Soundless Roar

Poignant art, poetry, and writings give voice to a Holocaust ordealSoundless Roar introduces a distinctive new voice to the Holocaust experience. Author, poet, and artist Ava Kadishson Schieber was born fifty miles north of Belgrade and spent her teenage years hiding from the Nazis on a Serbian farm. Her cultured speech and city-bred body language could have betrayed her, so she was forced into near isolation. This experience forged the unusual sense of time that shapes her stories. Phyllis Lassner writes in her preface to this amazing testimonial: "the timetable of Ava's stories often consists of circles within circles, of patterns of an intertwined past, the past present of hiding, and the present looking back at those distinctly separate but inseparable pasts."With just scraps of paper, Schieber began drawing while in hiding, and she continues to express herself today with the same urgency. The drawings and writings in Soundless Roar are the culmination of many years of artistry. In them, she shares her memories of her loved ones killed in the Holocaust as "friendly ghosts" who will always be a part of her. Schieber's drawings, paintings, poetry, and prose are all intimate reflections of one another; in her own words she explains, "As a painter I paint stories; in order to be more explicit I transform my recollected images into words....So my paintings and stories have at times the blank space of a blatant void as an integral part; a long pause within a composition."