JANE MESSER Raven Mother. Reviewed by Sandra Hogan

In searching for the truth about her grandmother, Jane Messer brings together both Jewish and Palestinian histories.

Michael Messer was sure his mother never loved him. She had abandoned him twice, leaving him with strangers for years on end. His father told him that she was having too much fun with her lovers to care for her children, and Michael carried a sense of being unlovable from childhood into old age.

His daughter, Jane, sensed very young that her father’s life could have been different, happier, if he knew his mother had loved him. And perhaps she had! After all, they knew so little about the woman called Bella, Jane’s paternal grandmother; her life and death were shrouded in silence. Jane longed to find out the truth about Bella, and to give her father a past in which he had been loved.

An accomplished writer and researcher, Jane Messer set out to find who Bella really was, spending many years interviewing her father and other family members, hiring genealogists and researchers, delving in archives, and travelling with deep intent through Germany, Israel, Palestine and Australia. The result is a remarkable book – part memoir, history and biography – that brings Bella vividly to life and definitively answers the question of whether she loved her son.

In retracing Bella’s steps, Messer brings to life some of the most dramatic chapters of modern world history: the flight of refugees from the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, and the arrival of postwar migrants in Australia. Bella’s decisions can only be understood in the context of the historical tsunami of World War II and the Holocaust that resulted in 40 million displaced people desperately seeking a home somewhere in the world.

Bella and her family were Jewish refugees and it is no surprise that Messer treats their story of escape from Germany and life in Palestine with compassion and empathy. She gives us a vivid sense of Bella’s life in Germany, Palestine and Australia; the skies she walked under, the people she met, the caring work that she did with great competence in times of crisis. She brings alive the hopes of people who had lost their homes and whose families had been slaughtered.

But it is surprising and deeply affecting to find that Messer’s research and her empathy extend to the Palestinian people who were forced to flee from their homes in the wake of the influx of Jewish refugees to Palestine. In her three visits to Israel, Messer chose to spend time with scholars and peace activists from Israel and Palestine, who worked together to give Palestinians the right to return and nationhood. She came to grieve for the lost, little-remembered villages and for the people of Palestine.

One of the most moving scenes in the book is a meeting Messer has in the Café Yafa in Jaffa with a Palestinian man called Abu-George, who had been a child in Palestine in 1948 – one of the 20 per cent of Palestinians who still live in Israel. She asks him to share his memories of the village he had grown up in, hoping it will help give some background to Bella’s life in Palestine.

‘I won’t share my memories of the village I was forced from with my family, to help you remember your grandmother,’ he answered. ‘It’s not “interesting” to me, as it is for you. I’m a refugee in my own country. That’s what I know. That’s what you need to know.’

Messer reflects that she had known that, but ‘not fiercely enough, not enough that it hurt me too’. If she had, she would not have asked the question.

Messer began writing a family story but, by the end of the long process of discovery, she has written something more difficult, subtle and ambitious. She is sharing with us the tragedy and resilience of Jewish experience and also honouring the histories, resilience and terrible losses of the Palestinians. It is rare to find this willingness to respect and grieve for the tragedies of both Jews and Palestinians, and to bring those stories together.

Under the Ottoman regime, Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Bedouins co-existed peacefully for centuries. Delving into that history, Messer sees how a different narrative could have emerged in the Middle East.

A shared land of coexistence could have been possible, but the historical collision of Western imperialism and German Nazism beat down that possibility.

Messer is a writer who questions everything, thinks deeply, and double-checks her facts. Her writing is clear and poignant. She has the persistence and courage needed to bring this extraordinary book off and she has a very big heart. Raven Mother is a riveting read.

Jane Messer Raven Mother NewSouth 2026 PB 288pp $34.99

Sandra Hogan is a Brisbane-based writer whose memoir My Mother’s Secret will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2027.

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