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In 2021, Isa Milman published a memoir about her investigation into the lives of Jewish twin sisters who grew up in interwar Poland, Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History, and Home (Heritage House $24.95). The two women are Milman’s mother, Sabina, who survived the Holocaust, and her mother’s twin, Basia—who did not. Milman describes her fears and fascination as she traversed modern-day Poland and Ukraine, the lands of her ancestors, looking for Basia’s vanished poems that were published when Basia was aged fourteen. As Milan delves into the complexities of what cultures choose to remember and what they erase, she visits places where her relatives had been, including where her aunt Basia and her own paternal grandmother Yalena were killed in Polish-held Ukraine.
"The last of Kostopol’s Jews were murdered in Kostopol forest on August 25, 1942. Five thousand Jews in all, from neighbouring farms as well, were brought to the forest where huge pits had been dug. After they’d been forced to undress, they were lined up in rows, facing the pit, mounting with bodies of their friends and family, and shot in the back of the head or neck. Among them were Basia Kramer Fishman and Yelena Bebczuik Kramer, and the entire extended Bebczuk and Kramer families. The earth trembled for three days after as those still alive slowly suffocated beneath the weight of their dead….
“My mother [Sabina] rarely told the particulars of this horror, but I’ve known it as long as I’ve had consciousness, in one form or another. How could she speak of this to her children—that human beings have the capacity to reduce other human beings to garbage, to torture and kill and feel nothing of the pain? From the moment of learning the truth, sorrow raged through my mother’s bones and lived in her marrow for the rest of her long life.”
The poet Don McKay has described Afterlight as “a telling reminder that atrocity thrives in the dark and must be unearthed, whatever the anguish, in order to be overcome.”
Born a displaced person in Germany in 1949, Victoria-based Isa Milman grew up in the United States and came to Canada in 1975. She is a graduate of Tufts University and holds a Masters of Rehabilitation Science from McGill, where she taught for a decade. Her first three poetry books all won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Prairie Kaddish in 2008 was inspired by the Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to the Canadian prairies near the turn of the 20th century, fleeing persecution about fifty years before the Nazis came to power. To cite this far lesser-known genocide, when thousands of Jews were being murdered in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, one her poems titled “A Few Restrictions Regarding the Jews of Romania, 1885-1900” lists restrictions forbidding Jews to be peddlers, forbidding Jews from attending elementary schools, barring them from professions such as practicing medicine, or from being a patient in a hospital, or from owning a business or property. This collection was inspired by an epiphany Milman had in the Lipton Hebrew Cemetery in Saskatchewan where she realized she belonged in “the great tapestry of Jewish suffering and regeneration.”
BOOKS:
Between the Doorposts (Ekstasis, 2004). Poetry
Prairie Kaddish (Coteau, 2008). Poetry
something small to carry home (Quattro, 2012). Poetry
Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History, and Home (Heritage House, 2021) $24.95 9781772033830. Memoir
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2021]
"The last of Kostopol’s Jews were murdered in Kostopol forest on August 25, 1942. Five thousand Jews in all, from neighbouring farms as well, were brought to the forest where huge pits had been dug. After they’d been forced to undress, they were lined up in rows, facing the pit, mounting with bodies of their friends and family, and shot in the back of the head or neck. Among them were Basia Kramer Fishman and Yelena Bebczuik Kramer, and the entire extended Bebczuk and Kramer families. The earth trembled for three days after as those still alive slowly suffocated beneath the weight of their dead….
“My mother [Sabina] rarely told the particulars of this horror, but I’ve known it as long as I’ve had consciousness, in one form or another. How could she speak of this to her children—that human beings have the capacity to reduce other human beings to garbage, to torture and kill and feel nothing of the pain? From the moment of learning the truth, sorrow raged through my mother’s bones and lived in her marrow for the rest of her long life.”
The poet Don McKay has described Afterlight as “a telling reminder that atrocity thrives in the dark and must be unearthed, whatever the anguish, in order to be overcome.”
Born a displaced person in Germany in 1949, Victoria-based Isa Milman grew up in the United States and came to Canada in 1975. She is a graduate of Tufts University and holds a Masters of Rehabilitation Science from McGill, where she taught for a decade. Her first three poetry books all won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Prairie Kaddish in 2008 was inspired by the Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to the Canadian prairies near the turn of the 20th century, fleeing persecution about fifty years before the Nazis came to power. To cite this far lesser-known genocide, when thousands of Jews were being murdered in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, one her poems titled “A Few Restrictions Regarding the Jews of Romania, 1885-1900” lists restrictions forbidding Jews to be peddlers, forbidding Jews from attending elementary schools, barring them from professions such as practicing medicine, or from being a patient in a hospital, or from owning a business or property. This collection was inspired by an epiphany Milman had in the Lipton Hebrew Cemetery in Saskatchewan where she realized she belonged in “the great tapestry of Jewish suffering and regeneration.”
BOOKS:
Between the Doorposts (Ekstasis, 2004). Poetry
Prairie Kaddish (Coteau, 2008). Poetry
something small to carry home (Quattro, 2012). Poetry
Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History, and Home (Heritage House, 2021) $24.95 9781772033830. Memoir
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2021]
