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.