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58 Facets: On violence and the law
When you have been forcibly displaced from your home, the revolutionary dream of what should have happened … stays alive as a utopian beacon of happiness that will (possibly) never come to pass. To be content and make a meaningful life from the ruins of that wrenching and uprooting is a small, everyday miracle that others easily overlook.
58 Facets is like a beautifully cut jewel, the kind Marika Sosnowski’s grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947, having passed through a checkpoint minutes ahead of Nazi occupiers, via a Japanese internment camp in Java and a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane. If you hold it up to the light you will catch different stories in each of its many facets. You will have the table, the bezel, the star and the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and the culet. You will have the dreams, the checkpoints, the documents, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance.
Part memoir, part exposé, 58 Facets weaves together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters. It challenges us to go beyond the links we see in our lives to our felt experiences of the law, violence and revolution, and how these experiences travel across bodies, space and time.
58 Facets is like a beautifully cut jewel, the kind Marika Sosnowski’s grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947, having passed through a checkpoint minutes ahead of Nazi occupiers, via a Japanese internment camp in Java and a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane. If you hold it up to the light you will catch different stories in each of its many facets. You will have the table, the bezel, the star and the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and the culet. You will have the dreams, the checkpoints, the documents, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance.
Part memoir, part exposé, 58 Facets weaves together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters. It challenges us to go beyond the links we see in our lives to our felt experiences of the law, violence and revolution, and how these experiences travel across bodies, space and time.
187 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 16, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 28, 2025
Profound, wandering, wondering. The journey took the long road at times but I mostly enjoyed the process. A vulnerable read with some core themes that I’ll chew on for a little longer. Brava MS
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November 4, 2025Marika Sosnowski's 58 Facets explores the links between the law and violence.
Sosnowski begins by telling the story of her great-grandmother, who paid a bribe to the guards at the French/Spanish border during WWII, securing a passage to safety for herself and her descendants.
Arriving eventually in the Dutch East Indies, a place to which Dutch citizens could travel "without much difficulty" in 1940, Sosnowski's family were imprisoned two years later when the Japanese invaded, and spent three years starving in an internment camp in Java.
From there, Sosnowski zooms out to examine how the law and violence affect people in myriad and often difficult to categorise ways. Each chapter is short and diamond-sharp.
The writing is intellectually scrupulous and canny. Describing a great-uncle who fought for the Haganah, an early Zionist military organisation and precursor to the Israel Defense Forces, Sosnowski writes: "The Haganah went on to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1947-?."
That question mark is one that hangs over much of the book. Confronting the violent realities of conflict, exile and migration, from Europe under the Nazis to Syrians displaced by the civil war and Assad's regime, Sosnowski looks at some of the most intractable problems of our time. She does not pretend to have answers.
Sosnowski's ability to link dramatic and life-changing situations and experiences with more mundane moments is part of what makes her book so compassionate.
Read on:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-2...
Sosnowski begins by telling the story of her great-grandmother, who paid a bribe to the guards at the French/Spanish border during WWII, securing a passage to safety for herself and her descendants.
Arriving eventually in the Dutch East Indies, a place to which Dutch citizens could travel "without much difficulty" in 1940, Sosnowski's family were imprisoned two years later when the Japanese invaded, and spent three years starving in an internment camp in Java.
From there, Sosnowski zooms out to examine how the law and violence affect people in myriad and often difficult to categorise ways. Each chapter is short and diamond-sharp.
The writing is intellectually scrupulous and canny. Describing a great-uncle who fought for the Haganah, an early Zionist military organisation and precursor to the Israel Defense Forces, Sosnowski writes: "The Haganah went on to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1947-?."
That question mark is one that hangs over much of the book. Confronting the violent realities of conflict, exile and migration, from Europe under the Nazis to Syrians displaced by the civil war and Assad's regime, Sosnowski looks at some of the most intractable problems of our time. She does not pretend to have answers.
Sosnowski's ability to link dramatic and life-changing situations and experiences with more mundane moments is part of what makes her book so compassionate.
Read on:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-2...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews