Laura Silver has elevated the common knish to its rightful place in the pantheon of Jewish soul foods along side bagels and lox, pickles and pastrami. She reminds us with equal parts passion and humor that the knish is much more than simple street food. It represents a whole culture worthy of admiration, preservation and enjoyment.

For 70 years, Mrs. Stahl’s bakery in Brighton Beach served a delicious array of knishes to Jewish and gentile devotees. The bakery’s closing in 2005 filled one enthusiast — Laura Silver — with Proustian remembrances of knishes past. These nostalgic memories launched her on a global quest to pay homage to the knish. She has collected stories about her voyage in her deliciously appetizing book. The reader is left with only one question: Where’s the nearest knish shop?

Truly riveting, Laura Silver’s Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food weaves personal taste memories with the intricate past of knishes, making for a compelling, well-researched biography of these iconic Jewish pastries.

Laura Silver’s at-times poetic meditation on knishes is not only a cultural history of this filled lump of dough, as meticulously researched as any doctoral thesis, but also a Proustian personal memoir that hints of James Joyce, no less, in the way Silver intones and uses the rhythms of Aramaic Jewish liturgy, Yiddishkeit, and Yiddish humor to tell her story. The knish has never been put to better use. I loved it.

A lovingly researched book that elevates the knish, arguably the humblest of Jewish foods, into a weighty symbol of history, identity, and family. Knishes haven’t met anything this good for them since the invention of mustard.