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Present Past
Present Past is a collection of stories, artwork, and poetry by Ava Kadishson Schieber. Like her debut work, Soundless Roar , this multi-genre collection creates rich and varied pathways for readers to approach Schieber as well as the absorbing events and transformations in her life as a Holocaust survivor. The focus of Present Past is her life after the Shoah. Rejecting stereotypes of survivors as traumatized or broken, Schieber is stark yet exuberant, formidable yet nuanced. The woman who emerges in Schieber’s Present Past is a multifaceted, heterogeneous figure—poet, artist, and survivor. In it, she plays the passionate observer who dispassionately curates the kaleidoscopic memories of her tumultuous personal and professional life in Belgrade, Prague, Tel Aviv, New York, and Chicago. Organized into thirteen chapters, each a blend of images, poems, and narrative, this moving new work offers myriad points of entry to readers of these genres, those fascinated in the relationship between the Holocaust and art, as well as readers interested in memory and survivorship.
216 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 2016
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 23, 2016
Disclosure: I received a digital copy for review from NetGalley
This was a complete surprise, I had no idea who the author/artist was when I asked to review this and also I had no idea that she was a Yugoslavian survivor of WWII (because this info wasn't included in the NetGalley summary... just saying).
The author recounts memories of her life after WWII in sparing but beautiful prose split with poetry and these beautiful sketches that are dominated by faces, hands and feet. I can only suppose that the faces are representative of emotions (the brain being the seat of emotion), hands symbolic of feeling and touch and feet representative of the journeys, the paths the author has traveled.
The author who lost most of her family by the age of fifteen, paints herself as a very precocious, intelligent, creative and talented young women who made hard decisions, lived in poverty at times but ultimately lived the life she wanted and carved out for herself.
A very quick, entrancing read, but also unfinished as the author ends the book in the 1980s. I would dearly love to read the rest of the authors story, and see more of her haunting sketches.
This was a complete surprise, I had no idea who the author/artist was when I asked to review this and also I had no idea that she was a Yugoslavian survivor of WWII (because this info wasn't included in the NetGalley summary... just saying).
The author recounts memories of her life after WWII in sparing but beautiful prose split with poetry and these beautiful sketches that are dominated by faces, hands and feet. I can only suppose that the faces are representative of emotions (the brain being the seat of emotion), hands symbolic of feeling and touch and feet representative of the journeys, the paths the author has traveled.
The author who lost most of her family by the age of fifteen, paints herself as a very precocious, intelligent, creative and talented young women who made hard decisions, lived in poverty at times but ultimately lived the life she wanted and carved out for herself.
A very quick, entrancing read, but also unfinished as the author ends the book in the 1980s. I would dearly love to read the rest of the authors story, and see more of her haunting sketches.
Displaying 1 of 1 review