Jewels and Ashes

‘Do you ever think about those you left behind?’, I ask father. ‘Not often’, he says. ‘Such memories are a luxury I can’t afford.’ First his parents made a journey to the New World. It was the 1930s, and Europe was seething. As he grew up, Arnold Zable heard tales, songs, fragments of the world they had left behind. He had inherited a fractured, vibrant past which both fascinated and disturbed him. Finally, he had to confront the mystery: he had to travel back to the Old World, to his parents’ h