Product Description
Here is an unabashedly personal poetic memoir, in the format of a saga spanning three generations of women trapped in the wrong place and time, who lived through two merciless world wars that left them trying to stand alone against the harsh life that fate had assigned to them. Beginning almost a century ago with the author’s maternal grandmother, widowed in WWI and immersed in the despair of overwhelming grief and poverty while raising two daughters in a time when women were not socially prepared to do so; continuing with her eldest daughter, the author’s mother, reduced to groveling for crumbs of withheld love and approval from a mother lost in her own pain; on to her daughter, the author herself, grappling with the deeply etched genetic wave of particular pain, which washes like tides through this passionate and compelling collection of free-verse poems wrought from living through the unthinkably grim landscape of Nazi-occupied Europe, that emerges as a rare and authentic portrait of that time. At once heartbreaking and heartening, Bygone Daughters of a Lesser Fate is an eloquently moving and vibrantly alive tale of courage, survival and resolve related in a poignantly real voice that touches the deepest recesses of the soul, sure to be logged deep into the reader’s memory long after the book is read.