Alas

A call from a group of bones found in a long-buried well in Norwich prompts Joanne Limburg to begin this exploration of the complex relationship between her ancestral past and her lived present. This takes her across time, from contemporary Britain back to the Europe of the Crusades and forward to the 1905 Aliens Act; across borders, from the birthplace of one grandmother in Ukraine to the other’s in Norwich, from the Pale of Settlement to the Port of Grimsby, and from Babylon to Bethnal Green. The scale of the enquiry is also constantly shifting, taking in both the microscopic barleytwists of a genome and the nightmarish cycles of history which have come to shape them. Using the acrostic form of the Hebrew Book of Lamentations as a twenty-two-line template, Limburg brings her own voice into dialogue with two very different choruses, one made up of collaged lines taken from texts by gentiles on Jews, and the other imagined as the collective voice of the Bones, who understand that mourning should always come with self-examination, and that any given distance ‘must be measured before it can be felt’. ‘…we speak Bone, and your own bones. Explain us.’