Isa Milman - Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History, and Home

Praise for Afterlight

Written with powerful awareness and historical heft, the memoir Afterlight follows the daughter of Holocaust survivors as she travels to unpack her lifetime of living with the aftermath of a genocide.

FOREWORD REVIEWS

What a remarkable, deeply moving act of homage Isa Milman has accomplished: a long quest to rescue stories of relatives enduring war-time atrocity from oblivion; a Kaddish performed through personal on-site practice and writing. With candour, humility, and courage, she travels in space and time through this scarred landscape, calling upon imaginative thought experiments to supplement the spare horrifying facts. Afterlight is a telling reminder that atrocity thrives in the dark and must be unearthed, whatever the anguish, in order to be overcome.

DON MCKAY Governor Generals Awardwinning poet

Marrying dogged research with sharp emotional insight, and storytelling both intimate and poetic, Isa Milman reassembles her brutalized family tree. With palpable love, unflinching horror, and unexpected joy, she reclaims and reimagines the almost unutterable memories that her mother held in silence until just before her death. Meanwhile, Milman gives voice to so many children of the European Jewish diaspora, as she moves toward her own peace with the land that bore and then cast out and swallowed her ancestors.

NAOMI K. LEWIS award-winning author of Tiny Lights for Travellers

In this beautifully written and evocative memoir, Isa Milman takes us with her on a trip back to her ancestral home in what is today Ukraine but was once Poland, as she searches for the writings of her aunt, her mothers twin sister, who was one of the several million victims of the Holocaust. In chapters that alternate between past and present, Milman suggests how the afterlight of historical tragedies can both illuminate and complicate the present.

GOLDIE MORGENTALER professor of English at the University of Lethbridge and award-winning translator from Yiddish to English of the work of Chava Rosenfarb

In search of a family narrative shattered by war, displacement, and genocide, Isa Milman traverses the past and present in Poland and Ukraine, Israel and Canada, to weave a memoir of profound loss and great love. Time and again, Afterlight pierces through darkness and leads, at last, to acceptance, recovery, and hope.

RUTH PANOFSKY poet and author of Radiant Shards: Hodas North End Poems

Isa Milmans Afterlight is as close to a living history as one can come. There is a quality of lucid dreaming in this memoir. Told with a poets exquisite attention to detail, it is a work of exhumationa bringing to light that which has always been with us.

EVE JOSEPH author of In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying

Isa Milmans Afterlight is an absolutely riveting memoir. From her parents survival in a Siberian gulag to her own investigation of the scarred landscape of Eastern Europe, the author portrays a deeply moving journey across time and space as she searches for traces of history, including her aunts lost poetry, and explores the meaning of home in the aftermath of the Shoah.

HELGA THORSON associate professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria and co-founder of the I-witness Holocaust Field School

Afterlight is a powerful journey. By going to Poland, where her Jewish family was torn apart by war, Isa Milman invests her story with potent force. We are taken into the frozen Siberian gulag; we escape Stalingrad just before the Germans arrive. Compelling and poignant, Afterlight is a truly luminous book.

ANNE SIMPSON author of Speechless, winner of the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award

Isa Milman brings an artists eye, a love of the music of language, and a ferocious tenacity to her quest for her familys lost ones, for the survivors, for herself. As the still unfathomable atrocities of the Holocaust retreat from living memory, her story glows in the afterlight of history and memory, deeply personal and ultimately profound.

DIANA WICHTEL award-winning author of Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father

In Afterlight, Isa Milman tells a timely personal narrative of travel and discovery, which is entangled in the twentieth-century calamity of the destruction of Jewish life in eastern Europe. Milman provides a fresh and thoughtful reconsideration of postwar Polish Jewish identity. Was I not free, she wonders, as she seeks out her ancestral story, to adjust my own opinions without breaking the codes Id been brought up with?

NORMAN RAVVIN author of The Girl Who Stole Everything and A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory

Isa Milmans powerful book takes her readers on a voyage of self-discovery through the landscapes of Eastern Europeand Jewish memory. A story of real people and events, Afterlight reads like a mystery novel that you cannot put down until the very last page. It will have a major impact.

SERHY YEKELCHYK professor of Slavic Studies and History at the University of Victoria and the author of Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know

Combining the threads of memory, history, and imagination with a strong fabric of family stories and research embroidered with recovered maps and artifacts, Isa Milman recreates her Jewish familys tragic fate during the horrific events of wartime Poland. Afterlight is a beautiful, haunting memoir that speaks of both devastating pain and abiding love.

LYNNE VAN LUVEN professor emerita, Department of Writing, University of Victoria

Copyright 2021 Isa Milman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, audio recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.

Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.

heritagehouse.ca

Cataloguing information available from Library and Archives Canada

978-1-77203-383-0 (pbk)

978-1-77203-384-7 (ebook)

Edited by Rene Layberry

Cover design by Setareh Ashrafologhalai

Interior book design by Jacqui Thomas

Cover photograph: Sabina and Basia Kramer, Warsaw (Praga), Poland, circa 1937 (family collection); background image: iStock. com/duncan1890

Interior photos are from the authors family collection, unless otherwise noted.

Maps by Joe Castiglione

The interior of this book was produced on 100% post-consumer paper, processed chlorine free and printed with vegetable-based inks.

Heritage House gratefully acknowledges that the land on which we live and work is within the traditional territories of the Lkwungen (Esquimalt and Songhees), Malahat, Pacheedaht, Scianew, TSou-ke, and W SNE (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum) Peoples.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.