We poets had a beautiful tradition at Glenairley in Sooke, B.C. on Friday evenings at our retreats when the Jewish women said prayers and sang songs, lighting candles as sunset approached for the beginning of Shabbos. One of the women was Isa Milman from Victoria, B.C.
Glenairley, an old farmhouse in Sooke, was an early location for poetry retreats with Patrick Lane. They had been running for several years before I began going in 2006. I was glad to meet Isa there and many other poets to whom I’m still connected.
Isa Milman is the author of three collections of poetry: Something Small to Carry Home (2012); Prairie Kaddish (2008), and Between the Doorposts (2004). She’s a three-time winner of the Helen & Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards whose jury in 2012 called Isa “a foremost Canadian writer of Jewish themes.” Besides writing and university teaching, Isa’s professional life has encompassed occupational therapy practice, entrepreneurship and art-making such as quilt making and collage.
In 2013, Isa began writing her memoir that came out in the Fall of 2021: Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History, and Home (Heritage House). Her memoir is a family story as well as the lesser known story of “a holocaust of bullets” in Eastern Europe. Jews were shot and thrown into pits dug by local people “to get rid of Jews” or pressed into abominable service by the Soviets when Hitler and Stalin took over Poland. (Quotes are from Isa’s interview with Kathryn Marlow on North by Northwest, CBC, October 16, 2021).
As Isa says in Afterlight, “In all thirteen thousand Jews were murdered in the district of Kostopol – local Jews, and Jews brought from neighbouring towns.”
Afterlight is composed of chapters about what Isa knew of her family history told as if in an unfolding present interspersed with chapters where readers learn as Isa learns and does research including travelling to Poland and immersing herself in Polish Jewish history and poetics. I so appreciate the sharing of her journey as a poet and writer digging into the lost history of her family.
Sabina, Isa’s mother, had withheld some horrible details but had told her children about the murders of her twin sister Basia, Basia’s two-year-old son Mordechai Fishman, ripped from her arms, and other extended family members. More stories came out in the last year of her life, while living in New London, Connecticut.
“But in her newly awakened state, just steps away from the threshold to the next world, my mother returned with a story of her childhood with Basia. She told of her twin’s brilliance, her love of poetry and history, and her desire to write a book when she was only fifteen.”
As more stories were revealed, Sabina Milman said: “Isa, write this down, this should be your next book!”
Isa did jot down her mother’s words to which she would refer several years later. (Sabina Milman died in April 2007.) The photograph on the cover of Afterlight is of Sabina and Basia Kramer in Warsaw (Praga), Poland circa 1937.
Isa’s research and travel opened her up “to the complexities of how we understand history,” she said in her interview. Her memoir is “deeply rooted in the facts of the history that I tell,” Isa says in her introduction, and “it’s an exploration of imagination” as she creates scenes and dialogue as she envisions them. The book really is a marvel.
There’s also a mystery to be solved: Isa wants to learn more about her mother’s twin sister Basia who published poetry when she was fourteen, and was murdered in 1942 when she was twenty-five.
I found it heartwarming to read that Isa’s husband Robbie accompanied her to Poland where she was to present at a conference about Jewish-Canadian-Polish cultural connections in April 2014.Originally, he hadn’t want to go as nothing attracted him to Poland “not even the food.”
Robbie said: “I’ve been watching and listening as you prepare for this trip, and I think that doing it alone is a bit more than you should take on by yourself.”
Robbie, whose full name was Robert Brooke Naylor McConnell (1942 – 2019), was a fourth generation British Columbian. Afterlight is dedicated to him, Isa’s children “and theirs.”
It was also heartwarming to read of the various connections Isa made to Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in her research and travels.
Isa’s parents, Sabina and Olek Milman considered themselves lucky, she said in her interview. They were deported to Siberia, spending twenty-six days in a cattle car enroute to Itatka, “the second-to-last stop of this railway line, the farthest prison camp of the Soviet gulag,” she says in the book. [Photo of Isa Milman by Shea Lowry]
The Milmans did have some luck and synchronicity along their arduous journey, before and during their deportation. In early 1943 when they were sent to Uzbekistan, Sabina met a young Russian soldier on the journey. They conversed in Russian when their paths crossed, heading in different directions. When the soldier heard the Milmans were headed for Fergana he said his parents lived there “. . . and they would be overjoyed to receive word from me that I’m alive and well.” More than fifty years later, Sabina remembered the address on Vtoraia Ulitsa (Second Street).
Isa writes that “Once again, my mothers’ treasure chest of languages, and her natural friendliness and warmth, opened the door to the next chapter of my parents’ survival.”
Afterlight is a healing journey with its references to crimes against humans by fellow humans, Isa’s shedding of tears on the site of atrocities in Kostopil, and the blessed connections that can be made with survivors and allies. There is much to appreciate and honour in Isa’s story of uncovering the sorrows and the joys of her family. She, along with other Jews, is a member of “an ancient global family” as Rabbi Rami Shapiro has said in one of his magazine columns.
When Polish poet, Tomasz Rozycki, was visiting Victoria, Isa asked him if he had heard of “Tikkun – this beautiful Jewish concept of repair.” He shook his head and Isa told him: “This is our task on earth, to heal what’s broken, to make it a little better. It’s the most we can hope for.”
Among the amazing family photos included in Afterlight is one of Sabina, Olek and their daughters Estera and Isa Milman leaving Germany in May of 1950, where both girls had been born in DP camps.
The word “afterlight” is one Isa discovered and found to be the perfect title for her memoir. “Afterlight is an uncommon word that refers to the light visible in the sky after sunset, or to a look back in time, a retrospect,” she writes in her introduction.
The book is timely as Isa said in her interview. Hatred and genocide still exist. People are still displaced from their homelands. “What can we do as human beings to make it a little bit better in this world?” she asks.
Thank you for this excellent review of what sounds like an inspiring book. I will look for it. An uplifting message.
Thanks Mary Anne for this review; I have loved this book from the start. And thanks, Isa for your brave and very fine volume.
A compelling review Mary Ann. Sounds like a remarkable memoir. I’ll be watching for it.
I’m so grateful for your book reviews, Mary Ann. I, too, will look for this book…perhaps I will pick it up while visiting BC in April!
I love the idea of “tikkun,” and this idea, of leaving things better than you found them, is something that I learned in the Ukrainian girl guide organization I attended in my youth. I carry the motivation for little improvements to this day.
As someone who hopes to one day discover my own Jewish connections, as my maiden name is a Hebrew-Ukrainian blend, I read of the trials of “an ancient global family” with compassion.
I found Isa’s story a delight as well as tragic, a duality that seems to be part of our lives here on Earth. We must find the joy in the little things, like recalling a street name decades later, bits of luck that made the deportation perhaps more tolerable, and memories of joyous moments.
Thank you for your beautiful response Stephanie. Perhaps reading Afterlight will inspire you to begin looking for your Jewish connections. Isa’s journey is an inspiring one.