In Raven Mother, Jane Messer weaves together her Jewish family’s compelling and tragic story – stretching back and forth between Berlin, Israel, Palestine, Melbourne and Sydney.

Messer retraces the steps of her Jewish grandmother Bella, as she tries to understand her life in pre-war Berlin and Mandate Palestine, her suicide in post-war Melbourne (how Bella didn’t survive the surviving), and why her father was abandoned in England before the war. In this powerful, beautifully written and insightful book, Messer spends time in Berlin, Israel and Palestine and grapples with the effects of nationalism, both historical and contemporary. Along the way she speaks with historians, activists, refugees, and scholars, and constantly, to her beloved father.

Raven Mother is a powerful work of memoir and history, essential to understanding the impacts of the Holocaust and Jewish identity in the post–World War II era. Blending the personal and the historical with lyrical precision, Jane Messer sweeps from the grand scale of global events to the intimate struggles of family and memory.

‘This excellent book approaches the fraught issue of Palestinian and Israeli lives today with rigour but also with artfulness. A very powerful effect is created, whereby the story of her grandmother Bella, which is at the centre of this book, animates the contemporary story of Israel.’ – Lee Kofman

‘Raven Mother is an important book. I would even go so far as to say it is a book we urgently need. I say this as a Palestinian and an Australian.’ – Randa Abdel-Fattah