Memory and Meals: Remembering and Representing The Jewish Cultural Codes and Identity Markers in Esther David's Book of Rachel Shiji Mariam Varghese & Dr. Avishek Parui IIT, Madras Address for Correspondence: editojohp@gmail.com ABSTRACT Despite its immense cultural importance, food studies have only recently started to gain the scholarly attention it deserves. Right from the time of Structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, food has been recognized to be as significant a human behavioural code as language. Literary and critical engagements with food relate to complex cultural debates regarding identity, history, modernity, religion and gender. For ethnic communities like the Jews who are held together by a problematic concept of homeland, food practices denote and connote a way of defining these cultures, occupying borders, and negotiating with issues of power, memory, dislocation and belonging. Migrant food culture is invested with great emotional ambivalence, for it unites as well as divides people. It involves the discourses of control and exclusion, whereby certain objects and behaviour are defined as acceptable or deviant, marking a sense of belonging or of dissension. Book of Rachel (2006) by Esther David portrays the life of a Rachel, a Bene-Israeli Jewess who is one among the last Jews left in Danda after most members migrated to Israel. She lives and relives her life through the process of cooking. Food and the ways to prepare food lend existential sustenance, asserting her happiness as well as grievances to different people in varied manners. The kosher (abiding to Jewish dietary laws) food typical of their culture becomes her spokesperson and plays a key role in uniting as well as dividing people. The paper aims to study the intermingling of culinary cultures and codes of consumption and how the same generates affective associations and appropriations pertaining to memory and markers of identity. More broadly, this paper is an attempt to examine the entanglement of food, memory and literary representation. Key words: Cooking, Memory, Dislocation, Belonging, Identity CASS Received on 20/02/2019 Accepted on 25/02/2019 © HEB All rights reserved Access this Article Online http://heb-nic.in/cass-studies Quick Response Code: March 2019 – Vol. 3, Issue- 1, Addendum 4 Page-153 UGC Approval No:40934 CASS-ISSN:2581-6403