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'Testimony of Flight'

Jane Spiro

An Amazon review of Jane's published book.

This is an emotional read. Beautifully written snapshots of Jewish lives and moments.

If you are Jewish or interested in what it was like to go through having to leave your home and find a safe place to exist and deal with all that involves, read this. Written in pros, poetry and play scripts, each snapshot takes you down another emotional path and conveys something far deeper about the human condition and how we deal with change, loss, struggle, learning how to fit in and much more. Moving. Unsettling. Familiar. Uplifting. Thoroughly recommended.

Jane also celebrated this publication publicly, during the 'Think Human Festival' at Oxford Brookes. Her presentation (see below) and installations (which were strategically placed around both the Harcourt Hill and Gypsey Lane campus) are displayed below.

Jane Spiro ppt.docx

ExhibitionCovers.pdf

Jane says: 'This exhibition tells the story of flight drawing on transcribed interviews with two travellers in their own words, Julek and Ludwig who escaped Cracow on foot in 1939 days before Nazi occupation; my own words giving life to ancestors and family members who escaped anti-semitic pogroms in the small wooden villages of the Urals by travelling east into Siberia; and images from my own travels in 2018 through the landscape they traversed between Cracow and Vladivostock. All the images are mine. The words in italics are spoken or quotations by others. Words not in italics are my own, imagined or extrapolated from what I was able to see and experience on the trans-Siberian journey. These are brought to life through my own audio recordings. The aim is to take you too on a journey and to trigger your stories on the way: reminders of what constitutes home, what constitutes flight, what memory brings to the surface and what it suppresses or distorts'.

Share your own stories in the Google Form at the bottom of this webpage. The stories recounted through the Google Form, with reference to the key words that this memory, will not appear anywhere on this website once submitted.

Now tell your story using the key words below.Image 1) Crocow doorway thresholds, entrances, openings, home, sealed in, locked outImage 2) Safe haven sanctuary, shelter, asylum, hideaway, safe house, harbour Image 3) Visa transit, permission, passage, licence, Image 4) Trans-Siberian express leaving from, going to, liminal space, transitionImage 5) Diaghilev table eating together, sitting together, where I sit ,what I remember, souvenirs, remembrancesImage 6) Mushrooms what grows, what is food, where I am alive, what is wild, what is freeImage 7) Gulag van taken, exiled, displaced, transported, disconnected, distancedImage 8) Gulag exercise block glimmer of hope, bounded in a nutshell, chinks of light, what is prisonImage 9) Painted stove places in the mind, where I dream, where I am warm, Image 10) Wooden gods how I pray, who I worship, where is solace, how I am comfortedImage 11) Sledge breaking out, cutting through, gripping the edge, white-out, Image 12) Liverpool docks escaping, launching out, waiting, changing, future

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