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, to post-war Melbourne where she 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, Messer sweeps from the grand scale of global events to the intimate struggles of family and memory.

Jane Messer is the accomplished writer of novels, short stories and essays, is a regular contributor to The Conversation, and is a former Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Macquarie University. She is the founder and director of StorySALOON, a live show and podcast dedicated to Australian short stories.

As the daughter of a refugee, she finds herself compelled to write about fractured lives, marginal people and migration.