Available for the first time here as an ebook, sadly, after the passing of the author, Deborah Masel, we are privy to a short sequel to her first book, Soul to Soul: Writings from Dark Places. .......

A few years before my cancer diagnosis, my partner Doug and I took two of my kids to New Zealand. We traveled with a cheap airline, whose planes seemed to need help with lift-off. As the aircraft built up speed on the runway, the four of us would wildly flap our arms, hoping to give the plane a fighting chance. We looked like ungainly birds, struggling to get our feet off the ground.

With one unpublished memoir [Soul to Soul] flapping away on various runways and now another on the way, I am inclined to think of myself as barefoot and pregnant. Cancer and pregnancy share certain characteristics. They both make you sick and tired, and they grow within you. Cancer is a kind of ghoulish mirror image of pregnancy.

Sequels in this particular literary genre are, understandably, exceptional, and I shall begin by admitting that I can't know if this sequel is destined to become one of the exceptions, or if the cancer will take me before I say what I need to say.

Autorentext

Deborah Masel (formerly Miller) is a teacher and author with a special interest in the Jewish mystic tradition. She has written two novels, and edited the English translation of Eish Kodesh (Holy Fire), written by the Rebbe of Piacezna in the Warsaw Ghetto. Her most recent book is In the Cleft of the Rock: Writings on the Five Books of Moses, a collection of prose poems on the weekly parshah. Deborah has written and taught for various Jewish and interfaith organizations and is a regular contributor to the Melbourne Age. She currently conducts classes from her home.