What shapes who we are and where we belong? From the dishes we inherit from our families to the cuisines we encounter; from the traditions we adapt and keep to the languages we lose and recover; from the stories we carry to the ways we learn to make a home somewhere new – fragments of our identities come together to give us a sense of belonging that is both unique and helps us find our community. 

In her new cookbook Lozhka: Comforting Recipes of Soup, Stew, and Solace, from Eastern Europe, Alissa Timoshkina explores the food of Eastern Europe as a rich, layered story of migration, memory and cultural exchange, bringing together Ukrainian, Jewish, Tatar, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak and Roma traditions. Nadia Ragozhina’s essay in Jewish Voices from Around the World explores her own journey of discovering and reconstructing her Jewish identity in post-Soviet Russia.

Ragozhina and Timoshkina will come together to explore the many ways we inherit, adapt and reinvent identity – and the role food can play in carrying memory and belonging across generations. 

Nadia Ragozhina is an author and journalist with more than 20 years of experience at BBC News and other leading international news organisations. In her essay for Jewish Voices from Around the World, she explores the discovery and reconstruction of her Jewish identity in post-Soviet Russia. Her interest in her Jewish heritage had earlier led her to research a “missing” branch of her family, a journey which took her to Switzerland and resulted in her book, Worlds Apart: The Journeys of my Jewish Family in Twentieth-Century Europe. Nadia lives in London with her husband and three daughters.

Alissa Timoshkina is a London-based writer, cookbook author and historian specialising in Eastern European culinary culture. Born in Siberia with Ashkenazi and Eastern Slavic roots, she holds a PhD in Soviet culture and Holocaust history from the University of London. She is the author of Salt & Time (2019) and award-winning Kapusta (2025), and writes the Substack newsletter In Her Hands. In response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Alissa co-founded the global fundraising campaign #CookForUkraine, which has raised over £2.5 million for humanitarian relief and received multiple international awards. Lozhka (2026) is her latest cookbook

5a Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2TA