Jewels And Ashes

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.