Magdalena Ball’s Celebration of Human Spirit in Our and Other Worlds

Bobish is the seventh poetry collection and third full length book by Australian poet Magdalena Ball. Her lyric memoir has been described as a “re-imagining of the author’s great-great grandmother…a small woman who is nothing less than mighty.”  A more adventurous reading reveals the collection tells a cosmic tale, one with profound implications for the existence of human life on Earth and, very possibly, beyond.   

The work departs from Magdalena’s previous efforts because it is the first historical composition she has produced.  It is also the first family biography she has written.  As a book of lyric poems, Bobish is a eulogy for past generations, and an elegy to the resilience of the human spirit. It’s a poetry collection concerned with traces, with the imprints left by both trauma and healing.  Written against forgetting, the poems in Bobish commemorate adversity, yet advocate for connection and forgiving as means of transcending adversity’s lingering effects.

The book, whose stylistic clarity will delight readers intolerant of poetry that leaves one hungry for meaning, didn’t begin as a series of poems, but as research conducted in response to questions Ball’s daughter had concerning family origins.  All the material Magdalena discovered through her research yielded a narrative arc about Rebecca Lieberman who as a girl aged fourteen emigrated to America, unaccompanied by any relatives or near acquaintances, to escape Czar Nicholas’ scapegoating and persecution of Jews at the turn of the 20th century.  

In a poem about Rebecca’s parents, titled “After the Partition,” Ball writes of the conflicted part of the world where her ancestors lived, 

no matter the name

               Poland, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania

the one constant

                they did not belong.  

Bobish’s response to this alienation when it becomes exacerbated by the menacing behavior, and later, the violence of Nicholas’ pogroms, is flight—a deterritorialization from the village of Grodno in Western Belarus, with its forests enchanted by the birdsong of the azure tit—melodies savagely replaced by the cacophonous marauding of Cossacks. Rebecca suffers an uncomfortable oceanic crossing in cramped cruise liner quarters, and eventually arrives to a land initially thought to be of dreams, but quickly becomes a dominion of trying hardship.   

Magdalena never met the book’s namesake, but developed a “visceral connection” to Lieberman in the process of writing the collection.  The poet didn’t want the story to be solely about her great-great grandmother, but more generally about inherited malcontents as well as writing’s power to alleviate resentment, a disposition that does nothing to heal spiritual suffering, and often, quite to the contrary, exacerbates it.

Bobish, who flees her homeland to escape pogroms, but also eventually avoids the Russian Revolution as well as two World Wars, finds the streets of America are “not paved with gold” and she experiences hardships common to the acculturation process many impoverished immigrants who arrive to new homelands undergo—acclimatization to new and sometimes hostile urban landscapes, the acquisition of a new language and the accursed blessing of oppressive menial labor.

Other historical characters make appearances, namely Bobish’s children, in particular the musically-gifted Eve, who provided Magdalena with anecdotes that enrich the narrative.  

It is Rebecca’s husband, Simon, whose name never appears in the book, however, that looms ominously in the lyric memoir as a pivotal antagonist. 

According to Ball, Bobish’s husband was an emotionally and physically abusive alcoholic who she never met, yet came alive as a result of interviews Ball had with people who did know him.  As a migrant himself, he is referred to in the book as “the fishmonger,” and whereas Bobish lives a geographically unsettled existence, her husband suffers from existential unsettlement. Whereas Bobish never ceases to desire a better future, even if that future is made of humble “new dreams” such as “windows that opened / hot running water, a proper flushing toilet, / potatoes, the fishmonger displays all the signs of a promising individual whose dreams have been broken.  

Simon is an educated man who speaks eleven languages, is musically gifted and enjoys dancing.  In the narrative, his thwarted creativity leads him to become Bobish’s tormentor, a card-playing, quasi-barbaric gambler and domestic abuser. 

Readers learn “the fishmonger” is a man who drinks wine to warm up from the cold of work and disillusion, a man who “could not unsee the void” of faithlessness due to his fall from the graces of rabbinical education and musical proclivities to proto-proletarian work and an accompanying roughnecking lifestyle. 

In “Beyond the Pale,” Ball writes that after marrying the fishmonger, Bobish “would find out fast / there is no such   thing / as shelter.”  Even though her great-great grandmother “kept quiet / to avoid setting off / the bear inside” her husband, Magdalena says she found empathy for this flawed man and developed a compassion for his lived experience as well as the traumas that led him to victimize two generations of the Lieberman family. 

If the fishmonger is an incarnation of selfish Id, Bobish’s tolerance of adversity makes her an egoless paragon of conflicted sainthood. Her immigrant resolve makes the genetic inheritance she transmits to her descendants the true hero of the narrative.  

This spiritual disposition and genetic imperative calling from the beyond to be spoken into being is perhaps why Ball developed a mystical connection to Rebecca, a connection she felt after being hypnotized by the sepia-toned photograph that graces the book’s cover, a photograph Ball received ten years ago from her mother, at the time trying to recuperate from the removal of a kidney. “Something in the picture grabbed me, something in the eyes…they were expressing something visceral.”

Bobish’s struggles express the dignity of DNA, the validity and sacredness of every living being’s desire for continuance.  As a literary work, Ball’s book is an example of how we can take action on behalf of these imperatives by means of efforts that “lead toward peace, that keep a distance from the shouting match, and contribute to healing.”

Ball’s lyric memoir is a message to migrants and descendants of migrants who have benefitted both from leaving and returning to homelands to remember where they come from.  It also imparts a reassuring narrative to populations facing displacement and flight as well as reterritorialization. Jews like Rebecca and Simon Lieberman enabled their own survival by means of fleeing hostility and dangerous scenarios.  While their life circumstances in a new homeland were far from ideal, their deterritorializations led to new beginnings and the gift of unprecedented genetic transmission, allowing successive generations to gloriously reinvent their individual and ethnic identities.

In this sense, Magdalena sees a kinship between dispossessed indigenous peoples and Bobishes everywhere.  The last section of the collection is titled “Tikkun Olam,” a Hebrew phrase that translates literally as “repairing the world,” but Maggie insists means “leaving the world better than the one you came to.”  In the final section’s eponymous poem, Ball writes, “In the land of the Lenape a space is opened by grief.  She hears / a song, not in her native tongue, another, Unami, the familiar / voice of dispossession…  “You have a responsibility in your short life to give back,” Ball says.  This imperative is diametrically opposed to that which calls for us to continually take from nature, extract from the Earth with the sole aim of profit or mindless consumption and accumulation. 

The collection offers Yeatsian spiritualism as an antidote to cruel materialism.  While Magdalena went to Hebrew school, her upbringing was predominantly secular, but her mother was a hippie with a penchant for Hindu insights.  Today Magdalena shies away from cultish or dreamy connotations of spirituality but admits that there was a mystical dimension to writing Bobish.  When questioned about the process of creating the narrative, she recalls sitting on “a moss-covered rock in the forest in New South Wales and asking Rebecca for direction.”   

The collection connects spirit to nature in other ways.  Magdalena resists Old Testament depictions of Yahweh and His prized creation, Man, Conqueror of Nature.  The poet prefers the “beauty and engagement” of animistic conceptions of the cosmos, where the health of spirit and nature are inextricable from each other.  Separation of spirit from nature is responsible for a disproportionate share of malaise in today’s world.  “Much of our comfort is on the back of people who even today are going through trauma,” says Magdalena, adding, “The land we live on is implicated.  Much of our modern world is built on pain.”  Bobish allows readers to empathize with individuals and populations afflicted by spiritual suffering.  Magdalena says, “there is beauty in feeling this connection” because it lessens the hurt. 

Although she did not celebrate a bat mitzvah, in writing Bobish Magdalena has performed a good deed and followed the commandments of poetic conscience, summoning the image of other worlds Earth can become if we started willing Yennevelt into being.  The word signifies “faraway place,” an alternative to the business as usual of today’s politicized cultural affairs.  In a poem that bears Yennevelt as its title, Magdalena, in the voice and actions of “the fishmonger,” writes “There is no other world / the rough man with a big fist / whacked the table and swore.”

But as readers enlightened by Bobish, we can surmise that there certainly were other worlds for the fishmonger, as there were for Rebecca.  Had there not been the promised land of America, their lives could have ended during a pogrom or the Holocaust.  Taking flight, undergoing a de- and subsequent re-territorialization, Bobish survived and gave birth to children.  One of them, Eve, brought Bobish from the world beyond to this world in words.  Magdalena’s grandmother was a singer, like, but also opposed in character, to Simon, her father.  The poet writes, her “voice    was his / a birdsong    he recognized / felt the loss of    mourned.” 

True to the musical roots in her family, Bobish is Magdalena’s song to the universes that surround us and inhabit us.  It is an ode to those who want to believe that spirits can mingle with DNA, but can also survive without undergoing meiosis.       

In the book’s concluding “Notes and Sources” Magdalena writes, “Rebecca died at the age of fifty-four, in 1950, from diabetic complications.” Bobish extends her existence in this world as well as the next.  The last lines of “What Remains,” Magdalena’s concluding mitzvah, are spoken directly to her great-great grandmother’s enduring spirit.  

It lingers, like your voice

humming a Yiddish song

winding through the double

helix of your children, filling the air

everywhere, 

With these words Ball recites a melody in praise of continuance anywhere that can be called “home,” regardless of whether one is a longstanding citizen or an immigrant yearning to return.    

Magdalena Ball was born in New York City, where she grew up. After gaining an honours degree in English Literature from the City University of New York (CCNY), she moved to Oxford to study English Literature at a postgraduate level. After a brief return to the US, she migrated to NSW Australia, where she now resides on a rural property with her family. While in Australia she obtained additional post-graduation qualifications in Business, Marketing and Sustainability. Magdalena runs the respected review site Compulsive Reader. Her poetry, reviews and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won local and international awards for poetry and fiction. She is the author of the poetry books Bobish, The Density of Compact Bone, Unreliable Narratives, High Wire Step, Unmaking Atoms, Repulsion Thrust, and Quark Soup, the novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, the Celebration Series poetry books Sublime Planet, Deeper Into the Pond, Blooming Red, Cherished Pulse, She Wore Emerald Then, and Imagining the Future. She is also Vice President of Flying Island Books, is a regular host/moderator at literary festivals such as the Newcastle Writers Festival, the Maitland Indie Writers Festival, Sydney Jewish Writers Festival and Melbourne Jewish Book Week, and she runs a podcast, Compulsive Reader Talks, which has over 150 interviews with the likes of Ben Okri, Marion Halligan, Matthew Riley, John Banville, and Jane Smiley to name a few. In addition to her writing, Magdalena is a Sustainability manager for a multinational company, and regardless of what she’s doing, will usually be found with her head in a book or two.