Description
ISBN: 9781761170638
Year: 2026
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Description:
In a powerful work of memoir, history and biography, Jane Messer retraces the tragic and hopeful steps of her Jewish German grandmother, Bella. From pre-war Berlin to Tel Aviv to Melbourne, Messer follows Bella's journey and tries to understand her choices, including why she abandoned her son Michael in England before the war. Along the way, she speaks with historians in Germany, peace activists, scholars and refugees in Israel and Palestine, and, constantly, to her beloved father.
Shifting between the personal and the historical with lyrical precision, Raven Mother grapples with the grand scale of global events and the intimate struggles of family and memory.
'In seeking the truth about her grandmother, Messer uncovers far more than a family history. Her thorough journey reveals profound questions of identity, loss, and displacement, while exposing the deep-rooted racism and injustice woven through the world she explores.' Majeda Awawdeh
'With evenhandedness and generosity of spirit, Jane Messer's minutely researched history of dispossession and genocide embraces both her Jewish roots stretching back to Berlin before the Holocaust and, with unflinching clear-sightedness, the story of Palestine. It is a plain-speaking, remarkable and deeply affecting book.' Robert Dessaix
'Raven Mother takes us on a deeply moving journey of discovery. While we have begun to understand how tenaciously the traumas of our parents live on within us, it takes a writer of Messer's calibre to apprehend this phenomenon with such verve, candour and insight. As her travels into her father's p