“Make Your Heart a Home
that you can carry anywhere and everywhere.”
This quote is one of the main messages in my upcoming, debut chapbook Casa de mi Corazón: A Travel Journal of Poetry & Memoir (Poetica Publishing). The chapbook explores the journey of a young, Jewish Canadian woman who feels like a wandering Jewess traveling to Israel and Germany to learn more about her roots. As the granddaughter of Spanish Moroccan immigrants and Romanian Holocaust survivors, this Toronto native, navigates various landscapes of the past and present through poetry, dramatic monologue, and memoir to explore the diaspora, Israel, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, terrorism, and Zionism. Through confronting history, she brings healing to intergenerational trauma, while expressing the need for Jewish self-determination and hope for peace in Israel. Eventually, the search for home leads her to discover that, whether in Israel or in Toronto, home is where the heart is. In reclaiming her sense of home, the speaker dispels the wandering Jew narrative to open further dialogue.
This is an excerpt from the memoir in the chapbook entitled, Kaleidoscopic Views of Toronto and Israel: A Travel Memoir.
At times I cannot believe how enmeshed I felt, but of course, there were moments of culture shock…
