Counting Sleeping Beauties

We came to Johannesburg. Lived in Wynberg. After a time, my twin sisters Betty and Rosie also came looking for husbands. They stayed with us and the shadchen fixed them up. I can see that Hannah doesn¹t understand. Not the ideas. Not my mixture of Yiddish and English. Still she listens, looking at my face. Then they moved to their own homes but we always spent Shabbos and Yom Tov together. I go on, When your Mommy married your Daddy, they lived a one bedroom flat in Clarendon Circle. We wrapped you up tightly in your blanket when you were born. You slept in a drawer. I show her with my hands. You were this small.”

Spanning the pogrom years in Lithuania and the 1950s South Africa, Counting Sleeping Beauties weaves a delicate tale of despair and loss, of love and attachment and of place. She evokes the post-war years in South Africa in heartbreaking detail, and traces the relationships within an extended family and their own struggle with racism, grief and guilt.

ISBN-13: 9781770095441
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Drawing from Memory

Drawing from Memory is a collection of poems published by Cinnamon Press in the United Kingdom.

“Anyone interested in painting and sculpture will find the book particularly engaging as artists and their work are clearly a major source of inspiration for Frankel. She plunges us with relish into the world of their lives and works, often using single canvasses to offer her perspective and interpretation, using them as mirrors to her own life experience.

This is very ably demonstrated, for example, in ‘A Sestet of Edward Hopper Women’, six poems where a burning empathy with the subjects shines through;

The sheet is pure as longing,
empty as her arms,
skin folds to contain
the uncontainable.”

– John Webber

ISBN-13: 9781905614288
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