Thanks for posting this about Sheila's book, Christina. Well remember
working with you years and years ago
NORMA BREWER ( was at Waltham Forest
On 5/7/19, Christina Healey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> *Exit visas, entry visas - again and again and again*
>
> I thought some of the readers of ESOL–RESEARCH might be interested in this
> book published March 2019. *The Exit Visa A Family's Flight from Nazi
> Europe, Sheila Rosenberg*. 35% off with attached flyer! Hardback | 304 pp |
> March 2019 | 9781788314954 | £20.00 £13.00
>
> 6th September, 1942. Moses Schiff, a middle-aged Jewish refugee, stands on
> the Swiss side of the Franco-Swiss border. He is waiting for his wife,
> Toni, who he has not seen for nearly four years. Against all odds he has
> managed to get an entry permit for her to join him in Switzerland. She
> appears on the French side. They call out. She begins to cross the few
> yards of no-mansland that separate them. An official calls her back. She
> hesitates, turns, goes back - and is lost forever. She later died in
> Auschwitz.
>
> Many readers of ESOL-RESEARCH will recognise the book’s author, Sheila
> Rosenberg, as a committed ESOL practitioner, who has championed the Ruth
> Hayman Trust and, in 2011, received an OBE for her contribution to ESOL.
> What they may not know is that she is also a published researcher in the
> field of English Literature.
>
> Hilda, the daughter of Moses and Toni, was one of the small number of
> Jewish children allowed into UK with her sister under the Kindertransport
> scheme. She learnt her new language very well, became a poet, an academic
> and a teacher of literature and, in later life, chose to research what had
> happened to her mother after that tragically rejected Exit Visa.
>
> “ . . . why should I who cannot remember /What you were nurse the residual
> wound/ Of your mutilated absence.” *To My Mother,* Hilda Schiff quoted in
> The Exit Visa p.4.
>
> Sheila was friends with Hilda and shared much of the later research and
> many of the research journeys. Hilda died in 2010, although not without
> publishing a significant anthology of holocaust literature.(Schiff,
> H.(ed.) *Holocaust
> Poetry*, 1995) Sheila had employed her considerable research and writing
> skills to complete the work that her friend started.
>
> It is a story of empathy. It is about family, about the childless child who
> wanted to parent her mother. It is about sisterhood and it is also about
> friendship. It is not a novel and it does not have the unnegotiable
> authority of literature. It is more about process than product. The slow
> meticulous task of finding things out and why this process matters.
>
> I hope the above has inspired some of my readers to find out more. But
> there is another and more pressing reason why no one involved with ESOL can
> ignore this book. It is not just about the history of Europe in the last
> century. This is happening NOW. Our students are immigrants and refugees.
> They are subject to a hostile environment. Exit and Entry Visas are
> continually being denied, or granted or delayed. The details may change but
> the broad picture remains the same. The practice of ESOL can never be a
> neutral activity.
>
> The reviewer of this book, Christina Healey ([log in to unmask]) was
> an ESOL practitioner and teacher trainer in the 1970 &-80s and a founder
> member of NATECLA.
>
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ESOL-Research is a forum for researchers and practitioners with an interest in research into teaching and learning ESOL. ESOL-Research is managed by James Simpson at the Centre for Language Education Research, School of Education, University of Leeds.
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