Bobish by Magdalena Ball

Published by Puncher and Wattmann 2023

Though she was only fourteen years old, like many other Jews in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement in 1907, Rebecca Lieberman gathered her few belongings and left for the United States. What follows is a unique and poetic story of history, war, mysticism, music, abuse, survival and transcendence against the backdrop of New York City in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s.

‘A fourteen-year-old girl is launched by pogroms and poverty into the New World, fearful and alone. How can she know that her great-granddaughter would weave her story, through imagination and a careful reading of history, into a poetic gift to her memory, and for many more generations to come?’ – Ramona Koval

‘In Bobish Magdalena Ball picks up the thread that connects us to our ancestors weaving it into the fabric of family memory and public history, creating an intensely vivid and evocative work. A narrative montage of exquisite poems, where choices are funnelled by pogroms, racism, pain, poverty, hope, and nourished by music and family. It was a deeply moving experience to read this book.’ – Beth Spencer

‘Magdalena’s stirring poems are unsettlingly familiar and eerily transcendent. The persistence, the endurance, the quiet resignation, somehow amounts to the telling of a small woman who is nothing less than mighty.’ – Gillian Swain

‘The importance of remembering is a cornerstone of the Jewish faith and in this account of the author’s Jewish great-grandmother as she navigates her life of exile, each scene is both clear-eyed and evocative, poetic and down to earth, empathetic and far-reaching. A marvellous, nourishing book of resilience.’ – Judy Johnson