Postcards to Grandad

Book Details


By Phil Cohen
Typo/Graphics by John Wallett

In this prose poem Phil Cohen explores the ‘other scenes’ of his family history, the stories he was not told, about where he came from. They feature the mysterious, romantic figure of his grandfather, a Jewish revolutionary from Vitebsk who emigrated to the Glasgow Gorbals during the period of Red Clydeside before the First World War. Through this interleaving of stories, in which elements of fact and fantasy become merged, Cohen sets out to examine his complicated heritage as a ‘mischling’.

Postcards to Grandad is a bold experiment in what happens when a writer and an artist from different backgrounds combine creative forces to tell the story of a diasporic journey across generations and cultures, in which recurrent elements of tragedy and farce interact with the contingencies of shifting places and times.

“A troubled yet exuberant vignette of imagined selfhood, inside-out to the world and history, in which old age and boyhood form a circling dance of inheritance, suffering and survival.”
Les Bell (Author of ‘Archipelagos’)

“Phil Cohen takes us on a poetic journey into some of the complexities of Jewish diasporic identity, past and present. On the way he explores the intersections, both personal and political of class, gender and ethnicity which continue to shape the way we live now.”
Nira Yuval Davis (Emeritus Professor of Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London)

Published April 2019
Reprinted March 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9164719-2-4
Spec: PB Paperback size 148x210mm 44pp
Eight B/W illustrations. Gloss laminated covers.
Mail Order: £6.99 including P&P.

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By Phil Cohen
Typo/Graphics by John Wallett

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By Phil Cohen
Typo/Graphics by John Wallett