Bagel

Maria Balinska is an American of Polish Jewish origin. She graduated from Princeton University and spent a year in Krakow studying the Polish language and culture. She is currently the Editor of BBC Radio's World Current Affairs Department, and is a very experienced researcher, journalist and documentary maker specialising in Eastern Europe and the United States.

"Balinska offers a kind of history of and love-letter to Jewish culture through a series of bread-based snapshots. She ranges stylishly from the lifting of the siege of Vienna... through... the Nazi ghettos... to the post-war New York bagel-baking unions and the gradual transformation of the bagel into an 'all-American' food" – Steven Poole, Guardian

"[The bagel has] found a fresh and lively chronicler in Maria Balinska, who seems as much at home with the bagel's Polish and Jewish past as with its all-American present... Light and piquant, and yet at the same time seriously satisfying, The Bagel is anything but stodgy fare" – Michael Kerrigan, The Scotsman