Jeannelle M. Ferreira – författare

"The mask touched her, formed her face, and she felt a strange reversal, like a stopping heart, like electric shock. For centuries she had felt herself growing fainter; now the ghost-image that lived only inside her mind was suddenly standing in the middle of the workshop, more solid and real than she had ever been even in life. Her feet were bare, and they were touching the tile floor, and in danger of stepping on a needle. Her elbows strained the sleeves of a smock gone two years too small. Her hair was heavy, not tangled but not washed, either, and she had a moment's idea that she ought to go at it with a duck's egg and some lavender." These are the masks, but whose faces lie beneath? Here are lovers and weavers, hedge-witches and liars, greenmen and mermaids and all the masks of self and seeming-even the faces of time, and death, and transformation. We are what we wear. What we remember and what we desire. Who are you? Come and see.

'Siz an emese mayse: this story is true. A Verse From Babylon is a series of snapshots which never existed, but the people within them did. Told in a mosaic of scenes and events, it chronicles the lives of a group of Jewish friends who banded together to create the repertory theatre in the ghetto of Vilna, Lithuania, under the Nazi regime. A reminder that the camps were not the first step along the road to the Holocaust, A Verse From Babylon presents Raissa and Violeta, Fayge and Beniek, and their fellow artists not as victims of a violent genocidal war, but as humans with human interests: art, theatre, poetry, and music, all of which they created or helped to foster in the Vilna ghetto. As they fall one by one to the brutalities of the ghetto, they continue to fight back with their only weapons: words, subterfuge, and defiance. Written with a lyrical style and a sense of reverence for the people she has studied, the author flawlessly transforms real-life events into a powerful work of literature.Foregoing traditional narrative form, she presents the story of the Vilna Ghetto as it might have appeared to those living in it: a series of events and conversations retold with understanding and grace, but also with a fearless view of the facts of ghetto life. From the lush description of fresh fruit in front of starving Jews to the striking final images of rebellion and sacrifice, she treats language as both a means of comfort and a method of survival.