Overview
In this stunning journey of language and ancestry, nightmare and vision, Arnold Zable undertakes a search for his roots, for a way of life that is no more. Moving seamlessly between past and present, weaving a tale that transcends race, nationality, and religion, Zable recalls his travels by train through the Old World of his Polish/Russian emigrant parents. He enters the countryside of their remembrance, the terrain of his dreams and imagination, urged on all the while by the momentum of memory, the unsettling fragments of ancestral stories his parents told him as a child. Zable retraces the steps of the generations before him, bringing to life, as he moves among the mass graves and dead cities, the vivid and thriving communities of the 1920s and 1930s. He enters the villages of his family's past, finding the last Jews of Bialystok and Orla, stepping into the "still life" of a synagogue that is shattered and empty, or preserved as a museum, equally desolate, estranged from its purpose. In doing so, he comes to understand the inner lives of those who survived, siblings and parents - like his own - who escaped the hatreds of 1930s Europe only to lose, without warning, every trace of their family and former lives. The Australian publication of Jewels and Ashes generated immediate critical acclaim; the Sydney Morning Herald was not alone in suggesting that Zable belongs "in the same company as Elie Wiesel as an interpreter of 20th-century Jewish experience." With writing that is exquisite, Arnold Zable articulates the haunted consciousness of the next generation of survivors.Synopsis
Like Schindler's List, this is a haunting document for the next generation of Holocaust survivors. Zable travels from Australia to the Eastern European countryside of his parents' remembrance to understand the present-the inner lives of those who, like his parents, survived the hatred but lost every trace of family. Winner of top Australian literary awards.
Publishers Weekly
Australian writer Zable's powerful, beautifully written search for his roots is one of the most moving Holocaust memoirs in recent years. His mother, Hoddes, escaped Poland in 1933, emigrating to Australia where his father, Meier Zabludowski, joined her three years later. Virtually all of the family members they left behind in the cities of Bialystok and Orla perished in the Nazi genocide. Traveling via the Beijing-Moscow Express across Siberia in 1986, Zable went to Poland to meet Jewish survivors and to re-create the lives of his parents and relatives. Blending history, interviews, travel notes and his parents' recollections, he evokes the vibrant life of the Polish shtetl of the '20s and '30s teetering on the brink of annihilation. Zable also documents in harrowing detail the heroic but doomed resistance of Bialystok's Jewish ghetto and its subsequent liquidation. This fierce yet lyrical odyssey is a noble attempt to forge a spiritual connection with the six million Jews claimed by Nazi savagery. (Oct.)