Jewels and Ashes

Romance and terror, light and shadow, replicas and originals, hover side by side, seeking reconciliation, while within me there is a sense of awe and a silent refrain: I am here, at last I am here; and it is far more beautiful than I had imagined. And far more devastating. Yet, somehow, never have I felt so much at peace.

In the twenty-five years since it was published, Jewels and Ashes has become a classic, a book that has stood the test of time.

Compelled by the momentum of memory, the unsettling fragments of ancestral stories told him as a child, Arnold Zable travels to the Eastern European countryside of his parents' remembrance, the terrain of his dreams and imagination, where he retraces the steps of the generations before him. Miraculously, it is this journey to the past that allows Zable to understand the present - the inner lives of those who, like his parents, survived the hatred but lost every trace of his family and former lives.

Arnold Zable has articulated, exquisitely, the haunted consciousness of the next generation. An astonishing achievement, this is a lyrical, transcendent, luminous work.



'A very special book, evincing such superlative narrative skill, such an ability to evoke time, space and character that, for once, I have to agree with what the publisher says on the cover. Jewels and Ashes is indeed an astonishing achievement.'
-The Sydney Morning Herald

'Full not of anger and pity but witnessing and self discovery ... Zable makes both ordinary and awful moments come alive, often destined to sear the reader's memory.'
-Los Angeles Times Book Review

'A beautiful, moving book, always searching, sometimes exuberant, often uplifting ... It is characterised not only by a sense of tragedy, but also by a sublime irony, and a rumble of cosmic humour. He confronts suffering but refuses easy sentimentality. He writes so well he is under some sort of obligation to us all to write much more.'
-The Age