Illuminating love, by Hazel Frankel

Hazel Frankel's novel follows Cally, a Johannesburg calligrapher, as she works on a ketubah (illuminated Jewish marriage document) and inscribes poems written by her grandmother Judith, a Holocaust survivor. As Judith's poems surface stories of lost love, homeland and horror, Cally is forced to confront how inherited trauma — and her husband Jake's own history of conscription into the apartheid-era army — is unravelling her marriage in the present. The novel sets Highveld suburban life against generational memory of pogroms, the Holocaust and the Border War.