Bobish
Book Profile / by Maggieball / 105 views
Poignant poetry memoir of poet’s great grandmother and her escape from the pogroms of Eastern Europe to a difficult life in New York City
Though she was only fourteen years old, like many other Jews in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement in 1907, Rebecca Lieberman gathered her few belongings and left for the United States. What follows is a unique and poetic story of history, war, mysticism, music, abuse, survival and transcendence against the back drop of New York City in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
- Listing ID: 12582
- Author's Name: Magdalena Ball
- Your Email Address: maggieball@compulsivereader.com
- URL of the book's purchase link: https://www.amazon.com/Bobish-Magdalena-Ball/dp/1922571601
- Genre: Poetry, Memoir, Biography
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Awards, reviews, press releases, and other relevant information:
‘A fourteen-year-old girl is launched by pogroms and poverty into the New World, fearful and alone. How can she know that her great-granddaughter would weave her story, through imagination and a careful reading of history, into a poetic gift to her memory, and for many more generations to come?’
– Ramona Koval
‘In Bobish Magdalena Ball picks up the thread that connects us to our ancestors weaving it into the fabric of family memory and public history, creating an intensely vivid and evocative work. A narrative montage of exquisite poems, where choices are funnelled by pogroms, racism, pain, poverty, hope, and nourished by music and family. It was a deeply moving experience to read this book.’ – Beth Spencer
‘Magdalena’s stirring poems are unsettlingly familiar and eerily transcendent. The persistence, the endurance, the quiet resignation, somehow amounts to the telling of a small woman who is nothing less than mighty.’ – Gillian Swain
‘The importance of remembering is a cornerstone of the Jewish faith and in this account of the author’s Jewish great-grandmother as she navigates her life of exile, each scene is both clear eyed and evocative, poetic and down to earth, empathetic and far reaching. A marvellous, nourishing book of resilience.’ – Judy Johnson
About the author
Magdalena Ball was born in New York City, and has lived in Australia for over three decades. She is a novelist, poet, reviewer, interviewer, VP of Flying Island Poetry Community, and Managing Editor of Compulsive Reader. Her stories, editorials, poetry, reviews and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won local and international awards. She is the author of several novels and poetry books, and runs a podcast of writer interviews called Compulsive Reader Talks. Find out more at her website: http://www.magdalenaball.com