A Family History of Smoking is a wonderfully compelling memoir about two European Jewish families living through the last gasps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Andrew Riemer begins his memoir with the story of his great-grandfather David, an inveterate cigar smoker, and his family's journey to becoming cosmopolitan Europeans thanks to the multicultural ideals of the Austro-Hungarian world.
It follows the cruel disappointment of those dreams and ideals when a sense of Jewishness was forced on them and turned into the source of their persecution in the first half of the 20th century.
A Family History of Smoking is a humorous, engrossing account of family life. It is also a moving, beautifully written portrait of this vanished world that literally went up in smoke.
