Book Review: "Songs from the Suitcase" by Rosanna Moseley Gore

If you are thinking of writing a memoir or a family history, this book is for you.

If you are an immigrant living across cultures and asking yourself, "Who am I?" — this book is for you.

If you can relate to German, Jewish, Russian, Australian, or British émigré backgrounds, this book is definitely for you. Read it; it will help you formulate your own thoughts on family history, languages, travel, trauma, loss, and living.

If you and your friends have ever struggled to understand each other due to differences in your backgrounds, read this book together and compare your notes. Rosanna, to use her own words, "grew up feeling legally British but never English. Driving holidays in Europe were normal, friends and family with strong accents were normal, baked beans and rice pudding were not." With these complicated feelings about belonging at the center of the book, it comes as no surprise that some of the most poignant chapters deal with the question of identity, in chapters titled “Crises of Identity,” “Longing for Belonging,” and “No Safe Haven.”

The book contains very well-formulated and heartfelt reflections on many important topics, including German Jewishness, Brexit, the COVID and post-COVID years, and revisiting the Holocaust. One short chapter, titled “Putin’s War,” describes Rosanna’s experience of hosting a Ukrainian refugee and how it brought back memories of her father escaping Nazi Berlin on a Kindertransport in 1939. Rosanna skillfully shows how the present is directly linked to the past, and how our actions will, in turn, affect future generations. One quotation from the book summarizes it perfectly: "If one generation’s trauma might permanently scar later generations, then maybe — just maybe — one’s attempts at trying to carve out safety and security of nourishment and home might trickle its way down the generations too."

In other words, we have a chance to make life easier for the younger generation, with "safety and security of nourishment and home." A truly healing message.

"Songs from the Suitcase: Inhabiting an Inheritance" (2024) was published by Beaten Track Publishing, award-winning independent publisher of diverse fiction and non-fiction. It is available through the Beaten Track Shop, or via third-party vendors, including Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble and GooglePlay. Please follow this link.