Luba Gurdjieff: A Memoir with Recipes (Paperback)

~ (Author), Marina Bear (Introduction) "I was born in A lexandropolos, in Armenia - the capital - but we left when I was about four years old..." (more)
Key Phrases: Madame Luba, Madame de Salzmann, Coombe Springs (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Luba's Bistro is a London landmark, the first-ever Russian restaurant whosemost prominent features were the good food, the simple decor, and the queueleading out the door and onto the street. Luba was neice to Gurdjieff, thephilosopher and spiritual teacher, with whom she lived in France after leavingRussia during the turmoil of the revolution, before coming to London andopening her famous bistro. Luba claims no hidden knowledge her greatestsecrets may be the recipes, included here, that made her bistro so famous. A fascinating and entertaining memoir. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: SLG Books (December 18, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0943389224
• ISBN-13: 978-0943389226
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #370,763 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Fueling of the Work, August 23, 2000

By	Mark Newbold (Pittsburg, KS United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Luba Gurdjieff's memoir is a delightful reflection on her life with a most unique family that included her Uncle G.I. Gurdjieff. For those of us keenly interested in the philosophy of Mr. Gurdjieff, you may find yourself wanting more reflections on her remarkable Uncle and less on her joys and tribulations of operating a bistro in London for many years. Yet for those who love the Gurdjieff Work, any stories and memories of that remarkable social experiment known as the Priory, relish any memories of those heady days. And for this alone Luba's memoirs are enough. Only Thomas & Olga deHartmann's "Our Life With Mr. Gurdjieff" comes as close to providing that feeling of domesticity & intimacy with the great man as this book does. Moreover, she conveys an earthy appreciation & savor of life itself (very much her Uncle's neice)in her approach to feeding the bodies and souls of those who came her way. The cuisine is standard European bistro fare, with the odd exception of corn on the cob! Her borsht recipe is one of the best I've had, as well as her remembrance of her Uncle's famous salad recipe is a joy to read. This book is a delight for both gourmet & gourmand, but it's real quality is the warm, open hospitality of the old world that shines in every page.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Full of Life, June 19, 2003

By	Reijo Oksanen "Reijo Oksanen" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Luba Gurdjieff: A Memoir with Recipes (Paperback)

Luba's book is enjoyable in many ways. The recipes, like the memoirs, are down to earth and represent good honest cooking, most of it Luba's and not her uncle's.

Luba tells of the ups and downs in her life and demonstrates how in spite of difficulties with the help of her fighting spirit she made it. Her life-span takes us through both of the World Wars. The first caused the family to emigrate, the second required a great deal of hard work to survive.

Full of life and laughter, and reminiscent of her uncle, she tells of her visit to Coombe Springs, run by J. G. Bennett, two years after she left the place. She came there at tea time and was looking for her friend:

"...they were all sitting around on their bottoms, the legs all cross. I said, "Hey, everybody - anybody know where is Nottie?" It was as if nobody was there. Nobody even looked at me. They were all concentrating, or constipated - I don't know what they were. Just sitting there. I started clapping my hands, shouting, "Wakey, Wakey!"

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Every Stick has Two Ends, June 21, 2006

By	James Moore (LONDON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Luba Gurdjieff: A Memoir with Recipes (Paperback)

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff's All and Everything was unashamedly vast in concept: a 1238 page magnum opus. Catholicity, thematic and stylistic, remains the hallmark of today's burgeoning `Gurdjieffian' oeuvre. Even so, these slim, unindexed paperbacks - by his niece Luba and by Henri Tracol, Institut Gurdjieff President - make extraordinary companion pieces. "Of course", concedes Tracol, "in any kind of ascesis, there is always an element of apophatism". Or as Luba exclaims: "I was fed up with caviar".

Eldest daughter of Gurdjieff's worldly brother Dmitri, Luba garnishes her free-wheeling autobiographical sketch with slapdash bistro recipes for galubtzy, custard sauce and "Rabbit à la Sylvie" (cf. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book). Her cameos of Gurdjieff's Prieuré circle in the 1920s and 1930s reach us as patently uncensored reportage: rich dumplings of naïveté, warmth, vitality and candour, likely in vulnerable constitutions, to induce cardiac arrest.

Tracol's infinitely more judicious book comprises a dozen or so disparate texts ranging back 50 years - broadly `philosophical' modules, spared from their author's hypothesised "wild and vengeful bonfire". Tracol's youthful resolution to live out Malraux's injunction "transform into consciousness as wide an experience as possible", presaged decades of globe-trotting incident and discriminating reading, which here guarantee a quiver of intriguing adductions: Pueblo Indians, French cinema, the Fisher King's castle, Manichaeism, macrobiotics, meta-linguistics, Sengai's Zen drawings, and so forth ...Acute individual insights not only abound (Tracol's International-Airport-as-analogue-of-psychic-dispersion would adorn Barthes' Mythologies) but, more importantly, cohere - eloquent witnesses to his long spiritual Odyssey in the Gurdjieffian tradition.

Luba, sensing perhaps that her famous uncle dwarfs his apologists and detractors alike, breezily pre-empts our objections: "Silly. I'm a silly woman. I laugh too much. I love too much. I have too many friends who love me". Her ensuing Niagara of ungrammatical indiscretion seats an opéra bouffe Gurdjieff in a child's electric-powered car; displays him hiding Easter eggs under rose bushes; and - extrapolating a minor grievance over royalties - comes perilously close to misconstruing the raison d'être of the post-Gurdjieffian Foundations ... Yet Tracol, high in that movement's pantheon, personifies disinterested Gallic intelligence, fastidious, erudite, perspicacious, he glides on the subtlest of dialectics towards ever more quintessential and rarified truths; agree with him or not, his authenticity is bankable.

To history's validated roll-call of VIP visitors at Gurdjieff's Fontainebleau Institute Luba adds, without a peppercorn of embarrassment or evidence, the young Franklin D. Roosevelt: "It was all done so hush-hush. When he left, and he became President of the United States ... I said `Gosh! It's Teddy'. Is Tracol similarly a-historical? Never in Luba's Monty-Pythonesque mode. Yet a fine nose for chronology is essential to sniff one's way through this sacred literary grove to the paradigmatic evolution at its heart ... The Tracol who met Gurdjieff in October 1940; who found himself "standing before him ... confronting the exacting benevolence of his gaze"; who thenceforward for nine years stoicly met the rigours of group work in German-occupied and post-war Paris - this Tracol emphasised a "voluntary concentration on struggle". The Tracol of serene old age (palpably closer to Simone Weil) also leans touchingly on higher and transcendent forces.

Luba, offering umpteen hostages to fortune, innocently trumpets her uncle's all-too-human aspect but curiously misses the `superhuman' Gurdjieff of insights, powers, and real ideas; she cannot conceive that her magpie family hatched out an eagle. Tracol, by contrast, rejoices in antennae which instantly pick up Gurdjieff as avatar. Less tangible in his book, however, is his master's Rabelaisian alter ego, the creature of surreal incident and ribald humour so brilliantly evoked in Fritz Peter's autobiography Boyhood with Gurdjieff.

Is Henri Tracol himself perhaps an unringed falcon? Certainly the voltage of his intellect is not disgraced by those of the moderns who crop up in his discourse: René Guénon, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Stephane Lupasco, Paul Mus, Wolfgang Pauli, Pitirim Sorokin, etc. Fed at Gurdjieff's `ideas-table', Tracol has feelingly repaid with the lifetime's service of a first-rank mind ... Luba's idiosyncratic tribute to her Uncle George issues from unmodulated emotions and calls to the emotions: "He loved life ... He was more alive than anyone I've ever seen. I loved him. I like him. I admire him. He was fantastic". The sheer discrepancy of these two approaches conveys something of their begetter's universality. The fiftieth anniversary of Gurdjieff's death has come and gone yet he remains `X the unknown quantity'.

James Moore is Gurdjieff's biographer.
He undertook the Gurdjieff module in the
Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism.