Life-Tumbled Shards - Hardcover

by Heddy Breuer Abramowitz (Author)

Life-Tumbled Shards is a medical memoir dealing with illness, grief and loss. It touches on many other subjects: life in Jerusalem, life in the Old City, basic Jewish mourning customs, Jewish observance, the Holocaust as it affected the author's family, as well as her early years in Israel. The author, herself an artist, felt the need to rebuild herself. By instinct alone, she took hesitant steps. Through parallel processes, in paint and in words, she searched to find another facet of herself.

Topics woven into the manuscript:

- Family relations,

- Mother-daughter relations,

- Family medical crisis,

- Adjusting from a normative American suburban upbringing to life in Israel and raising children in a culture that was foreign to the mother,

- Jewish feminism,

- Modern-orthodox Jewish woman,

- Challenges to a creator/mother as she seeks to rehabilitate herself after a great loss,

- 20th-century Jewish history,

- Holocaust remembrances,

- Second Generation memories and questions, Israeli history,

- Jewish-Muslim co-existence in the Jerusalem's Old City,

- Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem life,

- addressing Israel and modern Zionism,

- seeing a private loss as a reflection of the most universal aspect of humanity,

- facing death,

- explaining common Jewish practices and Israeli culture to general audiences,

- Arab-Israeli tension and

- The centrality of Jerusalem in Judaism.