully this is changing) or who only think of Ashkenazi food when they think of Jewish cookery, these aromatic, spice-rich dishes will be eye-opening, and resonate much closer with Persian or Mughal cooking than that of Central Europe.

Fans of the excellent 'Parwana' by Durkhanai Ayubi and 'Persiana' by Sabrina Ghayour will love the offerings in this book.

Overall, a wonderful read, never too heavy, spiced generously with the scents, tastes, sights, and smells of some truly fascinating places.

Of note, my eARC sadly lacked any photos or illustrations whatsoever, and so I feel I missed out on quite a bit - other reviewers have complimented these. No stars off for this, of course, but I suspect the impact of the book in full would be even better.

Thank you to Pan Macmillan, NetGalley, and the Author for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

#AirandLove #NetGalley

I liked this book plenty!
The author smoothly blends memoir with cherished recipes.
The family history serves as a glimpse to parts of the human history, and encourages the reader to imagine how people lived in Samarkand, Tashkent, Palestine, Riga, Jerusalem and many other places (especially in Russia, Ottoman Empire, Middle East and today’s Tajikistan) with specific focus on what their food was like.
Some of the recipes are familiar to me personally, however even if you are new to both these recipes and the history of the mentioned places, you can still enjoy this book and like the recipes.
I will revisit this book to get the most out of it.
The style is reader friendly, unique, and the content is absolutely rich.
I wish I had written this book! It has helped me reconnect with my family recipes, reinvent them and appreciate them.
The cover and the recipes increased my appetite, and I can also smell fruits and many of the herbs mentioned in the book. The book is oozing flavours and delicious smells.

Very interesting family memoir by the author. From Samarkand to Jerusalem, stories of her family's past interwoven with the recipes that her great/great grandmothers used to cook. I will definitely be trying some of these recipes.

Or Rosenboim tells the story of her family through food; she recalls their journeys and struggles, migrations, separations and reunitions weaving the story together with recipes from their tables.

If you enjoy personal history, it's an enjoyable read and I loved learning how the family dishes came to be. How many different cultures and landscapes shaped each dish. The family faced a lot of difficult moments in history, much adversity and Rosenboim communicates how food was at times sustenance, but ultimately connection.

The book is sensitively written; migration is an emotive subject and particularly given current happenings in Palestine. There were some phrases and ideas in the book that really stuck with me.

In Or Rosenboim's memoir, she delves into her family's heritage using food as a lens, charting migrations from Samarkand and Riga to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Recounting her childhood, Rosenboim fondly recalls how family tales were woven into the flavors of her grandmothers' culinary creations. Exploring their memoirs and recipe collections, she embarks on a heartfelt voyage, uncovering themes of displacement and fortitude. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book for review. All views expressed are solely my own.

I enjoyed this read but it wouldn’t be something I’d read again.
It was enjoyable but not particularly captivating. It was difficult to stay interested but then at times was really interesting.
The use of recipes throughout whilst learning about family history was a great idea but just not for me.
I felt it was too jumpy at times and skipped too much.

Diaspora and its continuation; family, loss and resilience; food as anchor us time and place

Rosenboim’s book of the complexities of her own family tree, taking us back and forth between the Levant that is, countries of what is now called the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean countries and what has, at different times, been part of the Ottoman Empire, the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics, and independent states is a distressing as well as fascinating one.

She begins in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in the 1880’s. She, and her ancestors are Jewish, and so, inevitably, at different times and places, being Jewish, as well as identifying as a national of the country one is born in, or living in, has been more or less safe. Some times and in some places, different religions and ethnicities live side by side, some other times the same places can become markedly unsafe. Empire building countries, whether in ancient or more modern times, create problems. The acquisition of territory or control over the population in that territory has led, does lead, to diaspora.

Whilst inevitably her family history involves exactly WHY Jewish people have needed a home – this stretches back far further than the 1930s, she is also aware that finding that home has displaced others.

Personal history is never separate from geopolitical history.

I found myself both fascinated by the adventurous, resilient open-minded willingness to embrace and adapt to different cultures and ways of living, and utterly distressed by the continued displacement of one group of people from places they call home, by other groups of people.

The positivity in her book comes from the passing down across the generations of recipes, mothers to daughters, of food which comes from one place, gets adapted in another place, as this or that food becomes available or is not available, so that the tastes of one’s own particular home, as a child, is both deeply personal, and also, part of history and geography

There are a lot of recipes in here. Most of which I personally am, as a vegetarian, never likely to make, though I did enjoy reading them, and was also a little overwhelmed by the huge amount of work involved, by the women, to put food of time, place and culture on the plate.

An interesting, culturally explorative memoir following various strands of a family as they navigate the turbulence of 21st Century Europe as part of the Jewish diaspora. Weaved within the journey of the family members as they move and adapt their lives, are traditional recipes, illustrations of the geographical area and hardship they are facing at any one time. Food is a vital part of all cultures, and we all have our own traditions within how it is prepared and eaten, so the use of recipes and food alongside a family’s rich history was an interesting and powerful way to explore memory and tradition.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book.

This is everything I love in a book. It has family history, modern history, transience, travelling between cultures, the Jewish diaspora and food providing the thread that ties them all together. I found it like an imagined Silk Road parallel, Samarkand to Palestine, re-routing via Moscow, Riga, London, Tashkent, Odessa, Afghanistan...the list goes on. It tugs so many emotional chords by its fantastic evocation of time and place.

In a beautifully weaved narrative the author demonstrates how imperialism (in its many guises) turned natural human co-operation into division, discontent and sectarianism which are its legacy. To make such vast topics so accessible through a family story is hugely accomplished and help the reader understand many of today's geo-political hot issues. I was riveted.

Identity is seamlessly woven within the pages. Generations accustomed to (very arduous) travel and peripatetic lives define "home" by their food and how it evolves dependent upon the ingredients in each location.

I would suggest that anybody interested in Jewish food and history from the Middle East, the Caucasus, Russia and Eastern Europe also takes a dive into some of these other books which tell similar stories in different ways:

Samarkand by Caroline Eden & Eleanor Ford
Shaya by Alon Shaya
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen
and of course Claudia Roden quoted within this book who writes substantively in The Book of Jewish Food (and other books)

With thanks to #NetGalley and #PanMacmillan for the opportunity to read and review

4.5 stars
I absolutely fell in love with this style of family history and memoir. Tying the family's disparate strains together through food with some mouth-watering recipes enthralled me as I read about how her migrant family's cooking traditions changed or did not with their relocation. More than showing her family's food culture, looking through the lens of food allows her to show her family's experiences in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout this book she would use dishes that she still makes to connect with those long-gone or not-so-long gone or even those ancestors she did not know much about, highlighting the power of family recipes in creating a family food culture.

This book is a delight to read and would recommend it to anyone who loves a good memoir or a good foodie book. Also eat snacks while you read it to stave off cravings!