Afterlight (In Search of Poetry, History, and Home)

A haunting memoir of war, genocide, displacement, and a daughter’s search for the literary works of her mother’s murdered twin.

Grieving the death of her mother in 2013, author Isa Milman embarked on a heart-wrenching journey to unravel a family mystery—the whereabouts of her aunt’s long-lost poems, published in Poland in the early 1930s—which evolved into a broader investigation of her family’s life before, during, and after the Holocaust. This powerful memoir chronicles a lesser-known chapter of the Second World War through the story of two sisters: Sabina, Isa’s mother, who survived the war, and Basia, Sabina’s twin, who did not.

Exploring themes of loss and displacement, regeneration and resilience, Isa discovers how her own story is woven into the immense yet intricate tapestry of the Jewish experience. As she delves into her family’s history, accompanied by her husband, a native British Columbian, she travels to contemporary Poland, Ukraine, and Germany, and tries to reconcile her shifting appreciation of people and place, in a world where anti-Semitism and other forms of extremism are on the rise once again.