Toward Babel : Poems and a Memoir

Here are two books in one by an Israeli poet and muse, Ilana Shmueli, who has been known to English readers through her important correspondence with Paul Celan--short poems that can be read as a single, important long poem--loaded with new discoveries--and a memoir of her early life in Czernowitz, Bukovina (the region that gave us Celan, Norman Manea, Nina Cassian, Gregor von Rezzori, and Aharon Appelfeld, et al.), out of which a significant part of her poetry eventually grew.