Self-Portrait of My Mother: Launch of Yaara Shachori's New Book

“Self-Portrait of My Mother”

Launch of Yaara Shapira’s new book

“I wrote this book for eight years, perhaps more. On and off, in segments, sometimes not at all. I shelved it twice. I wrote it for my mother, and for the woman she was, and for those who knew her—and especially for those who did not. I tried to write her portrait, and it blurred into my own face and merged with the face of the girl named after her.”

A girl is sent from 1960s Tel Aviv to her uncle in Argentina to begin a new life. While she is on the plane, her uncle suffers a heart attack and dies. In an instant, she becomes an unwelcome guest and is required—for not the last time—to reinvent herself. After her death, her daughter, a writer, decides to write her own version of her mother’s story: a charismatic, brilliant woman, broken to the core. She soon has to forget everything she knows about writing, because even if she has succeeded in writing one version of her mother, there are a thousand others. From faded photographs, newspaper advertisements, and an internal archive, the author draws lines to the stifling home in Tel Aviv, prewar Warsaw, Buenos Aires, a commune near Milan, and finally a kibbutz. Amid silenced secrets and a tangle of guilt, she searches for the story her mother tried to tell—but there was no one to listen.

Self-Portrait of My Mother is a dizzying portrait in which writing functions as a final act of rescue. This is Yaara Shapira’s fifth work of prose, and the most personal of her books. Shapira is a poet and writer and the recipient of the Agnon Prize.

Featuring: Helit Yeshurun, Haim Weiss, Tehila Hakimi, Na’ama Gavirz, Anat Levin, and Roni Eldad.

Music: Daniel Rubin

Host: Dafna Lustig

Photography credit: Roni Knaan'i