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*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. *********************************** 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. To join or leave ESOL-Research, visit http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ESOL-RESEARCH.html To contact the list owner, send an email to [log in to unmask]