Ilana Rosen

The Shaddely-Babbelies Ilana Rosen

What are "baby-killer" pills?
What shall the girl sent to buy Zeller ask for at the vegetable store?
Why is being on your own always said to be "alone as a dog"?
And what might happen to the moon if they don't stop bothering it?
In The Shaddely-Babbelies, Ilana Rosen, a professor of folk and documentary literature, revisits her childhood and adolescence in Jerusalem of the 1960s and 1970s, in a family whose parents had lived through the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust in Hungary. In some fifty amusing, poignant sketches, Rosen depicts Holocaust survivors, Hungarian-Israelis and their unique languages, streets, schools and cultural sites in Jerusalem, as well as many songs, nursery rhymes and expressions. The book is enriched by the drawings of the author's sister, Jerusalem artist Tova Balman.