The Kotzker Rebbe famously observed that nothing is more complete than a broken heart. In that spirit and the search for self-healing, Jerusalem artist and former Jerusalem Post copy editor Heddy Breuer Abramowitz has written and illustrated the book Life-Tumbled Shards, a moving tribute to her Jerusalem-born daughter Talia Efrat Abramowitz Zwebner (1988-2015), whose struggle with cancer her mother documents in words and monoprints.
Picking up this slim volume, a reader might anticipate a lachrymose story of suffering leading to an early death that quashed a promising life and career as a nurse.
Instead, here one finds a nuanced philosophical and artistic treatise that begins with Abramowitz’s Hungarian-born mother’s survival during the Holocaust and continues to Abramowitz’s aliyah from a Washington, DC, suburb in southern Maryland with her husband, Benson; life in the Old City of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter; and the struggle to find meaning as it all went south.
Named after Ita, a six-year-old great-aunt who was a Mengele twin murdered in Auschwitz, Talia began her life in a neonatal intensive care unit while diagnosed with acute congenital vocal cord paralysis, leading to noisy response with each breath. Too close to Rosh Hashanah to undergo surgery, she was given a reprieve and was sent to the out-patient clinic at Mount Scopus’s respiratory clinic.
She died, unfortunately, of acute myeloid leukemia of the blood marrow in an oncology isolation room at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center surrounded by the sounds of her friends’ young voices. But not without first living a life of humor and purpose.
One can’t help but laugh when reading that Talia and her devoted husband, Alon, dressed up as doctor and nurse one Purim and dispatched mishloach manot with messages of recovery, good cheer, and a prescription to cure every malady. Similarly, Abramowitz notes that her daughter would joke about a bad hair day, even when her curls had fallen out after chemotherapy.
A slim, painful journal
The diagnosis came six weeks after the wedding canopy – every parent’s worst nightmare – and morphed into a maze of bone-marrow transplants, rounds of chemo, and experimental drugs. Alas, there was no cheating the Angel of Death – who waited patiently for three years while every conceivable therapeutic effort was made to postpone the inevitable.
How does one relate to a son-in-law when he no longer has a wife? asks Abramowitz.
This slim, painful journal attempts to answer that question. We are all part of the trauma-filled family of Israel struggling to cope with a divine-given destiny beyond our comprehension. Sometimes God says “No.”
In her journey of intuitive self-therapy, Abramowitz matter-of-factly describes herself as a lousy liar when she chooses to indulge in the much put-off timing of a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Artists’ House. Or during shiva, how does one respond to well-wishers who blather “at least your daughter isn’t suffering anymore” while asking for lurid details about her treatment and pain threshold.
Conversely, Abramowitz acknowledges the many acts of kindness she encountered from friends, neighbors, and strangers as Talia dragged her cross of tubes along her personal Via Dolorosa.
While Abramowitz is a gifted writer who movingly grapples with the knife in her heart, this book is also about her oeuvre which begins her search as a semi-abstract artist and winds back through more carefully observed visages while concluding with the simplest of all, practically a blank slate. The journal format, one of an intuitive search through her internal dilemma, is rounded out with the text that serves to anchor her thoughts.
Her monoprints are a Rorschach test in which we, as a nation, can measure our wounded psyche during this difficult year and three-quarters that we have jointly experienced, both on and off the battlefield.
As a feminist who is thoughtful about her actions, she also selected her learned friends, who were asked to speak during the gap between Mincha and Ma’ariv rather than to complete the more traditional mishnayot, to honor her daughter, to whom the classes were dedicated. One recalls the Yiddish aphorism Shver tzu zein a Yid– It’s hard to be a Jew – even when it is with good intentions, perhaps especially when that is the case.
Abramowitz published her book, suitable for the inner circle of parents and siblings, medical professionals, and social workers, to mark the 10th yahrzeit of her daughter in May 2025.
LIFE-TUMBLED SHARDS
By Heddy Breuer Abramowitz
Illuminated Press
112 pages; $29