Air and Love is Or Rosenboim’s history of her Jewish family as they traverse Russia, Latvia, Samarkand, Israel, England and Italy. The book, ostensibly a food memoir with recipes, encapsulates more. What it is like to be untethered in the world, booted from countries but still surviving? According to Rosenboim, moving, “whether for trade or for religion, was increasingly frowned upon; people were supposed to have a national home and stay there.”
Because of displacement, Rosenboim’s characters develop a global palate. In 1882 a young Israeli man working in Istanbul “bought special ingredients that could not be found in Jerusalem: red wine from Smyrna ... strong-flavoured Italian caciocavollo cheese, tins of salted bonito and mackerel”. The book’s recipes reflect her family’s migration; there is gefilte fish, resonant of eastern Europe; a central Asian khalti-sevo of rice and dried fruit wrapped in linen and steamed overnight.
Rosenboim was trained at Paris’s Cordon Bleu and founded the Migrants’ Supper Club in London. She is also a professor of history at the University of Bologna. Thus, her book has a diffident, academic curiosity about her family during turbulent times. But if one is a descendant of a peripatetic diaspora, ancestral records can be scant. “Only a few letters, memoirs, and diaries survived,” she writes. “Without documents, their thoughts and opinions seemed unreachable.”
Rosenboim begins with two memoirs of her great-grandfather and his father that she translates from Hebrew, and she uses research to give her story richer scope. With the help of the dissident poet Alexander Čaks, she evokes the short-lived joy of interwar Riga, where her grandmother Taube grew up. “Čaks’ verse,” she writes, “captures the spirit of Riga’s urban landscape of lifts and high-rises, cinemas and music halls, taverns and bars, trams and shops, workers and capitalists.” Čaks’ poetry swims with food: “a butter-yellow moon and dark bread night, summer radish and plums.” Such sensuality contrasts the devastation to follow.
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Rosenboim is a graceful writer, sometimes gently mocking. For instance, her great-grandfather Hananya Asheroff’s memoir is “filled with neat handwriting ... in the self important confident tone of a man who knows he has witnessed history’s great events”. She is more affectionate towards Hanaya’s father Zion, whose name, which means “summit”, suggests a somewhat fraught idea today. “Reading [Zion’s[ words, I felt that I knew this distant man more than many other relatives that I had actually met,” she relates. “[H]is writing brings to life an exuberant youth who looked at life with generosity and tenderness.”
Rosenboim also relishes absurdity; for instance, when Zion’s father, Abraham, decides to take on a second wife. “In an unexpected turn of events, the chosen bride was Uzbak, the mother of Zion’s young wife Batya.” She adds wryly, “No one but the bride and groom seemed happy about this union.” Her book is storytelling as opposed to fable, for there are no morals; instead, there are glimmers of humour that accompany the violence of myth and fairytales.
The females in her story are often unrecorded. Rosenboim’s grandmothers, who helped raise her, are her only connections to the women in her past. Personally, I have been sceptical of the proliferation of grandmothers in food memoirs. However, it is her grandmothers’ cooking and their reminiscences that give these women voice, and Rosenboim makes them sing. Not all of these women were meek housewives. As a girl in Riga, grandmother Taube “went with her brothers to concerts and ballets at the legendary national opera house. In the interval, they would buy delicious cheesecake and milky tea.” Great-aunt Penina, who disdained cooking, bowled London over with her charm.
Rosenboim’s breezy recipes belie the work that went into constructing them, for she investigates the food she remembers from her grandmothers and grounds them in history, culinary knowledge, and geography. Rosenboim’s precise prose, with little judgment and abundant footnotes, casts fresh light upon what may today be a delicate topic, namely the Jewish experience. It is fascinating to imagine that Jerusalem, in the 1880s, was a village that people believed could be the new Alhambra, the medieval Spanish utopia where Christians, Jews and Muslims once flourished.
The black American food historian Jessica Harris once said that the blacks and the Jewish were people of the word. The words of the blacks, illiterate during slavery, were “spoken”, while those of the Jewish were “of the book”. Rosenboim’s women were also unwritten, living on with oral tellings. Words are how people forge a legacy when they do not have monuments and cities, and no country to which they belong. Unsurprisingly, some of the best practitioners of memoir and food history are black and Jewish, like Harris, poet and author Maya Angelou, and writers Michael Twitty and Claudia Roden. Through recipes and the threads of the stories that they spin, their past has been preserved.
About her great-great grandmother Batya-Hannah, Or Rosenboim writes, “Travelling was not heroic or adventurous, it was a normal part of her life.”
