All Abroad: A travel memoir book review

In the preface, Weill – a prominent travel writer who has visited some 106 countries – makes the point that this is not a travel book per se. “It is a memoir of how an obsession was fashioned,” he explains. “It is an account full of events, distresses, injustices, joys, friendships, relationships, discoveries, sexual awakenings, illnesses, deaths, histories and happenings – of which many are tangentially, directly, or literally associated with travel.”

Although Weill presents his global travels thematically rather than chronologically, his journeys begin in 1973, when he leaves London at the age of 23 for New York to take up a position as consultant-in-training at the headquarters of the world’s oldest travel agency, Thomas Cook. 

“I arrived with seventeen suitcases on a freezing January 30 aboard the SS Canberra, the only liner crossing the Atlantic in the dead of that winter,” he writes. And he knows how to write.

Weill is the founder and president of WEILL (Geoffrey Weill Associates), an award-winning tourism and travel-related public relations company, and was honored with the HSMAI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. His older brother, Asher Weill, whom he refers to as Anthony, is a respected book publisher and editor who lives in Jerusalem, and he frequently refers to Israel and his Judaism in the book.

From 1976 to 1984, Weill served as executive director of Israel’s Tourism Ministry in North America with primary responsibility for the Israel Government Tourist Office’s Public Relations and Advertising, and from 1984 to 1995, he directed the AJCongress International Travel Program, an outreach program to 40 countries sponsored by one of America’s oldest human rights organizations.

Interspersed with photographs and a fascinating collection of travel posters, the book is an intelligent, touching and humorous account of a travel writer’s voyages across all seven continents.

Six weeks after the end of the Six Day War, Weill describes his memorable visit to his brother and his family in Israel, after first going there at the age of 14 in 1964. “It was five weeks of exhilaration as the pall of the Jewish State’s disappeared fragility was celebrated,” he remarks. “The coming together overnight of both halves of Jerusalem had been a daring decision by Mayor Teddy Kollek, whom Anthony knew closely.”

Although, he says, “the victory that many of the people I knew expected to evolve into peace evolved instead into occupation,” Israel’s accomplishment in the war dramatically changed him and his self-esteem.

“Within months, the always charming yet comparatively introverted and shy Geoffrey had become – outwardly at least, almost extravagantly – extroverted and gregarious.”

I won’t give it away for the reader, but Weill’s memoir includes an emotional meeting with a step-sister he discovered he had at the age of 34 in Germany, and a fascinating trip with his brother, their wives, their parents and a photographer for a story to be published National Geographic’s Legends Editor, Carolyn Bennett Patterson.

“The icing on Carolyn’s pitch was the ultimate finale that brother 1 had chosen to ‘return’ to the Promised Land, and brother 2 had immigrated to that other Jewish Promised Land, America,” he writes. “We would take journeys into our past, accompanied by Carolyn and a photographer, and discover our roots and relatives in the places our families had lived, flourished, been persecuted, and flourished again.”

The story, unfortunately, was never published, but it is definitely worth reading, as is Weill’s entire book. The publisher notes correctly, “Weill offers a unique view into how our vacations have been shaped deeply by human trends, tragedies, and technologies. While some long for the grandeur of tourism from decades ago, Weill insists that travel – the conveyances and hotels that await journey’s end – remains as glamorous as ever.”

Although COVID-19 quashed tourism around the world, Weill allows us to precariously experience his obsession, while sharing his vast knowledge and fascinating personal insights into the magical world of travel.