My Mother?s Spice Cupboard a Journey from Baghdad to Bombay to Bondi

"My Mother's Spice Cupboard is the true story of the author's Sephardi Jewish family's migration from Baghdad to Bombay (now Mumbai) to Sydney. Unlike most other Australian Jews, her parents were born and grew up in Bombay, and her grandparents came from Iraq, Burma and India. Her father's family immigrated to Sydney, her mother's to Los Angeles, both in the 1960s. They married in Sydney and raised their family there, alongside the father's many brothers and sisters and members of their former Bombay community. Despite being Jewish, her upbringing was greatly influenced by the food, language an."@en
"In My Mother's Spice Cupboard, Elana Benjamin has produced a warm and detailed account of her family's story, as they moved from Baghdad to Bombay (now Mumbai) and finally to Sydney, Australia. With loving strokes, she has created a detailed picture of everyday life for Jews living in Bombay during the British rule, followed by the disintegration of the community post independence. By the early 1960s, when her family left, the majority of India's Jewish community had emigrated. Thus, she has managed to recreate a world that no longer exists, whilst there were still family members around to tell her the stories."