Amador Book: ANCESTRAL NOTES

Cover by Brian O'Connor
Trade paper -- 176 pp.
ISBN-10: 0-938513-17-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-938513-17-9

$10.00

available in e-book:

ANCESTRAL NOTES
A FAMILY DREAM JOURNAL
by Zelda Leah Gatuskin

A collection of dream journal entries, poems, essays, short stories, and a drama; based on the author's investigations into, and her feelings about her family history and cultural identity. She explores the themes of Jewish spirituality, shtetl life in Europe, immigration to the USA, men's and women's traditional roles. Repeated references to spirits convey the sense that this inquiry is not only guided but demanded by ancestral souls. The book is illustrated with nine original collages by the author.

Read an excerpt!

Visit Zelda's Ancestral Notes Website

Special Features of the Ebook: While the trade paperback edition of ANCESTRAL NOTES is illustrated with black and white versions of nine original collages by the author, the ebook edition provides links to the full-color collages as published on-line. Another feature of the ebook is that foreign words and phrases are hyperlinked to the relevant Glossary entries (first appearance only where the term is repeated in close proximity).

View the Original Color Collages

With a deceptively simple yet strong voice, Gatuskin explores and celebrates what it means to be a Jew, to be a woman, and to be a member of the human race.

--ANNE BARNEY, author

As I began to read this work the shade of Franz Kafka fell across my shoulder, soon to be merged with the shades of Dostoyevsky, of Sholem Aleichem, and a myriad of my own memories dancing and grieving with those of the author. As I read on I wanted to bow before the author and kiss her feet. I wanted to weep with her and her ancestors. In the next moment I wanted to laugh with her in a triumph of the spirit over grief and pain. I put on her sister's clothes, but the door to the crematorium was shut to me, for I am not worthy. No other work I have ever read has had such an effect on me.

--William J. Turner, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry
State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY

A chronicle of personal awakening...Here is a joyful, insightful, poignant, tough-minded celebration of the individual self as a swirling complexity of genetics, random chance and divine and earth-bound humor.

-- THE JEWISH VOICE, Wilmington, DE

Read more about ANCESTRAL NOTES and view several of the collages in full color
at Margin, Exploring Modern Magical Realism.
Go to Zelda's Feature at Margin.

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