In Raven Mother, Jane Messer weaves together her Jewish family’s tragic story – stretching back and forth between Berlin, Israel, Palestine, Melbourne and Sydney. Messer retraces the steps of her Jewish grandmother Bella, as she tries to understand her life in pre-war Berlin and Mandate Palestine, to post-war Melbourne where she didn’t survive the surviving, and why her father was abandoned in England before the war. In this powerful, beautifully written and insightful book, Messer spends time in Berlin, Israel and Palestine and grapples with the effects of nationalism, both historical and contemporary. Along the way, she speaks with historians, activists, refugees and scholars, and constantly to her beloved father.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Jane Messer about the origins of the old German term, ‘Rabenmutter’, the city of Berlin under the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and what she discovered about her grandmother Bella along the way.