Small Things Left Behind

"Freedom is something my father has never known. How do I explain freedom to the ones born bent?" -from "Not Scared" Ella Zeltserman's poetry cuts both ways. The story of her flight from the USSR in 1979-of the young family she brought to Edmonton and the older one she left behind-does "explain freedom to the ones born bent," but it also explains oppression to the ones born free. Deftly modulating language, imagery, and events of past and present, comfort and tyranny, atrocity and family, home and war, Leningrad and Edmonton, she touches readers emotionally, drawing them into the journey. This authentic account of Russian-Jewish immigration to Canada during the Cold War will speak to all who have left their country or who moved far away from home. Lyric-narrative poetry of a Russian-Jewish refugee's flight to Canada during the Cold War. "That is what I would write if I were a poet." "Her first collection of poems...is powerfully sad and hopeful, full of Russian history and personal histories, her family, herself." [Full interview at http://bit.ly/1wtv7ql] "Ella Zeltserman waited decades to pen her experiences of oppression and liberation.... In these 38 poems, small things left behind weaves a big story. It traces the poet's bold quest for a better life after she sees a Soviet documentary of a Russian-Jewish immigration... Zeltserman's story of the human cost of leaving one country, one life, for another, has made her an important voice." Fall/Winter 2014 "Ella's is an important story for all readers and she tells it with razor-sharp prose and exquisite imagery. The poems tell a story of politics and family, of leaving and arriving, of displacement and longing... [A] book that belongs in schools and classrooms, on the shelves of libraries and in homes as a treasured part of a family collection."